It's a brilliant, mainstream indie rock album from a band who have for too long operated on the margins of, for want of a better word, the 'scene.'

Hold Time is a wonderful, wistful collection of songs from an artist who has really started to hit his stride.

It bears to be dissected because it is pretty much all over the place, even if what they wanted to achieve could be stored inside a magical pot of gold.

While Woods may falter here and there, Bend Beyond stills manages to hold its own and then some. The Brooklyn-based band may have cleaned up their sound since Songs of Shame, but their signature spontaneity and amplitude come through better than ever.

The "perfect sounds for the summer" tag might cause a battle with The Thrills, but I do believe The Tyde have a fighting chance.

What Makthaverskan lack in variety they make up with a passion that cannot be quenched, and the dreamy undercurrent it carries throughout is filled with a shot of optimism that is undoubtedly contagious.

The Unseen in Between should be the album where he steps out from the shadow of his contemporaries and establishes him as one of the most reliable singer-songwriters of his generation. His heart is in tune with that of a wanderer but his songwriting is firmly in place, ready to come out of obscurity.

Glitter and Doom doesn’t include a pocket-sized Waits who sings and dances atop your candelabra with a pawn shop marimba, but it provides you with the tools to imagine such a sight.

Overall, it's a successful return, and a record that demonstrates the success of their debut wasn't a fluke and that The xx truly are masters of musical alchemy.

Desire is most memorable as a collection of amazing verses. Not only is there not likely to be better rapping this year, Desire is the kind of album that reminds one of why emcees matter and just how much they can do.

With any other protagonists this project could become sickeningly twee, but Vile and Barnett deliver every lyric, no matter how ridiculous, with absolute sincerity. As they close with a stunning cover of Belly’s Untogether, it’s difficult to be cynical about something this utterly charming.

Weiss is a smart, heartfelt performer whose stories rarely veer into overwrought territory, though the lukewarm acoustic fluff that occasionally lingers throughout Standards bogs down an otherwise affecting and perceptive listen.

A lot of this terminology may sound familiar to the Mogwai devoted, but Every Country’s Sun does signal a change in attitude and confidence, and there’s no more convincing argument than that.

Their initial EP documented a band that sounded ready to take on the world – but the follow up just shows that the journey may take longer than expected.

The band’s blinkered aspiration to create a classic again produces an album that is enjoyable but hollow. In that way, at least, Pressure Machine is a Killers album just like any other.

Certainly few guitarists playing today evoke the kind of mad intensity on display here, but like the Comets on Fire, the whole package rarely comes off as good as you think it should.

a record that is both this good and a display of a band with so much more to show us does not come along often.

This album is nothing short of a miracle.

Cooler Returns plays out best if you go with its flow. Musical flourishes, references, and inspirations abound, but if you let yourself get lost in it, there is a lot to enjoy and not too much to worry about.

Ultimately, Something Worth Waiting For is an album of good songs with some sequencing and balance issues. Its problems have nothing to do with quality in the traditional sense, but Friko will need to temper some of their maximalist tendencies if they want to seize the indie rock throne.

It sounds at once old-fashioned and contemporary, undemanding but clever – a joy.

The fact is there are just too many smart, well-written songs on this album to get hung up on the messy sound.

It's a heavy theme to handle, but thankfully (or perhaps to its chagrin), most of these topics go unnoticed if you submit to its simple guitar-pop pleasures.

Tracks like Silver Timothy and Silver Joy showcase what Jurado does best, crafting songs that despite being a bit gloomy are beautiful and heartfelt.

It’s a sharpening of the ideas introduced on Addiction to Blood, performed with clipping.’s classic graveness which only supports how scary this album can be.

Restarter is still quite a strong sludge-metal album that can stand strong with many of their peers, but it’s sad to see them sacrifice much of what made them stand out so strongly from them in the process to merely become one of them.

While Anoyo's showcase of Hecker's ambient textures, paired with Gagaku, is organic and interesting, it feels like a retread of ideas or an assemblage of scraps from the recording of Konoyo.

The Achilles’ heel of this record isn’t the songs themselves but the production: drums throughout are blocky and distracting, guitars are washy and lacking personality, and the aforementioned synthesizers rarely fit the songwriting.