The tempos vary, sort of, but there’s a mood on this record that’s hard to qualify and never wavers.

Aloha have created an album with a strange feel, Home Acres is dark but it’s not cold. It’s a humid album that aptly demonstrates Aloha’s greatest strengths, but also highlights their weaknesses.

The Runaway Found is to be filed alongside Coldplay, Starsailor and Snow Patrol.

Pop. 1280 are still concerned with the dark underbelly of the human experience, though the sneakily measured Paradise proves that even the most degenerate souls deserve some sanguine aggression, too.

Leave Me Alone is giddy with joy, cackling with sun-drenched vibes and that captivating youthful energy, and it’s impossible to listen to tracks like Easy, Chili Town and San Diego without leeching off it.

Some tweaks are almost imperceptible, but when administered at the right place and the right time, Dusk shows an incidental dynamism that Ultimate Painting haven’t shown before.

It’s Frightening isn’t a bad album in its own right. There are certainly worse things than making a record that’s frequently catchy but not terribly exciting.

All that being said, every track has at least something of interest about it, and with Obscurities managing to squeeze in fourteen of them in less than forty minutes, even the worst never outstay their welcome.

Summer 08 is good work from Mount, and an album with its fair share of corking tracks.

The Bird and the Bee end up sounding like the soundtrack to some glossy drama about a bunch of over privileged kids living in Notting Hill.

Fuckbook is a fantastic, energy-fuelled riot of an album and--if you wish to view it as such--yet another brilliant addition to the embarrassment of riches that is the collected works of Yo La Tengo.

It's cohesive, it's tight and it illustrates the band's continuous depth and attention to subtlety.

Even if this is a by-the-numbers creation, it certainly adopts the same fiery posture that every Burma album encompasses. It just has to be looked upon with a different mindset. So here’s a toast to conviction.

Deeper plunges headlong into its nightmarish source material with feverish petulance, insisting on the authenticity of its own sorrow.

Wondrous Bughouse, with its epic sprawl and quaint curiosity, successfully captures through its music the idea that the smaller you are, the easier you’re dazzled and overwhelmed by the world around you.

Mellow Waves doesn’t immediately grab your attention like some of Oyemada’s past work, but his careful attention to craft remains intact.

You could call it inconsistency, but you can tell they never signed up for the mission of steering the chasm of modern rock music. Instead, they're four guys doing what they want, culling their influences and breathing life into whatever construct emerges. But regardless of where it falls on the spectrum, it's always fun.

Buckner’s songwriting, both in the arrangements and vocals, is laser-focused on the development and exploration of his scorched-earth aesthetic. Together, they project it with grace, refinement, and skill.

Songs like All Blacked Out and Chemical Freeze are suffused with melancholic ambiance, where descending minor chords provide a fullness to their otherwise spare arrangements.

With some of their catchiest songs yet and Gareth's muse in top form, this album stands among their strongest work.

Most of the artists have slipped into their most generic, polite, Obama-supporting personas. However this is not to say the album isn’t enjoyable and featuring so many high caliber artists, almost all the songs are good and some really hit the mark.

Fever Dream may not be the most revolutionary electronic album of the year but as a whole, it's strong, and will prove an enjoyable journey for fans of instrumental hip-hop, triphop and chillwave, as well as anyone who is partial to the occasional moment of dreamy, psychedelic dance.

Sun Airway conducts Soft Fall with a unique command, never straying from its drifting atmosphere even as it continually delivers a batch of catchy, highly replayable songs.

Good but not as good as you might think it is on a song-to-song basis, enjoyable but somewhat less memorable.

Weaves have written a good debut record that is unafraid to take chances, and to an extent, it signifies a band that will only get hungrier with time. There’s still in search mode, though, exceedingly pushing themselves to write clever pop songs that sometimes expose their calculated overconfidence.

Goons Be Gone won’t go down as No Age’s best, but it benefits from its directness.

Moments like Living Up to Let You Down are unforgettable; it’s just a disappointment the rest of the album isn’t even close.

Archive Material is a strong release for fans of Fad or newcomers to Silverbacks, the type of album that feels like it’ll only get better with time.