It feels churlish to criticise Everything Everything for trying different things, but all too often their efforts feel like lightweight flirtations with a style rather than committed explorations.

Anyone expecting some sort of lost treasure in this collection will be let down.

Fade is a sign of perseverance for the group, as the album perfectly details just what is so essential and appealing about the group, and why there will always be a place for these guys in the world of indie rock.

Lennon and Saunier interact with kindred sensibility.

These songs just lack that certain oomph to separate Free Energy from the thousands of groups who have sang about girls before.

He has come up with a gem of a record, heartfelt and true, that hopefully will get him some of the attention he richly deserves.

The Haunted Man is so effortlessly emotive that it seems to demand that we demand even more from it. Or at least, it would, if it weren't so easy to get lost in the many layers of these melodies and start thinking about the ghosts that Bat For Lashes is trying to chase away.

Sushi's main strength is the way it draws from so many strands of contemporary electronic music, but sounds like something else in its own right.

Bish Bosch is a wilder, more scattered (and scatty, in the case of Epizootics!, ten minutes of sax-driven jazz which could almost be seen as accessible, if it wasn't so dark and threatening) work than its immediate predecessors.

There is just too little here to distinguish Wild Nothing from the vast sea of mediocre 80s revivalists, all getting a kick on overhyped nostalgia.

Regardless of what the future holds for Led Zeppelin, the record shows that this single concert in the O2 Arena certainly was a celebration day for all.

Elverum has created an album that demands your time and attention, not to mention any memories you may be willing to part with.

Too often the way of the beat ends up a distraction rather than a fully incorporated addition to good songwriting.

Grace/Confusion is an aptly confounding record, its six tracks very much dissimilar to each other yet held together with a sense of grand gesturing and tireless virtuosity.

Where before, sounds could often exist along similar planes, he's now added a multi-dimensional aspect, with Exoskeleton in particular.

The Odds is excellent, because the odds are never against him.

Kendrick Lamar may not have saved hip-hop, but he's certainly provided us with one of 2012's best records.

While it's hard to say whether or not Our House on the Hill is truly a great album, it's clear that with this record, The Babies have defiantly surpassed the less-than-lukewarm expectations geared towards them to create a pop record ripe with personality and flavor.

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.'

When this album hits, it hits hard, but for the first time in their career, the barrage is intermittent instead of constant.

All in all, Instrumental Tourist offers more proof that these two are undisputed masters in their field, regardless of how necessary a collaborative effort like this really is anyway.

While all of the songs on the Ghost are good, the EP's identity crises will keep pulling listeners out of the experience.

This EP is not a singles-ready collection, nor should it be. Instead, the atmospheric songs do their part to transport the listener to another mood or mindset.

Rarely is an electronic album like sparked with such radical confidence.

It's all powerful stuff and it can only be GY!BE.

Smalhans won't be the most memorable record of the year, but that's partly because its great strength is its subtlety, which makes it constantly refreshing.

Its intensity has style, whatever Zeros lacks in substance or license, and an enjoyably infectious pulse that's consistent up until the final bits of backwards sound rotates during ƨbnƎ ƚI.

There's much to recommend Just To Feel Anything and while, as with all retro-leaning instrumental rock, the question of its exact purpose is perhaps a little hard to answer when the details come together, as in Adrenochrome's shifting bass-line, or in how the title track gradually blossoms into life, such concerns are ultimately rendered entirely, wonderfully, redundant.