Silver Steps and Slow Cathedral Melt are all howled melancholy, and equally exciting are Triccs' sonic twists and turns, even if they are exhausting, exhilarating listens.

Hardly groundbreaking, but heartfelt all the same. [May 2011, p.116]

Que Veux Tu and La Musique cannily mesh memorable pop hooks and dancefloor energy, but Budet's international aspirations may be offset by her brave, if commercially questionable, decision to sing entirely in French. [May 2011, p.127]

At the end of Monoform, the first track on Leeds five-piece Vessels' second, album, you can pretty much hear the sound of impending collapse, as if the band has begun to implode in the mix.It's at once terrifying and exhilarating. [May 2011, p.127]

Dark, often opaque, but also full of emotion, this is a gem. [May 2011, p.127]

For all the sonic bricolage, nothing upstages Garbus's own force of personality: her vocal range thrillingly from demure cooing through sassy funk to lung-bursting holler. [May 2011, p.126]

It may have been recorded in a church, but this is a record celebrating the celestial and the sinister in equal measure. [May 2011, p.126]

It is sufficiently gritty to at least keep her in the game. [May 2011, p.126]

Idlewild's Roddy Woomble has made a surprisingly decent stab of his concurrent career as a born-again folkie. [May 2011, p.126]

Simon Le Bon's croon oozes with charisma throughout and the elegant, new wave pop hooks of their heyday are revisited. [May 2011, p.126]

Nine Types of Lights finds them boldly going forward with their most cheerful, party-centric effort to date. [May 2011, p.123]

Only the title track, with its surge of guitar fuzz, really matches the idea with the execution. [May 2011, p.120]

An over-thought approach, however leaves Schifino's drumming feeling restrained while Johnson's nasal, perma-positive vocals are overzealous. [May 2011, p.119]

His second album evokes blade Runner's stylish futurism, populating it with Spaceape's paranoid poetry and drowning clean lines in tape crackle. [May 2011, p.119]

Hope St. is an expertly crafted burst of energy. [May 2011, p.119]

Rarely do teenage kicks result in such eloquent, nuanced records as this. [May 2011, p.118]

Music in monochrome needs blacks and whites, but Silesia only has shades of grey. [May 2011, p.116]

Throughout, Hunx nasally trills teenage romantic pain over raw retro clatter, and if Spector heard songs such as The curse Of being Young and Tonite Tonite from his prison cell, he'd surely approve. [May 2011, p.116]

The only problem is that the duo never manage to execute a truly killer pop hook, resulting in a debut that breezes by in a pleasant but ultimately forgettable haze. [May 2011, p.116]

The Unforgiving's rampaging orchestral stabs and hysterical synths, coupled with Sharon den Adel's fevered vocal flourishes, make for awful Euro-pop with the odd distorted guitar. [May 2011, p.115]

But for some off-key warbling, they might have slapped some crowd noise over the fantastically bonkers original. [May 2011, p.115]

Hope delivers the sort of soaring melodies and driving riffs eschewed by their emo contemporaries. [May 2011, p.115]

While they may have broken the slacker's code, the results are worth it. [May 2011, p.115]

While the songwriting stays high, it's her strong but sensitive voice, with its lonesome hint of yodeling, that captivates. [May 2011, p.115]

The effect is evocative if nothing less than a 21st-century Caledonian Spirit Of Eden. [May 2011, p.119]

The novelty soon fades and the collision of styles rarely coalesces into anything approaching a song. [May 2011, p.120]

The English Riviera is a major progression for Metronomy, idiosyncratic but also as instantly accessible as, say, Hot chip. It's a winning combination. [May 2011, p.114]

After a promising start too much else glides by as a wash of warm, organic--yet unremarkable--background music. A Shame. [May 2011, p.116]