Where a lot of modern Balearic music can sound cheesy and banal, Idjut Boys have a keen sense of melody and a fondness for unexpected left turns, which keeps their tracks tight and surprising.

There is a feeling of accomplishment throughout Invite The Light.

An entire album of the stuff would likely be twee overkill, but Gonno's endearing quirks and lighthearted sensibilities are charming in small doses.

This series has always been Kompakt’s annual attempt to try to shape mainstream house and techno in its own idiosyncratic vision. Once again, it has done so in style.

His architectures still have an unreal sheen, but they're convincing enough to get lost in.

Staring into a murky void, Thundercat has actually made his clearest music yet.

Whatever James puts his name to could and should never be expected to make conventional sense, so Orphaned Deejay Selek only falters when denying his own slippery logic.

Born In The Echoes follows the duo's formula of saving the more psychedelic tracks for the end.

There's the occasional hint of another, more vivid album.... Elsewhere they often seem all too separate, like combatants squaring off in a strange, airless room.

Each production here feels less like a 10-minute single than a condensed DJ set, and The Orb navigate these spaces with a fresh wind in their sails.

It's a total weirdo crossover success, and perhaps Bahdeni Nami's standout if club fodder is what you're after.

Blondes' new arrangement seems to working fine so far, and suggests that subsequent live shows will be pretty special, too.

Though his abilities with oddball party jams are unquestionable, Davis proves he can be equally compelling when he tones it down a notch.

Pattern Of Excel succeeds during those little moments that capture Bannon's way with mood and melody.

Sometimes Walker can have his cake and eat it, too, and on the best moments of Knockin' Boots, he does.

What does it feel like to be alive in a digital age, overloaded and confused, but excited, too? What perspectives are possible now? Piteous Gate is a captivating attempt at putting those feelings into sound.

In its best moments, Morning/Evening is perfectly paced. Less convincing is the Evening side's coda.... Even with these faults, though, Hebden has brought a refreshing addition to his discography.

LP might be Ren Schofield's shortest album as Container, but it's also the one that best captures the full elemental force of his music.

This is a minor work, but a minor work from a master of his art.

This is machine music for a machine-ruled future made by someone who truly loves machines.

This new LP is understated by comparison, with fewer jarring moments and more shifting grooves.

Portraits resonates at a level of button-pushing sentimentality, but Maribou State are such deft directors of their sound, and so melodically gifted, that they still create moments of magic.

It hardly bears Moroder's personality at all.

Starfire won't get stuck in your head for days, but you could spend weeks unpacking it and still never quite get to the bottom of it.

On Tundra, the duo's debut long-player for R&S, Lakker seem fully in their element. The ideas have room to breathe and consolidate themselves.

Since the beginning, DJ-Kicks has been about finding unique takes on this craft. Kozalla's 50th instalment more than lives up to this tradition.

Nozinja Lodge is joyous, colourful dance music from one of the electronic scene's most eccentric and promising personalities.

Walk Dance Talk Sing shows you can't have too much of a good thing.

When Lantern hits its high points, it ends up somewhere in the stratosphere. When it falters, it's mostly because it's too ambitious, either thematically, as with the overblown love songs, or technically, as with the roller-coaster sequencing that halts the momentum over and over.

The Shakes is worth hearing for the sonic detail alone. The best tracks have an inclusive, sweeping abandon that rivals the high points of Scale.

Ambiguities can make Olympic Mess's charms difficult to excavate, but it's well worth making the effort to do so.

The LP hops between ideas and experiments in the tradition of the rock music double-album, and even within individual songs things are rarely straightforward.

Stylistically, it's more of a grab-bag than ever before, occasionally tipping the scales from charming to bombastic.

Platform is full of beautifully corrupted, synthesised signals.

What we're left with is an uneven album that's rarely as profound or as meaningful as it tries to be.

It's slightly ludicrous, highly theatrical and great fun.

This is a short album that toggles around pretty familiar sounds without doing anything new with them. But in this final salvo, Walls have proven that they are a force.

For all their strange angles and squeaky sonorities, these songs satisfy in the way that pop has always satisfied, no more and no less.

Cunningham focuses primarily on selection for his hour-long jaunt through murky technoisms. All too often, though, technique and sequencing seem to have been banned from the booth.

Runddans is an intriguing and sometimes fun experiment, but it's not quite a meeting of great musical minds.

The album is a ultimately a disappointment, but it has its moments nonetheless.

Very little of Trickfinger could be called surprising, but it isn't without its charms.

Captain Of None places Schott's voice front-and-centre and folds in her long-burning love for dub and reggae rhythms, making for her most approachable and otherworldly record yet.

An elegant, heartbroken album that wraps its dance floor influence in thick pop overtones.

Where Ufabulum felt like a garish souvenir from the performance built around it, Damogen Furies is more substantial and self-contained.

Where Bad Vibes had a dynamic range of feeling, Dark Red is melodramatic to the point of being alienating.

Jlin has plenty to say, and she has a remarkably strong and distinctive voice with which to say it.

Beneath its stylish veneer, Unspell lacks substance.

The gussied-up politeness that has followed Greene throughout his career is still an issue here, making the less adventurous material sound slightly anonymous. That's why the thick textures on "Folle" stand out so much, or why it's so exciting when Greene lets it all float away on "Lately." There are more than enough of these moments to make the record worthwhile.

Instead of trying something new, he focuses on what he's good at, which makes Claustrophobia a lateral move rather than a step forward. It seems Rose is trying to recapture the brilliance of his peak-period work. In Claustrophobia's best moments, he does.


Rather than an earth-shattering opus, Dream A Garden is a stepping stone to a new sound, one with enough promising moments to suggest it's only a matter of time before Latham gets there.

He may be trading more in the glow of nostalgia than the shock of the new, but he can still deliver the goods.

Excerpts feels like a series of glimpses into Gast's world, where past full-lengths have been an unbroken wander through it.

An album that finds Cantu-Ledesma orchestrating perhaps the most gorgeous ambience of his career so far.

Without its academic trappings, Projections starts to grate, with its middle-of-the-road niceness and mood of tepid celebration. With them, it's borderline offensive.

For all the dub diehards, Late Night Endless is a must-have. For the rest, it's a leisurely detour in the catalogues of two great artists who proved themselves a long time ago.

"Junkies" is the album's only weak moment. The others, while never delivering the thrills of "Six Figures" or "Solemn Days," slowly reveal a different kind of charm.

Coming from a producer who habitually finds new ways to dazzle, Pearson Sound is uncharacteristically average.

Modern Streets may lack ingenuity, but it works as a sincere and relatable portrayal of the artist's experience.

Over its 20 minutes, the EP pushes dance music through violent twists and turns until it becomes disorienting and startling.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but Fatima Al Qadiri, Nguzunguzu and J. Cush have delivered a surprisingly solid record with a global outlook and more than a few surprises surprises up its sleeve.

It's all meticulously crafted with a keen ear for mood and emotion, and yet Creatures has trouble moving beyond a pastiche of Castex's record collection.

If The Mainframe is a film, then it's a Michael Bay blockbuster: slick and engaging but totally adolescent in worldview, its plot tortuous, its characters flimsily drawn, all of it an excuse for a string of eye-popping action set-pieces.

Body Pill is thoroughly understated throughout. It's an odd little album that only shows us part of the Anthony Naples puzzle, which is probably appropriate for an artist whose work seems to come in small and unusual bursts of inspiration.

A beautiful collection of tunes as striking as they are subtle.

James spends most of the EP in that exploratory mode, and though there's a certain pleasure in listening to an artist figure things out, a full 28 minutes feels like overkill. Regardless, it's comforting to know James isn't settling into a routine.

Some tracks, like "Mouth Mantra," simply feel overcrowded. The Haxan Cloak, who mixed the album, struggles to find clarity in busier moments. But the story, visceral and tragic, transcends these imperfections in the telling.

Ghost Culture is a good record from an artist who is probably capable of a great one.

It's a testament to Lennox's dexterity that these brief detours into soft introspection only enhance the wondrous breadth and vision of Panda Bear Versus The Grim Reaper.

Islands might not have the far-reaching social insights of Routes, but it shows that Idehen's personal world is almost as gripping.

The result is a set of tracks that, compared to the prickly, experimental music of Shaking The Habitual, are purposeful, propulsive and emotionally direct.

Visa finds Ripatti attuned to a very specific, focused energy, and the result is some of his best work.

For something as weighty as a debut album from a hotly-tipped artist, Parallel Memories feels a little too light for its own good.

Power Of Anonymity merely repeats the ideas first laid out on Yours & Mine, sometimes improved yet other times untouched.

It's another entry of his sublime wanderer's music as Torn Hawk, and includes some of his most arresting and sonically numbing creations to date.

Magazine 13 doesn't feel like a coherent album so much as a more open-ended platform for the same thing we get on his 12-inches.

Clearly, Stewart's future does not lie in crossover R&B--he should drill down into his musical imagination to open up ever weirder, deeper seams.

Where their first album felt like a definitive statement, Natural Selection sounds, as so many second albums do, like a diffuse bunch of half-realised ideas.

Even when Clark is firing sounds at bewildering speeds, it's never a chore--in other words, it's a lot more fun than Clark's reputation might suggest.

For an artist who has traditionally experimented with recording methods, Quixotism is another landmark, thanks largely to how natural it sounds in spite of its ambitious approach.

By injecting a self-serious genre with a sense of theatre, Bestial Burden makes Chardiet's music more engaging without dulling its edge.

Music this haunting is more universal than local.

From its rumbling lows to its ethereal, resonant highs, Tomorrow Was The Golden Age is one of the simplest and most beguiling albums of its kind since Stars Of The Lid's landmark run on Kranky in the '00s.

The most fully formed and wholly unique record in his discography.

The combination of these two forces is both inspired and insane.

Xen remains as singular--and often as brilliant--as the rest of the Arca catalogue.

Sure, the LP has its eccentric moments, and it takes a long time to really get to know. But, as The Redeemer hinted and Black Metal proves, beneath all the YouTube sampling, bizarre press and one-off Russian blog releases, Blunt is a talented singer-songwriter with a keen ear for odd sounds.

It's bold, maybe even avant-garde, but from beginning to end it's raucous, barnstorming, chair-dancing fun.

Huxley's pop forays might not be for everyone, but there's plenty on Blurred to appeal to both his underground acolytes and, perhaps, a new crop of fans as well.

Rundell and Goddard are still crafting warm, well-balanced tracks, but the parts that reveal their personalities—namely the lyrics--are often awkward and strangely didactic.

Wonder Where We Land pads its vocal tracks with plush instrumentals, morsels of melody that would have been strong points if they weren't so half-baked.

What she's lost in subtlety she's gained in star power, off the back of two years of touring and a slow-burning hit album.

With In A Dream, Maclean and Whang have crafted some of most expertly tuneful music of their career.

The whole album bleeds into one magnificent mess, thanks in part to some incredibly short track times, but also to the nature of the music itself.

Like most Caribou albums, Our Love is a grower.

Amid all this diversity, Abaporu is a remarkably steady work, with Boratto's consistent sound palette and knack for melody running strong throughout.

With KOCH, Gamble has found a canvas that's just the right size to fit everything on, to hold the whole beautiful thing up at once.

These are synthetic sounds that have a sense of natural decay built into them, but Prudhomme unleashes them with such carefully built momentum, the music can't help but feel optimistic.