This new U&I long player is a welcomed return to form and Leila's most gripping work to date.

There's no doubt you'll hear a lot of records in 2012 that sound like Whispers in the Dark, but you'll rarely hear it done this well.

Burn Slow isn't the most original or exciting work. But it's a thoughtful and personal album that allows Liebing to move beyond his techno reputation with grace.

The flatness of their construction, despite refreshingly warm undertones, means the songs easily collapse beneath the weight of Smith's carefully constructed persona, losing the plot on his apparent quest to let loose. Where they might blossom, the album's new cuts mostly bore holes into themselves.

Gibson's earlier work mixed pop mastery with genuine feeling. Actual Life 3 is the Hollywood remake, with not-quite-convincing lookalikes and a script laden with clichés.

Adult Contemporary might not break any new ground or present any radical ideas, but as the familiar saying goes, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Wraetlic has the lingering feeling of prematurity, offering snatches of brilliance too easily snuffed out by its own tendency to hide its features in the dark.

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 reason that the DJ-Kicks series has remained relevant is that even at its so-called worst, it was still saying something about the overall state of electronic dance music. With Gold Panda's entry-despite its cleverness and state-of-the-art, diverse penchants-you're left with the impression the famous !K7 cycle has nothing more this time than a muted episode on its hands.

Too much of the album feels restrained, unable to truly revel in the bliss of melody.

The music sometimes suggests inventive new directions, but the strange, tonal weirdness of the vocals doesn't always sit right, and ends up sucking out the individuality from Pharrell and Kendrick Lamar alike.

The brilliance in moments of these tracks doesn't add up to a fully engaging album experience, but Aguayo deserves plenty of credit for continuing to show the imagination he thought minimal lacked all those years ago.

Yoyogi Park is at its best on the tracks where Kersten wanders out of his comfort zone.

It has hooks galore, but embedded in brilliantly strange music.

Pretty Ugly takes the ugliest tropes of UK dance music and flips them inside out without losing what makes them so physically powerful in the first place.

Situated at the border of ambient, new age, techno and industrial music, the album could just as easily fit into a meditative practice as a gritty basement rave. It is also a testament to her technical prowess as an electronic composer. But perhaps more importantly, it lives and breathes her insistence on exploring new sounds and techniques.

Stately though Dedication was, its serious mien and careful composition made it an introduction to Zomby that made his work seem less appealingly messy than it oftentimes is. This seven-song, 23-minute EP remedies that.

Where many similar hybrids are too cerebral or schizophrenic, his album is impressively tactile, and laced with a genuinely passionate pulse.

Overall Passion is an angst-free experience, finely wrought with a view to banishing the black and the blues.

So we have an artist who's found a very comfortable groove, continues to produce from it, and plenty of people love him for it. It may be an enormous cop-out to say that if you like Recondite you'll probably like Dwell, and if you don't like Recondite (or you're a music writer) you probably won't. But, like Brunner's music, some things really are that simple.

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.

Like all good pop, News From Nowhere is brief, never falling victim to the temptation to get lost in soundscaping. Instead, it builds those immersive realms in just a few minutes with each track.

Designed to be listened to as a continuous mix, From Deewee is as much about the flow between songs as the standout anthems.

Brandt Brauer Frick's contribution to the series, while not a classic, is still a little treasure trove.

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.

They draw from the immigrant communities to make a sound that, to them, is completely at home.

If there is one main flaw you could attach to Rapprocher, it's how Harper sticks so slavishly to the template laid out by her dance pop mentors.

For what is essentially a composite of three "live" performances (all produced on a deliberately limited set-up of two modular synths, two sequencers and a mixer), Whorl is surprisingly cohesive.