An atmospheric yet danceable debut.

Memphis is a late-night delight.

A genuinely odd collaboration.

Katie Stelmanis's emotionally tortured vibrato meshes with her band's lush textures to often-potent effect.

There’s singing going on, all right, it sounds lovely, but little is conveyed other than loveliness. However, there’s no arguing with their authenticity or technical excellence.

Unrefined, unresigned, occasionally clunky, frequently obtuse but always, always fit to bust.

Proper, stop-you-in-your-tracks talent with the occasional song to match.

Crain’s third album has proved something of a breakthrough in the US.

Within the first 60 seconds it's alluded to Blue Peter and Taxi Driver in successive lines. Wind in the Willows it ain't.

Her debut is an accomplished, glossily shimmering thing.

The sixth album by these Kentucky alt-country types sees them risk destroying forever the aura of existential gravitas they've accrued with the previous five.

Funny, sad, perfect.

More important on first contact, anyway, is the feel of the music, which grooves. Really good.

Ghost on Ghost is as dense stylistically as it is lyrically.

It is a near-total triumph.

It's a less distinctive incarnation, but as evidenced by the stutteringly propulsive "Ye Ye", hardly less hypnotic.

Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon and Pugwash’s Thomas Walsh strike another fine balance between cricket’s arcane specifics and its universal metaphors in cucumber-crisp batches of catch-all pastiche-pop.

In its own downbeat, understated way, Tinsel and Lights does more for festive good cheer than any number of more traditional Christmas albums that go straight for the razzle-dazzle.

Gossamer is hard to fault, besides the fact that it's more of the same.

In place of politics, or any kind of point, all this album offers is a parade of premium brands, from Grey Goose to Louboutin. The overriding sensation is akin to reading one of those luxury-shopping magazines you get on planes while a mediocre hip-hop station plays over the headphones.

The second Nixey solo album is a thing of subtle gorgeousness, with Nixey's none-more-English, sexy school-mistress diction dealing with topics as bleakly improbable as the Bridgend teenage suicides.

The music treads a gingerly path between the lighter textures of honky-tonk and a sort of indie lounge-pop. Charming.

Sweetly soaring stuff.

Based on his native London, its themes are hardly original but he handles them with likeability.

If this isn't Foals' pop classic or their art masterpiece, they're having a huge amount of fun squaring that circle.

The odds-and-ends nature of this compilation is spelt out by its title, but the quality barely suffers for that.

Wonderful Glorious alternates between distorted rock and freewheeling country-pop interludes.

There's no "Chasing Pavements"-style killer, but she has murdered the Cure's "Lovesong" using Heart FM-friendly jazz-lite as her weapon.