In many ways it’s a simple record, favouring technique over technology and to-the-point lyrics rather than those that miss the point completely.

It’s emotional, it’s hooky and it’s loveable, and as a straight-up folk record for those who’ve never heard Hoop’s sounds before, it ticks a great many boxes. But, alas, as dazzling as the album regularly is, it is a fan’s record.

There’s a wealth of delicious treats held within this set to more than sate your curious appetite.

The record does get a little samey in parts, and at times feels like a soundtrack for another Juno or Away We Go. But the album fits a very particular aesthetic.

It’s not as thrilling or elemental as his earlier work, but Minimum Rock N Roll is a hell of a lot of fun.

This record utilizes straightforward folk-rock with understated string and brass accompaniments, mostly stripped of the whimsical music box quirks of yesteryear.

The songwriting is there, as are great performances. But with a band like Horse Thief, the difference between in studio and on stage is a distraction that’s as unfortunate as it is glaring.

Amphetamine Ballads probably shouldn’t feel like quite so much of a breath of fresh air--there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that it wears its influences (or has them tattooed, probably) very much on its sleeve--but it carries a threatening urgency so often conspicuous by its absence nowadays.

On With Light and With Love, Woods once again prove that they can casually strike the perfect balance between imaginative pop confections and untethered psychedelic jams.

What’s makes PUP an engrossing listen, though, is also what takes it beyond a typical hardcore record: there’s sunlight that refuses to be shut out from the overcast skies.

If Blood Speaks found streaks of steel, Smoke Fairies is malleable in music and meaning.

It may not be the best album this year and it certainly won’t be one of the most influential or contemporary--there are slews of reviews here for those well-deserved albums--but it may rank among the most important.

There’s an aching pain that throbs throughout Hendra. But as the personal suffering that shapes the album is lamented, there is a clear cathartic quality to these songs.

This is a lovely, beautiful and reflective record, the music is intelligent, has depth and sounds gorgeous.

When all’s said and done Chills On Glass is an exhilarating record with a variety of shades, but its biggest achievement is its ability to create such weird and wonderful sounds whilst maintaining the potential to appeal to more than a small minority.

The fact that Pattern Is Movement defies genres is both its strength and its downfall.

This band are masters of their craft, and Dances in Dreams of the Known and Unknown is simply more evidence to attest to that assertion.

Make time for this single-sitting long-player and you will be rewarded.

Wasted Years is unlikely to appeal to a whole new legion of fans, but those already on-board should be happy with their order of ‘more of the same’.

This record is intelligent, succinct in its ambitions, and more than anything, it’s pretty bloody cool.

This third full-length is enjoyable as a standalone too, but probably more so with the added context.

While Esben may be the more established of the two bands here, the more critically massaged and beard-strokingly analysed, it’s Thought Forms that provide a sense of gameness, of openness and of actual fun that offers a welcome balance to Esben’s pummeling, near-savage emotional and musical beatings.

Tweens pulls no punches, though; this is basic music and these are basic words expressing basic emotions.

While Taylor definite seems to prefer to approach his themes and ideas with a sombre touch, he’s not afraid to whack up the pace a notch or two, and it appears he actively enjoys getting stuck into dissembling standard percussive forces.

It’s not just Album Time, it’s crazy psychedelic hoo-ha time, and it sounds pretty damn fine.

Enter The Slasher House is stylish, daring and captivating; spooky, but not scary.

My Sad Captains have got the words, the sound, and the craft, now if only they’d try a little harder to get everyone’s attention.

The Future’s Void is an album that, rather than plead with us to disconnect from the online, asks us to face up to a world with where internet, surveillance, selfies, the NSA aren’t going to go away, and to find a way to continue to interact with this technology in a constructive and positive fashion.

It’s a skew-wiff funk record you can’t dance to, something to get lost in while not immediate, stuffed with arrangements that have so much going on but you hardly notice once they’re set.

It won’t be the year’s slickest or tightest alt-pop effort, but it’s plenty adventurous--for the most part, endearingly so.

Mohawk is an album that feels great, imparts wisdom, drops sweet details and encourages both fandom and participation. If there’s fault to be found it’s in the record’s brevity.

Arc Iris is traditional music thrillingly positioned at the nexus of the old and new.

It certainly sounds like black and white and red, but while it’s quite clearly in a better way than a sunburnt penguin, its attempts at something completely dramatic and bold aren’t quite as successful as Spielberg’s iconic scene.

It’s lucky for us that Joyland so often yields gems amongst the heavy strata of computerized monoliths.

Toujours reminisces to an age of simple love songs, and Sabina encapsulates a more elegant, Breton-wearing, subtle popstar in the milieu of Serge Gainsbourg’s Paris.

Mess is characteristically confident and brash, but humane and enduring. In short, it’s up there with the rest of their unerringly brilliant back-catalogue.

The album is lacklustre, and suffers for a lack of purpose and intent.

Whether this is a Clyro-esque transformation underway, time will tell, but for now, we can revel in their top notch, A-grade rock cacophony as it is.

The album’s second half doesn’t let up on the grooves or the gusto.

Timber Timbre, in crafting Hot Dreams, have cultivated an immensely strong record and an alternate sonic dimension you can spend a lifetime exploring.

The listener is never really on terra firma when ambling through the elusive foothills of Range of Light, but every fluctuating composition and shift in mood makes for a refreshing experience spin after spin on a record that could so easily be entangled and mired in its own instrumental mastery.

While those individual songs are great, they generate the urge to listen to the whole record in its entirety which, in the end, may not be as healthy and carefree as the title and arrangements would have us believe.

At times the record’s pleasantness feels forced, part of a calculated game plan. But at its best, Out Among The Stars is a gentle reminder of how sweet the everyman missives of the Man In Black could be.

It combines Molina’s hardcore background with jangling melody perfectly at times, and I wish each song was longer.

Not for a long time have I listened to something that so delights in its lack of abandon; their name might be uninspiring, but Cloud Nothings’ output is clearly anything but.

There are a couple of great tracks, but a little too often you’ll find that it isn’t Norman Wisdom, Johnny, Joey or Dee Dee, but musical déjà vu that these dreams are made of.

A peerless and affecting album, from start line to finish.

It lacks some of the first record’s energy and virtuosity. However, Two remains a joyous listen considering how little chance there was of it even existing a few years ago.

New Gods is an unusually good album.

It’s not that the album is particularly any shorter than any other album – clocking in at around 40 minutes--it’s that it’s so tightly-packed with such consistently good content and is so musically pithy, that you just can’t ever really get enough out of it.

A glimpse at the album cover for Seer, a severe black circle surrounded by a chaos of stars and glimmers, betrays the album’s chief theme: moments of symmetry floating in space.

Singles is an effortless wonder. Each and every track runs its course avoiding any pitfalls.

The boisterous new record is filled with plenty of raucous glimpses of what has beat at the unsteady creative heart of this notoriously dubious band for over 15 unpredictable years.

Croll has some great, great tunes but they so often artfully distract from the rest of his approach, which can often be minimal, and lacking in effort.

Awake isn’t without grip or feeling, it’s just deft, and I’ve got an awful lot of time for something that picks me up whilst being so easy to listen to and so hard to forget.

Despite Daughter of Everything’s brief runtime, its sheer number of tracks and subgenre bending lend it a sprawling quality, not unlike Robert Pollard.

La Luz excel when they commit to the way the songs of that era worked, rather than settling for the aura or the pleasant, used-vinyl memories of it all.

Although the urge for transformation is commendable, sometimes a change isn’t quite as good as a rest.

Blonde is a crushingly unoriginal piece of work, weirdly proud of its derivative nature, and anybody who wanted to listen to this kind of album could easily find a raft of better records in the last few years alone.

It’s a unique record, for sure, and one that deserves at least some of your time.

Sometimes doing what comes naturally is as big a risk as attempting to do something outside of your comfort zone, and that gamble paid off this time for Tokyo Police Club.

The songs are much more complex and nuanced than one might expect on first listen and, like most good music, it is an album that deserves deeper comprehension.

The more reflective moments on the album are some of the best.

If you persevere, it’s an LP that will reveal it’s creamy goodness in due time. You’ve got to wine’n'dine it, not just expect to jump into bed.

An admirably well-balanced attempt by Drew to really strike out on his own.

Sisyphus is a tragic waste of a vivid storyteller.

Although he doesn’t offer the genre anything noticeably new, he’s more than capable to keep the momentum going over a long player.

Content wise, Glow is everything you could want from a dance artist’s debut album. It’s produced well, it’s cheeky in parts, dark and suggestive in others and varied enough in regards to genre.

Anyone actively looking for flaws in Lost In The Dream, the exquisite new album from The War On Drugs, is quite frankly listening to the album wrong. And at any rate, they simply won’t find any, no matter how hard they search.

Waterfall is massive and unyielding, and marks Evian Christ now as a producer who’s mastered both tactile and intricate beats.

If a long playing ode to the wonder of women was the driving concept behind G I R L, then of course, Williams has failed. If however, you want to hear an artist at the height of his popularity who’s all up in this place for a good time, then grab a hand and raise a cup (if you must), this G I R L will keep you entertained throughout.

We’ve only got eight tracks here, about twenty or so minutes of music, but not a second of it is wasted, and just about every moment is brilliant.

It’s a worldly record in many ways, and though the core tenet is of his personal feelings, it works just as well as you what you’d probably assume the record to be about--abandoned cities.

There’s plenty of kernels of good ideas here, but very few of them feel properly developed; just as their genre’s been thrust into the spotlight, Sleepy Sun seem to have developed stage fright.

TV En Francais isn’t less successful than its predecessors, but the tracks that show a band evolving naturally offer a more welcomed take on the band in 2014.

The group may be battling their more indulgent tendencies at times, but Drive-By Truckers always find a path back towards redemption somewhere along the line.

If a whole album could sum up my juvenile years of prepubescent chanting along to anthems in the kitchen at house parties, it would be this.

Neil Davidge takes full advantage of his big opportunity to finally show off his textured sonic mastery on a full-length that is entirely his own, and Slo Light only enhances his reputation as one of the greatest sound alchemists of his time.

MØ’s debut LP is an exquisite collection of synthpop, dance and gushing, heartfelt emotions.

Dean Wareham is an album that sees both of its key players growing in stature as it progresses; I could take or leave the first half, but the second is a delight.

There’s a sense of exhaustion in Spectre, but it’s not an exhaustion with irony and a refuge in po-faced sloganeering. Rather, Laibach dramatise the exhausted nature of a political movement that seems unable to do anything other than follow the lines laid out for it by the social order it claims to oppose, or take refuge in a vague utopianism.

The real problem with The Classic is it just can’t often enough avoid the pitfalls of mediocrity, whether pastiche grooves, lackluster songwriting, or Joan’s own vocal limitations.

You Can Do Better is still the JoFo you might know and love, and for anyone coming to it fresh it actually provides a fantastic gate-way album, with fairly obvious retro sensibilities but an energy, enthusiasm and self-confidence that keeps it feeling relevant and modern.

Metronomy have stepped up from the mantle of electro-pop, and matured into the sort of band that endures. Excitingly still, they leave us with no idea where they’ll go next.

The closer Perhacs stays to her original organic vision, the better The Soul of All Natural Things sounds.

Electric Balloon sees Ava Luna staying the course in producing music that is as heady, adventurous and intelligent as that of their debut, if not more so.

The Unsemble is an album that sounds like it was phoned in from a bunch of guys who clearly think they just have to turn up to the studio and the magic will flow instantly from the fingers of these master craftsmen.

They didn’t quite manage to move past The Seldom Seen Kid on Build a Rocket Boys!, but with Take Off, they’ve both cemented their place as a British institution and hinted that their best might yet be to come.

The intensely moving track ["Don’t Be Afraid"]--and the entire album itself--perfectly illustrates the idea that we all have a magnificent universe within ourselves just waiting to be discovered, and that we should never be fearful of uncovering exactly who and where we are.

When it’s not inclined to cast off into distension, Silent Treatment is robust, purposeful and precariously, hauntingly sublime.

Boy is intense, intrusive, brutally honest, compelling and mature if not ironically titled; it certainly bears nothing in common with infancy.

Skip track one though, leave it to simmer a while, and Apocalypse Soon should inevitably be soundtracking at least some of the summer of 2014.

There’s a human element to the record, missing from so many of their contemporaries’ efforts, waiting to be engaged with for those who choose to scratch beneath the surface; for everybody else, Blood Red Shoes will simply be the riotously fun sound of a band who have well and truly cast off the shackles.

There’ll be plenty of albums this year that grab you by the throat more vigorously than Atlas does, but very few of them will be quite as lovingly nuanced--and none will make the guitar sound anything like as appealing.

Amidst the sanded-corner tunes and taut, buffed percussion, the five-piece have a lot of valuable ruminations on being young and hopeless and helpless in modern Britain.

Much like its creator and artwork, it remains unidentifiable, borderline incomprehensible even, but never less than thoroughly enthralling.

It’s a record full of brilliant playing, solid gold songs and most importantly it feels like an honest assessment of where The Men are right now as a band and as individuals.

Working Out is a sophisticated sounding record, but with only a handful of standout tracks, it may not be enough.