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

Overall, Trick is reminiscent of those rare enjoyable hangovers--contemplative, contented and tranquil. And like those hangovers, it is unusual and a delight.

Like a kid in a candy shop, Goddard has indulged in a selection splashed with dazzling colour; but the results are pic’n’mixed.

This is a varied, but still stylistically consistent and wonderfully accessible album. It’s a frequently wonderful and often fantastic album that demonstrates and exemplifies the joys of nostalgia.

The Badfinger-leaning “You” and quasi-Britpop of “Passionate Life” typify an era-colliding strain driving at Buzzard Buzzard Buzzard’s work, segueing track by track without feeling forced. Backhand Deals captures this pop revisionism, the band tweaking sounds of yesteryear with enough swaggering individuality in their own right.

The result is a seamless psychedelic synthesis of pop noir, ghostly '60s girl group sounds, Lynchian-style atmospherics, ambient washes and dance floor undertones, there’s nearly always a subliminal sense of unspecified menace or is it simply the deep disorientation that love and desire brings? Surrender and immersion are the only sensible responses.

When Neil leads us away cheekily with the macabre “I’ll never grow old in a graveyard”, the confidence sounds resolute. The trio’s abilities were already in cement, but being uninhibited by past musical ventures has become a marvellously fun, snarling beast.

Period sounds like a record trying its best to be happy – the striking highs of something like “Praying” are nowhere to be found on this allegedly unrestrained album.

Thirteen albums in, and the Brian Jonestown Massacre may have just delivered their most impressive album yet. Clear heads prevail.

There has never been anything wrong with the oddities that emerge from Bob’s brain, and Blazing Gentlemen simply sees the man operating in as relentlessly fine form as ever.

Something Shines is a continuation of that frustration: so many wonderful moments let down by times where it sounds like Laetitia Sadier just isn’t completely focused, meaning it’s a record that’s okay, but one that could have been great.

I see it as less of a leftovers album, and more of a personally curated buffet.

The difficulties seem to arise when melody and vocals are expected to step up and carry a track for them. They don’t, much more often than they do, which ends up leaving the listener (or this listener, at least) vaguely dissatisfied.

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

It’s The Wedding Present as we’ve known/loved them since 1991’s tour de force Seamonsters--opening squalls of feedback, a deceptively sweet melody, and Gedge’s lyrics fluctuating between self-lacerating and acrimonious in the midst of ferocious guitars. We’re on far less familiar ground with a number of the other 19 tracks, though.

Homosapien is a good album with great moments.

Wonderful Wonderful is not an about-turn, not an exercise in New Earnestness, but the latest step in becoming the most concise version of themselves--it is true because it concentrates the traces of what they have always been.

While it’s good to have Sebadoh back thrashing around in the unfurnished basement of the music industry once again, you just wonder how much better the results would have been if they had a complete album’s worth of material that proved worthy of their return.

From the song structure to the vocal delivery, everything’s fairly laid-back and far from groundbreaking, but such is its lo-fi garage aesthetic.

A record that feels so familiar but with just enough surprises to make it exciting too. The three year wait, then, seems entirely worth it; that scrappy Brighton foursome have grown into a bonafide anthem factory with plenty more still to come.

New Gods is an unusually good album.

This is another lo-fi gem, and most encouraging is the fact that there’s apparently plenty more he can wring out of this particular sonic platform; he might not need slick studio production to genuinely capitalise on his potential.

Ke$ha too reaches for a savage base pull, lifting from the low-end, high-reward arena rock spectrum, a place of soaring peaks and valleys that still float above heads even at their most subdued, music meant to be blasted from towering stacks of speakers, so the stage appears bookended by the Willis Tower and the John Hancock Center and that finds its artistic beauty in the sheer size and ferocity of its scope and emotional appeal.

While moments on Species don’t quite touch on the grandeur we’ve heard from Moore in the past, the trio more than make-do by enticing us still. They’ve created an album that melds into what feels like a massive piece, our patience is required to see how it unfolds, to realize what’s contained inside, and what to do with that information if we ever uncover it.

Satan’s Graffiti or God’s art? shows that while other bands may find themselves naturally winding down when several albums in, Black Lips are still going from strength to strength.

It sounds precisely like what it is: a very straightforward Franz Ferdinand record.

Self-doubt and anxiety still flow through the veins of the record, albeit quieter and much more introspective, but this time it’s darker, and more matured. A vital record of universal emotions that makes the current global mantra of “we’re all in this together” feel just that bit more believable.

Calvi thrashes, broils, sweats, cries and lusts through the EP, and returns to reality remarkably unscathed from Strange Weather. Kudos to Calvi.