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.