Where You Stand picks up where you last left them--no matter where that was along the way.

Overall though, this is a special album, and a real accomplishment. To make a record largely of solo violin music with songs played as impeccably as this, but have the performance itself not be the focus, is remarkable.

It’s pretty hard to deny that No Age make a damn good off-kilter rock record, and that’s a pretty good idea in itself.

Like her previous works, Loud City Song requires time and patience, but once you grasp its intent the investment will feel wholly worthwhile.

There’s heaps of incendiary six-stringers, throttling beats and barbed tongues; it’s a potent brew that they peddle, but one that suits them just fine.

Coherent though it is, songs have a habit of blending into one another, and all too often end up sounding like that noise when you’re constantly on hold.

A successful experiment, a great record in its own right, and (hopefully) a great primer for a subtly evolved next effort.

Nepenthe is a very special album, one which doesn’t sound like anything else around but which also sounds like music you have unwittingly known your whole life; the quiet hum of life itself, re-appropriated and expertly sculpted into a shape where all of it’s complexity and simplicity feels a just that little bit sweeter.

There is a little filler to strip, and Little Green Cars are still a work in progress--but they have already honed a seasoned sound, paying homage to peers beyond their years.

This is a creative and varied set of songs that spiral high and swoop low, sometimes both at once--and there isn’t a weak link amongst them. Mesmeric.

It’s incredibly immersive, and at times it can be emotionally overwhelming.

While it doesn’t rank as an essential live album concert disc by any stretch of the imagination, and even though it’s plagued by a slow start, New Order’s Live at Bestival 2012 will probably stand as their most solid live recording, celebrating their storied career with their best songs from 3 decades of albums.

Agree with them, or write them off as abstracted lunatics, The Shadow of Heaven is an incredible persuasive push for thoughtful guitar music, in an often vacuous mainstream.

It’s intended to breathe life into everyday objects we take for granted. You made need a dash of imagination to bring those items into consciousness, but Silver helps the process along.

Crimes of Passion is a stellar fourth effort and may prove to be the defining record in what surely will be a long career ahead for the Crocodiles.

At the very least, it’s an admirable first step into something far more profound.

Yes, they are working with a previously-explored aesthetic, but they are molding it into a beautifully-original product, per a vision that refuses to forget music’s former greatness.

The Nextwave Sessions is five tracks from a band who’ve etched their mark on the UK music scene, stretching their sound whilst still occasionally snapping back to what made them so appealing eight years ago.

Despite all of its 33 minutes being recorded in a home built studio that also doubles as a brewery, there’s little to suggest anything particularly wacky rubbed off on the sound.

The Blind Hole is nothing utterly mind-blowing or game-changing in the grindcore world, but it’s also not trying to be. Instead, much like a kick to the balls, it’ll remind you of what it’s like to be alive and feel primitive emotion, and sometimes that’s enough.

By the end of some heavy listening, you understand that they’ve found something more beautiful still, all the more so because it is hard won, but just as they’ve had to work to find it, so must we.

Pokey will invite you to step away from the modern, more complex times and immerse yourself in a period of music from the mid western USA which formed the heart and soul of the country. It is a trip well worth it.

In other words, Moderat have stepped up to the plate and then some.

Hobo Rocket may not be the band’s best album to date, especially in light of their super-tight standout Beard, Wives, Denim--but, if the question is whether its rough, shambolic sound makes you think it’d be completely off-the-chart in a live setting... absolutely yes it does, and that’s really the aim of it.

Most reformed bands are creatively barren, hawking around twenty five year old songs, so for Medicine to break this cliché is a great, great thing--it’s just a shame that some of the interesting sounds they create here couldn’t have incubated for a bit longer.

Uncanny Valley is unfortunately too insignificant to escape the looming shadows all around.

Samaris’s songs are just so cleverly composed and gracefully balanced, that it’s sometimes hard to pick them apart.

Sleep of Reason then is a ponderous rolling through complexly changing scenery, no one drive-through ever seeming the same, more than a roller-coaster ride that promises the same loops each time.