Though very few of the songs themselves outstay their welcome, Tomorrow’s Harvest as a whole can feel overly long, and it’s the short songs that are the problem--they feel like unnecessary padding in a record whose triumphs should have been allowed to stand tall and proud by themselves.

By having faith that his songwriting ability would stand up to being thrust into unchartered musical territory, he’s overseen the making of a tight album that has a cohesiveness that belies how open it is to new--and genuinely exciting--ideas.

Settle is a soulful, accomplished and versatile record.

June Gloom marks another confident step forward in the band’s quest to live up to their name in the indie-rock landscape.

Tedious genre classification aside, it’s a fascinating record that begs softly for closer inspection and possibly even adoration.

The record is an absolute trip: a movable feast pressed to 12 inches of microgroove.

It’s the haunting, beat-driven atmospherics that ultimately make the songs memorable (or not), and throughout this new record the textured dynamics of these songs pulse with a clean, modern inventiveness, while also echoing the moody tones of his best work.

They’ve poured so much time and effort into Cave Rave--but you may never get a chance to appreciate that aspect of the album, because for all their intrinsic talent and informed attention to detail, their passion for pure pop is overpowering.

Though it will never be something you can boogie on down to, or strut your wiggly bits at, it will, without a shadow of a doubt, hold your attention.

By pushing Josh Kolenik’s vocals further up in the mix, the songs tell more of a narrative of discovery than their hazy, ambiguous earlier material.

The eleven tracks show little shift in the sisters’ sound, which remains as beguiling--or as infuriating--as ever.

At a time when dance and electronic becomes increasingly homogenised by the mainstream, Mount Kimbie have released an album that still refuses to court the mundane.

Though it has been sixteen years since their last studio album, not much is technically new here except a further tendency towards the mellow and ongoing hopeless romanticism.

With Saltwater but as a difficult second album goes, this is a total breeze rather than a mainsail-battering ocean storm.

They’ve struck a perfect balance between pushing boundaries and making people dance.

Dungeonesse have brazenly managed to distill the best parts of modern and classic pop radio down to a sweet, everlasting core while creating their own sparkling, sugary sound in the process.

Marling has delivered Once I Was an Eagle with a charisma lacking in most of her peers, and the poise of a far older hand.

What he does well here, and has always done well, is to embody traditional music; its harmony, its lyrical themes, and at the same time imbue the music with a vitality that never feels forced or disrespectful of its roots.

There’s no denying the technical ability and songcraft is there, and unpicking the layers is the most enjoyable part of listening, but it’s emotional tugging ultimately strikes as hollow, not through insincerity but in being too obfuscated or overbearing for me to really love these songs.

It’s a little difficult to get a handle on his subject matter, although there’s an engaging quality to his delivery that makes him worth sticking with. The rest of the band work more cohesively, applying mob shouts and sunny pop ‘oohs’ to the ADD-riddled backing.

Despite the level of fastidiousness that’s standard to Daft Punk, Random Access Memories still sounds loose. The album doesn’t feel synthetic or disingenuous, as it perhaps should. So perhaps these two are cooler than anyone you know.

Charlie Boyer & The Voyeurs have crafted a solid debut.

There’s too much telling and not enough showing across More Light‘s 70 minutes.

It’s an unsettling, incomparable racket of The Fall at their wonderful, frightening best.

By plunging impassively into their own hearts of darkness, Mark Lanegan and Duke Garwood have demonstrated that there’s still plenty of life lurking in the muddy waters of the blues.

Imbibing such personal performances with a universally relatable humanity is the greatest strength to a record that makes fragility sound pretty devastating.

Drifters/Love Is The Devil isn’t always an unqualified success, but more often than not it displays Dirty Beaches as a project increasingly adept at the scattershot of styles, imprinted with Hungtai’s own recognisable mark.

Dark elements permeate the menacing corners of Crawling Up The Stairs, and while it may have been a long, grueling journey to get through, it seems that by the end of this bumpy road, Pure X have reached a positive creative terrain that suggests their long climb up the from the bottom was worth all the effort and pain it took to get there.