On The Invisible Way Sparhawk has managed the rare trick of rendering that language not only intelligible but lustrous and attractive to even the staunchest naysayer while simultaneously steering his band around a fresh and perhaps uncharted musical turn.

The record is an amazing first stride for Amateur Best, one that’s both full of pop sensibilities and avant-garde experimenting.

With Krieg und Frieden (Music for Theatre), Apparat has created yet another awesome dimension to his diverse catalogue of releases.

The album isn’t easy going: it’s hard to completely love a record as bleak as this.... but Henson has a poet’s way with words and an expressive voice that you’d never tire of listening to.

A darker, rougher beast than either of its predecessors, it’s a highly expansive piece of work.

It’s a pretty relentlessly upbeat, pacey affair that could do with stripping things back (as it does a little, to great success, on ‘East Side Glory’) a tad more often--but not many.

Wondrous Bughouse is a delicious collage: provocative, allusive and consistently engaging.

If You Leave is staggeringly beautiful from beginning to close, a catharsis that’s both bracing and woozily amniotic.

This is an album that, as elegant and refined as it is, will be forgotten about soon enough. That’s not to say it doesn’t deserve to be extolled for the hard work alone.

If you’re able to look past the campy facade and accept that this is purely a record of glimmering pop, it’ll be something you’ll cherish.

It is flawed--a few too many diversions and distractions, and one or two experiments that don’t really work--but the best thing about Monkey Mind In The Devil’s Mind is the simple way it frequently reminds you how good a songwriter Mason is.

Herein lies the central problem with Devendra Banhart’s latest record; there are moments to savour, but for each of these there’s at least one frustrating or disappointing moment to counteract it.

It’s not one for EDM purists or those who like their lyrics with any degree of ambiguity, but if you’re the kind of person who finds the very idea of John Grant interesting, you can revel in the fact that he just got a whole lot more complicated.

Sometimes something comes along that seems to revel in nonchalant noisemaking; gives in to the din and just is. Effortlessly, thrillingly, brilliantly, Go Easy does that in spades.

It doesn’t quite all come together here as a whole album, veering between low-key dreamy ambience and more up-tempo indie pop.

New Moon is at times quite captivating and as rowdy as you need it to be, but its weaker moments consistently outshine its brighter ones, leaving the listener with an album half-full of both indelible sonic fury and equally forgettable missteps.

Pearl Mystic is a promising debut from Hookworms, but whether it’s universally appealing is impugnable--there’s a suspicion that accessibility is not exactly on the top of Hookworms’ priorities; instead making interesting, immersive music to get lost in clearly is.

Exai operates within a comfort zone--one that’s dazzling, but given the sheer length of this thing, also far from easy to stomach as a whole.

If you like your summer pop to keep you on your toes then this is definitely for you. Otherwise this is an impressively ambitious if somewhat misguided debut from a band well worth keeping tabs on.

The simple moments are offset by grander, more exciting ones.

Images Du Futur is exciting in a way that few albums manage to be, dangerous and compelling like a first cigarette or fumbled sexual encounter, and nothing here quite seems real.

Despite the mad proliferation of comparable contemporaries, The Deer Tracks have balanced out, and in so doing added context to their oeuvre whilst avoiding sounding derivative.

For a debut, the album has a spacious sound, and that can also be accounted for by Milosh and Hannibal’s music history which predates Rhye by nearly a decade.

The Next Day is very, very good. Purposefully good--the work of someone who seemingly knew that if he was going to come back at all, it had to be with something blessed with brilliance.

A superb debut.

Though it’s clearly crafted with a visual accompaniment in mind, it does just about work as its own album; albeit one of their strangest, and most inventive.

The quality of the tracks are enough to keep the most hardened of critics occupied and the depth of the album, both musically and lyrically, should hold your attention, whatever month it is.

Somewhere Else makes for an invaluable addition to any self-respecting pop-loving household.