It might not represent a radical new kind of futurism, but at its yearning, technicolor best The Bones of What You Believe captures the sound of pop music working out how to use the recent past to move slowly but surely again into the future.

Regardless of whether you share the Manic's collective outlook on life, and if you're not forty plus you might not, you can only take Rewind The Film for exactly what it is: a band who know where they want to be and are comfortable with that. And, interestingly enough, this is maybe the closest we'll ever get to really knowing them.

It feels like he's taking a step back; his covers album is livelier and more creative than this, perhaps because it didn't feel the need to live up to anything.

Where Hubbert goes musically from here he may not even know himself, but with Breaks & Bone he's managed to pull himself from the quicksand of grief and cement his latest work amongst the top Scottish albums of 2013.

It doesn't necessarily break down the boundaries of rock music, but it sure gives them a good kicking.

R Plus Seven is music that's more programmed than performed. But behind that programming is a very human kind of agency, pushing the right buttons. Amidst an excess of prosumers, Lopatin proves here to be an actual pro.

The result is something stranger and more off-kilter than either of its predecessors, but equally distinctive.

This is a new incarnation of The Julie Ruin, and it's still raising the goosebumps on my arms.

Imitations lacks the visceral punch that Lanegan delivers at his best: it doesn't demand that the listener descend with it in the way that, say, Bubblegum manages to. That's not to say, though, that it's a failure; it's more the case that its emotional palette is a relatively comfortable one.

For all its complexity and dazzling scope, The Blackest Beautiful never loses its ability to channel the seething madness and, most importantly, fun of the band's live show.

With John Wizards, Nzaramba and Withers have arrived.

Mediation Of Ecstatic Energy is undoubtedly Wong's most fully realised, varied and intriguing set of compositions to date.

On its own merits, it's a decent enough record with some interesting tracks on it, even if they sometimes sound like nicely turned B-sides rather than top drawer material.

Belle And Sebastian fans have long ago learned to take the rough with the smooth and the quality control on The Third Eye Centre is all over the shop. The odd flashes of wonder within show they're still not a lost cause though.

With Weird Sister, attentiveness pays off, and rewards with deeper comprehension of what this band are about.

There are plenty of nicely recorded aural treats dotted across 6 Feet Beneath The Moon, but they're swimming in a sea of dull mediocrity.

Here we find more of the same, with Sean's vocals switching from likeable to thoughtful with a hooky, synthy musical backdrop--it's catchy as hell.

This more lithe and economical album in many ways proves that Pond have taken a further step towards genuine maturity, but it does still seem rather thrown together and the result of a scattergun approach to both composition and arrangements.

For a fan it's fascinating stuff, a parallel universe of unfulfilled potential.

Far from being self-proclaimed slack mothers their work ethic and life ethos is to be admired, if not from afar, but from the front row of a sweaty mosh pit as if your own existence depended on it.

[A] challenging but beautiful album.

The Arctic Monkeys have comprehensively slaked off their PG-13 pretensions and gone full-on X-rated.

An intimate collection of fireside confessionals which weave their spell on you with a slow-burning intensity, seducing the listener by stealth.

Theirs is a physically and mentally overwhelming (and exhausting) form of full body sonic experience that's equally akin to the psychedelic techno battery of Jeff Mills and the blissed-out sensations of swimming through MBV's arcs of feedback. With its airless surrounds and restrained feel, however, Factory Floor clearly doesn't sound quite like they do onstage.

Paracosm deserves to be praised and enjoyed now, not in 20 years' time. He's not quite cracked it, but it's a big step in the right direction.

It's a sunny, sweet, excitable record, but it doesn't forget a couple of moments of contrast.

Where acts like Grouper or Lee Noble seem to be deconstructing song altogether, Barnes seems to be engaged in a more subtle exercise, assembling strands of song formats into elliptical constructions with absolute precision.

With its mix of deep voice and sentiment with hooks and loops the'd suit a dancefloor, Me Moan is a uniquely epic album that puts the Double O into croon.

It's a roiling, often tense, but just a little more calm and contemplative NIN, seemingly content to emerge and exist rather than to sweep all before it or punctuate a point.

In taking her sorrow, turning it on its head and finding inspiration in another magical place, she has produced something powerfully, uniquely transcendent: something vast and expansive, intimate and affecting all at once.

Drenge is giddily goofy.

This kaleidoscopic mix emphasises the Black Jazz catalogue's consistently searching brand of music, and both complements and abridges one of jazz's most undersung and thrilling musical footnotes.


Larceny and sharp, immediate hooks permeate everything they do, and so it is with Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Action.

More than a mere souvenir or stopgap, Versions is a sumptuous release that affirms both the increasingly unique and essential nature of Zola Jesus' music and the enduring genius of JG Thirlwell.

It's to Earl's credit that he's managed to make the music he wants to, even if it's more of a rapper's rap record than one of any major crossover appeal.

Originally conceived as a mixtape, Trap Lord rightfully exists as a proper album, with thirteen tracks totalling fifty-one marvelous and misanthropic minutes.

There may be no dramatic leaps in style from No Age, yet there also doesn't seem to be any requirement for them. An Object is the refining of a formula that remains open to play and experiment, without adopting a slash-and-burn policy to all previous outings.

This is body music, sure, but not for crowds of people eager to move--this is music to spend the night in to.

The reissue's bonus material, culled from the original cassettes Darnielle recorded to, fails to outshine the album's original tracks, but does offer a few highlights.

It is an easier, more focused listen than Ekstasis, but there is nothing here to rival that album's 'Marienbad' for sophisticated songwriting.

Though constantly teetering on a knife's edge--to be expected in such mental syncopated mashups--this is wildly colourful and knowingly absurd music. With a little trust from the listener, though, it works.

Listeners willing to put in the hours to engage with Saltland on their level will find reams to love about their debut , a record so carefully considered that making a song and dance about it all feels a little garish.

Despite its overall lighthearted, ebullient mood, E.m.m.a's music is almost unsettlingly weird at times, and laugh-out-loud bizarre at others.

This is some of the raddest music you’re likely to hear this year. Rad in its overall excellentness and radical as to its forward-thinking nature, sounding so even today, though recorded at the height of Ceausescu’s suppression and censorship.

Pinkunoizu take synth pop, psych folk, surf rock, krautrock and other marginal forms of pop and rock from the last 50 years, and use them for the basis of extremely enjoyable excursions in deep listening.

Overseen by Sune Rose Wagner of The Raveonettes, all the songs are so instant that it makes the album something of an onslaught on the senses - multiple listens will be needed for clear favourites to reveal themselves in a slow strip tease.

The High Frontier is a vibrant and thoughtful album that avoids the trap of naff that this genre can so easily fall into. If I have one gripe, it’s that it sometimes sounds too much like music made 200 light years out from Earth on a journey without any specific destination, neither capturing the thrill of first ignition or the discovery of exotic new worlds.

The results are simply amazing, Ghil effectively standing as the premier noise album of 2013.

Abandon is quite short for a full-length album, but its physicality and intensity leaves the listener exhausted in a way that doesn't require further expansion.

He's in playful mood and the tunes certainly don't suffer as a result.

On the whole Body Music's tracks feel like little more than fairly unimaginative collage pieces: fifteen years of pop trends, compressed into one very indistinct style.

Beyond Bugbears' supplementary nature, it's a coherent collection of songs, a window to a period closer in time and temperament to our own than we imagine.

It's not that Thicke can't carry a tune. It's that he thinks that having songs that smoulder with sex appeal a la Luther Vandross, Boyz II Men or Barry White means that you have to degrade woman and boast about how your penis is bigger than the next fella's.

II mostly succeeds on its own terms, rather than as a refined package of each act's moodier moments, precisely because it does keep you guessing.

[This is an] excellent, playful and moving album as a whole: the closer you examine Glynnaestra, the deeper and stranger the rabbit hole goes.

Slave Vows, then, is a masterpiece, its black-hearted explosions and sordid vibes coming from a darker place than most of those pantomiming their way through rock & roll. But while there’s bleakness here, there’s also that sulphurous sound of resistance, of high drama at very real stakes.

With The Savage Heart, The Jim Jones Revue display a deft ability to move things forward whilst retaining firmly in place all the components that made them such a seductive proposition in the first place.

The fact that BE is patchy, and solid rather than surprising in its best spots, you have to put down to a failure of nerve or drive. It's not Different Gear, Still Shit, but it is nowhere near as exciting as it might have been.

Still Smiling is a playful, intelligent album, a series of personal and observational sketches of a disquieting world.

Lustmord's music takes its time, but it's hard not to get absorbed into its shadowy netherworld, even if all meaning and sense in there stay resolutely out of focus.

What makes The Moths Are Real such a well, lovely listen is just how unforced this all is--not out of twee naivety, but by a brilliant sense that these songs are their own worlds, telling their own stories, with a bit of a twist.

Slow Focus is the album Fuck Buttons were born to make.

For anyone who has enjoyed the great guitar music coming out of Mali in recent years Albala is essential listening.

It's quite brilliant and perfectly flawed: the sort of album you don't mind getting run over whilst listening to.

Clocking in at over 75 minutes, The Inheritors is an exhausting, complex and disorientating listen, but one that will stay with you.

The Argument may not be the best place for novices to acquaint themselves with the work of Grant Hart but for long-term observers it proves to be a welcome return from a singular if erratic talent.

The Big Dream is vaguely interesting, but not very interesting.

There's little in the way of light and shade--certainly nowhere to relax--and that's probably the intention, but as a piece of heavy music--in a music industry where it would be very easy for Anselmo to play it a little safe--it's as daring and as experimental an album as you're likely to hear all year.

They show us what pop music can do.

Sticky Wickets dispels any thoughts or concerns that this is merely a novelty act and while not as instant as their debut, repeated listens definitely provide equal rewards.

What we have here is prog-folk of the highest order.

While With Love is an ambitious and entertainingly composed undertaking, offering glimpses into Zomby’s varied inspirations, it can still be frustratingly piecemeal and somewhat self-indulgent.

Magna Carta offers only a few vivid images but even fewer full songs. The album's relentless spewing of wealth will be enough to repel some listeners, but that's not exactly the problem here, it's that his brags are often unimaginative and humourless.

There are moments when Clarietta breaks from being the wallflower at the indie disco, and lets fly with a few carefree windmills.

Thomas White sings, oddly enough, too well, lacking the fragility of Nick Drake, the androgyny of Stuart Murdoch, not to mention Jim Morrison's virility.... Idiots! is an excellent journey through the more poppy instincts of Electric Soft Parade.

These are sad songs, sure; desperately sad, sometimes. But while the connections they depict may be long-severed, that they once existed at all is enough to grace this assured, affecting collection some hope, and an unlikely warmth that seeps in around its blunt, hard edges.

Ultimately this is by far the most unusual and spiritually minded thing McBean has yet put his name to, and his feet being firmly planted on earth allow the more astral meanderings of Wasif more power through restraint.

This is an extremely strong, varied follow-up from an artist who is yet to fulfil his potential.

It's more that Kveikur feels more like an unfinished trip (through said glaciers, perhaps), where the destination is in sight, but seen only from the halfway point.

A ghostly and passionate debut.

It's as intoxicating a listen as anything we've heard from the duo to date, drawing its power from the combination of Blunt's ideas, fluid and often semi-literate musicality, and world-weary persona.

The tracks crackle and shimmer with an abandon not heard since their debut.

By compartmentalising Emika as it does, DVA leaves a nagging sense that she's still selling herself a little short.

Fans of the characteristic Kylesa stomp will find enough of it remaining in the cracks to keep them entertained, but the originality and kinetic force of their vision has become a splutter.

The last time West used the name Jerome in a rhyme (MBDTF’s 'Gorgeous'), it was a reference to racially disproportionate sentencing practices in drug cases. It’s that sort of doublespeak that makes Yeezus the zenith of West’s entire career.

The music Melt Yourself Down make on this eight song, 36-minute debut album is insanely full of energy and ideas, a tumultuous barrage of snaky, infectious hooks and punishingly addictive grooves.

Until In Excess, Imperceptible UFO has lofty ambitions of space on one hand, and a great deal of heart and soul to keep it simultaneously grounded on the other.

It's Up To Emma is as blatant an intimate reckoning with betrayal, anger and pain as it gets and yet it's Scout Niblett's most sonorous, most beautiful album to date.

Ignoring the pair of low-key, forgettable tracks that close the album, Howlin is a cracking summer album.... but whether the album has a shelf life beyond that remains to be seen.

This is all instrumental, and as in Billy Idol's haunting 'Eyes Without A Face' these are songs that say so much without ever saying a thing, piercing windows into the soul.

Together with Duke Garwood, on Black Pudding he's created something rich and delicious.

A rich, complex album that, similarly, rewards both the grand overview and close attention, and offers up fresh details, insights and emotions with each listen.

This debut is possessed, for good or ill, of the sort of radio-licking, high-glycemic-index polish (courtesy of Arctic Monkeys and Adele knobsman Jim Abbiss) that will instantly raise the hackles of those who still care about appearing to be underground or whatever. It glistens. But crucially, that light is dancing with fleeting magic off the bones of some bewitching tunes.

Acid Rap is by no means without its kinks--'Favourite Song' and 'NaNa' make for a definite lull to these ears--but the heady Chicago cocktail served up on the tape's other 11 songs paints a splat of vivid colour over the city's newspaper headlines.

The only thing Settle succeeds at is repurposing generic late 90s funky house into a sound that people seem to have been brainwashed into thinking is new and exciting.

This is isn't album to fall in love with at first sight or listen; indeed, this requires a form of courtship between listener and album as the former, over time, opens up its many dense layers to first entice and then slowly seduce the latter into a lasting and meaningful relationship.

Excuse My French so blatantly plunders rap radio's past and present that once one stops expecting anything original there's little left to do than mentally catalog the references. Yet while French Montana isn't doing anything new, he's also not doing anything wrong.

Schott's work here takes you to all sorts of places while all the while keeping your focus firmly hooked on the music, this beautiful music, at hand.