As great as these tracks are though, it's difficult to shake the feeling that they just aren't really Daft Punk.

A musical punch-up from start to finish, Goldblade choose their targets well as one blow is delivered after another. You might want to roll up your sleeves and get stuck in.

The National have arguably never struck that balance [between tenderness, optimism, humour and melodrama] quite as sweetly or persuasively as they do on Trouble Will Find Me, a layered, resoundingly human work that extends their winning streak without so much as breaking a sweat.

Wolf Eyes were never one-dimensional, but they're adding an increasing number of strings to their duct-taped noise bow and more moods, techniques, textures and subtleties to their bile-splattered palette.

It's impressively focussed and musically adventurous, stirring elements of goth, post-punk, neo-folk and avant-noise into some perplexing shapes.

Whatever tack they take Boo’s tracks are solid, heavyweight constructions that work as well as home listening as they would in a club

When it's good it's great, and it's never bad; Gruff Rhys' lyrics are mostly thoughtful and tastefully poetic throughout, but Feltrinelli's complex tale perhaps needed to be fleshed out further, with more twists and turns and the peaks more evenly placed.

As vital as the air that you breathe, you need this album in your life.

Clocking in at 35 minutes it's a breezy listen, but one that stays with you. The musicianship is excellent, the production spot on and, despite its restless nature, the album hangs together nicely.

Modern Vampires quite often touches brilliance, and does so without audibly straining for 'maturity' or pushing hard to be some po-faced Great American Album.

The result is no sucker punch, but a knockout blow.

Bright Sunny South is Amidon's sixth solo effort and like previous releases, the key to the album's potency lies in how the Brattleboro, Vermont, native creates emotional dichotomies and then bridges the expansive gulfs in between.

One of the first things that jumps out at the listener, and it's something which persists throughout, is the disconnectedness between Smith and Elena Poulou in the control room, arsing about with daft voices and keyboard squiggles respectively, and the big lads at the back.

More Light stands as one of Primal Scream's finest, most honest records, even if the ravens remain soundly roosting within the Tower's walls.

With a discipline perhaps learnt from his extensive soundtrack work, Harvey has trimmed away the fat, so that every rhythmic or melodic touch serves a purpose.

Sequentially, Some Say I makes its six-of-11 central meditation on separation perfectly telegraphed.

Silence Yourself is the manifestation of a formidable spirit, a sense that everything they do is done with great purity of intent, and a brilliant sex, life and death album of a kind rarely seen these days.

Throughout Fain--the band's second album--folk melodies meet visceral fuzz-rock, never sounding quite like anyone else specifically, but a unique blend that never coalesced at the time.

It remains quite literally sublime--i.e. it creates a stirring sense of awe and fear in the listener, by creating an abstract representation of a facet of nature that we are right to be humbled by and terrified of: giant oceanic waves.

Most of the album sounds like a kaleidoscope of every “indie” rock archetype, to the point that, whilst it's never debatable that Monomania is a Deerhunter record, you still find yourself thinking of Silversun Pickups, The Black Keys, The Flaming Lips or Arcade Fire, not necessarily with positive comparisons in mind.

It's clear that this is easily Har Mar's best album. Sure, the lyrics are still hamfisted, but they're not as bad as they were in the past.

Blake may have dispensed with some of the more experimental and emotionally obtuse trappings of his debut album on Overgrown in an attempt to engage more directly with a wider audience, but his intentions are all but drowned out by a thick glass porthole being hammered on feverishly by a dozen drowning onlookers.

The album--an immaculately drawn piece of jazz-inflected pop--is loaded with such originality that Mvula's carved out a niche of her own in 2013's musical landscape.

It ain't no Raw Power. But once you get your head around the fact that it rightfully doesn't even attempt to imitate its antecedent, and really is more a belated sequel to Pop and Williamson's 1977 album Kill City, then this is, in places, a pretty damn good rock & roll record.

Outsider soul from a true original.

Phoenix gets the motions nearly right on Bankrupt, but that crucial snap simply isn’t there.

Gonzalez's intricate, mellifluous guitar playing is not front and center, but committed followers of this side of his artistry will certainly be satisfied.

The songs often sway back and forth; they are too structured and busy to be called ambient, but the music is often freeform, drifting in and out of its own meter.

All shot through with the psychedelic heft of Neil Young & Crazy Horse, this is not a flash in the pan, a fumble in the dark or an album which loses its way but a cosmic paean to perfectionism that creates order out of the most beautiful chaos.

Mosquito may conjure a similar frenzy to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' previous three albums, but it paints a disjointed picture of the band's turbulent history, on an already messy canvass

Ghost On Ghost might not be definitive--Beam gives off the impression that a genuine modern classic is not yet beyond him, something a tightening of focus might help him achieve--but this is big, beautiful music all the same. That he makes it sound so effortless is all the more impressive.

Although Blood Lust remains their crowning achievement to date, Mind Control's highlights shine just as true.

Exemplifying the work of Joe Boyd (and of Gabrielle Drake, who has been rigorously loyal to her brother's legacy) it's a fascinating and charming example of creative curatorship.

The resulting album, unsurprisingly enough, contains their most texturally diverse work to date.

There remains a re-assurance in these grooves that here is a band that knows what is does best and is perfectly happy to play to its strengths.

The lack of immediacy isn't Vile's biggest problem here: it might seem trivial, but Wakin On A Pretty Daze is his first release that doesn't improve upon his last.

You Are Eternity is not po-faced, despite its thematic and sonic weight, it's concise and does the job with a glint.

The past, present and future collide in a sublime celebration of technology, history and humanity, in all its flawed and triumphant glory, filtered through one man's attempts to understand and explain his small but significant place in the interconnected, universal whole.

Each track, although dressed in punk scuzz, is whip-smart and perfectly framed

Wolf is Tyler's album through and through, a mostly diverting document of juvenile delinquency that defines him better than any prior musical effort.

An album where just enough business-as-usual is sacrificed for genuine growth.

It's a record that doesn't undermine their body of work, but nor does it stand out as a career-defining highlight.

Seabed never really gets out of first gear. The general vibe given off is that of a teenager moping about in his bedroom, albeit one with the skills to emote through slick, well-produced pop music.

On record, it's certainly a jolt, and not just a pile of drum-driven aural overload, but something does get lost in the process.

A mature record, in the best possible sense, Machineries of Joy reins in the whimsicality and tendency towards wackiness, while still retaining a smart sense of humour alongside the philosophical pondering and strident rock shapes.

The constant zipping and zapping of its final five tracks almost cause the album to become bottom heavy, but thankfully the just-right 'So Cold' and the lovely 'Don't You Love Me' keep it from going completely overboard.

Some of Collins' finest work can be found here.

Nobody could question the fact that these guys mean it with every fibre of their being, and Meir is music to make Norway proud; a new majestic fanfare to welcome hog-riding warriors into Valhalla.

Crime & The City Solution's sixth studio album is as much an elegy to the American Dream that's turned into a global nightmare as it is a damn fine rock & roll album.

Nothing on Comedown Machine really sounds natural either; it comes across awkward, hollow, like dead-chemistry trying listlessly to spark.

So in short Welcome to Mikrosector 50 is rather excellent, with the only real dud on the album being the slightly tedious 70s porno-funk of 'Quadraskank Interlude'.

The question of whether BRAIDS will return or not melts away in this deeply personal insight into Blue Hawaii's emotional and physical connections with one another.

Soaring and swooping in all the right places, there's no denying the gorgeous ethereal shimmer and dizzying demonstrative pull of these songs.

Despite the songs' far-off beginnings, Change Becomes Us is like an aggressive, steroid-pumped continuation of the band's excellent 2011 album Red Barked Tree, a testament to the band's consistent faithfulness to the key signatures of ice-sheet psychedelia and jackhammer punk.

Retro styling contextualises Love and Devotion and, crucially, the album's story is delivered with an emotional heft that many current producers aspiring to hypermodernity would do well to note.

If Mason’s last album Boys Outside was a window on his struggles with mental ill-health, Monkey Minds moves from micro to macro as he harnesses his strong sense of social justice, while continuing to hone the crisp electronics that so perfectly soundtrack his ghostly, exhortatory vocals.

The Men may not be here to change rock history but at the very least they deserve serious recognition for the fact that they keep doing exactly what they want, and that it continues to be as honest and as shamelessly exhilarating as the best rock music always should be.

Unfortunately, with an appropriately filmic, best-part's-in-the-trailer irony, it seems like Timberlake gave away too much by making 'Suit & Tie' the first glimpse of the record. From hereon in, it's a fairly dull affair.

They've arrived at a romantic, odd, ambitious pop record that eschews musical theatricality for punchy, 40-something's take on the complexity of love from the view--and this is why it works--of one who is still, at heart, an incurable and incorrigible teenage romantic

Pearl Mystic is the best British psychedelic album since the 1990s; maybe more than that.

John Grant's songs can be characterised by extreme restlessness and the state of suffering mental and physical discomfort within one's being. The irony and often confronting honesty he brings to these problems ensure Pale Green Ghosts is extremely engaging and often engrossing. But Queen of Denmark it is not.

Far more than a collection of club tracks, it's an elegant, fully realised narrative.

Evidence is an impressive addition to their existing body of work.

So what you have is an album that's very recognisably Ed; the Steve Gullick photography, the tipsy melancholy and romance, the ballads... but without the need for too many frills it sounds complete, nine gorgeous songs that sit beautifully together.

Prurient's Through The Window, a three-cut techno tour-de-force released this month on the Blackest Ever Black imprint, is at once limiting and liberating.

There is humour--albeit dark--throughout this precious, timeless album.

With the soundtrack to Les Revenants, they have created a work of aural tension; a masterclass in how implied threat is far more effective than a million scary monsters.

Fans certainly won't be bowled over by the innovation on offer, but as a refinement of their sound it is the ne plus ultra Autechre album, honed and executed to perfection with only a few drifty moments that suggest it could have been cut down to a single LP.

It's not a perfect record, but then you wouldn't want it to be--the charm is the energy and room to grow here.

So more than half the album is fantastic, and the rest is very, very strong.

What Long Island captures is the warm sound of the room in full flow--it's a live album, really, recorded in a studio but improvised on the spot.

Not that The Messenger solely ransacks the past, though: conversely, it's the clunkier, more ham-fisted retro fodder that constitute the main misfires, especially lyrically.... But when he pushes things forward, everything begins to glitter.

Iceage's You're Nothing is one of the most exciting, open-minded pop punk (not THAT sort) albums I've heard in years.

It's the first great guitar album of the year--stimulating, idiosyncratic, occasionally challenging, but most importantly, jam-packed full of proper tunes.

Even without the cushy padding of Welcome to: Our House's clutch of Alex da Kid, AraabMuzik, and Hit-Boy beats, No Love Lost predictably sounds an awful lot like everything else on the radio.

As ever with Yorke's work, a strong desire not to get stuck in a rut results in a few experiments that don't quite pay off, but largely, AMOK is a slender, admirable record well worth investigating.

Dutch Tvashar Plumes is dominated by exquisitely expressive forms of abstract techno.

Intermittently enjoyable, Wonderful, Glorious is unmistakably the work of Eels but unlike previous and successful meditations, their tenth album frequently feels like well-honed schtick rather than a worthwhile insight.

Out Of Touch represents a steady evolution of a band, and while you sense they've still not made a truly great album, the Uncles pack a sturdy punch on their most focused album yet.

A mixed bag then but one that will doubtless prove that one person's high will be another one's low.

It's ambitious, personal, unusual and, crucially, touched with brilliance.

Cave is always the first to give fulsome credit to his band, and they aim true here in the most explorative, coherent and well-realised Bad Seeds album in years.

Anything In Return feels again like the work of an artist still exploring his sound and yet to pin it down to something concrete.

From the glissandos and vertigo of 'Milk & Black Spiders' to the jounce and yawn of 'Providence', in every note and noteless space you can feel it: the physical unburdening, the personal reckoning, the fatigue and reprieve of letting go.

It strikes a perfect balance between the emotional rack-drawing that's made them beloved to many an indie misanthrope and the warmth and hope that makes them better than mere scab-pickers, just as it offsets their talent for unashamed anthems with dark and gnarly little details. It's a beautifully layered construction.

These compositions are haunting because Grouper gives them space to breathe.

What all the songs on News From Nowhere have in common is a baffling, mystical elegance, both independently and, to an even greater extent, within the flow of the record.

Centralia is an album of surprising, subtle depths, a spacious, psychedelic landscape where the traditional meets the modern in a dreamlike combination of familiarity and strangeness.

One play is enough to confirm that defining moments refuse to peak through the murk.

The Flower Lane is far from a failed endeavour, but something special has been lost in the graduation from bedroom to studio.

Voivod have a hardcore following and for most, this much anticipated album will be received with adoration. For the rest of us, it's to be hoped that with relatively new bandmate in Mongrain, this is a transient moment before they head off to fight new battles.

Frightening though some of these passages are, the effect is not all hard going. The power of space is writ large everywhere on Burnt Up On Re-Entry, the giddy weight of infinity, the feeling of soaring transcendent journey and ego death--it's all rather exhilarating stuff, especially on a cold January evening.

Ultimately it's the breaking of a cycle that leads to change and, on this record of both progression and recollection, Esben And The Witch suggest that they haven't yet quite achieved that.

A Wonder Working Stone is the work of a songwriter at the top of his game; inspired by tradition but equally inspired to break from it, fired by collaboration and freed to follow his muse wherever it may soar, like the ptarmigans that spread their wings through several of these songs.

At the moment, the diversity on display here feels like something to be treasured rather than wished into oblivion.

There's certainly scant magic here.

Lady From Shanghai is another excellent addition to the Pere Ubu discography, the sound of a band using comparatively limited means to explore a deceptively broad spectrum of sound, confusing the boundaries between pop and the avant-garde.

Coming Out Of The Fog is an album of light and shade and one that benefits more from what's not in it than is.