There is still a lightness of touch to Who Do You Love; however dense the writing gets, no matter how ludicrous and far-reaching in scope, it has enough of a knowing sense of its own bombast to prevent it from becoming po-faced.

Sic Alps, a taut and absorbing listen, appears to have a mission to take conventional beauty and make it something more interesting by fraying its corners and smearing it with a little dirt. There is nothing Sic Alps could have done to create a better, more delicious sweet and sour record.

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

Convenanza regularly dips into a bag of tried and tested moves that are little more than default settings: dubby basslines, plenty of space, echoes, jazzy trumpets that sound like deflating balloons and so on.

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.

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

Solitude and/or headphones are the key to The Predicting Machine, another unflashily fine opus from a fellow who's almost cursed, in terms of the praise he gets, by being too reliable.

It's not that the depth isn't there, it's just that the experience is multidimensional enough to bring forth a flatness; a sense of unity which discards dimensions.

Sadly Arabia Mountain's residual nastiness and speed is pretty much gone, replaced by slow tempos and weird deviations. It's experiments with synths and disco beats that cause some of the record's truly worst moments.

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.

With its slow-disco hi-hat and splashy snares, 'Ma bien aimée bye bye' sets a sedate groove that the rest of the album never quite picks up. There's no irresistible '80s soul-funk like 'Girlfriend', nor a sprightly dance-routine-friendly hit like 'Tilted'. Instead, the pace is usually and resolutely stately.

It doesn't always work, but that's what makes Grapefruit live up to its name--the epitome of an acquired taste; one that, when hooked on the intricacies and possibilities of its flavour, opens up so much potential for the future.

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.

Recorded in Berlin, the eight tracks here pay easy homage to their European forebears, but are unmistakably British in their overall sound and feel, nodding melodically to the traditional folk music of these isles, and existing at a slower pace, on a smaller scale, than the cross-continental constructions of Kraftwerk and company.

Profound Mysteries III is decidedly weirder and slower, allowing the band to explore the leftfield theatrics and grittiness intrinsic to the best side of their sound. Yet there are plenty of moments where bombastic pomp overshadows this restraint. ... All in all, a mixed bag.

Feel The Sound, their first album since 2007, boasts the kind of incremental shifts in emphasis that no one but fans will savour.

Barrow doesn't go through the motions – and >> is definitely not the sound of a band in decline.

Death Becomes Her is an album from an artist who in now beginning to realise her possibilities, not just as a producer but as a performer, and as such she wants to get everything out there, squeezing every last idea into the album. And sometimes her take on pop music might be a little too abrasive to reach the playlists of many a commercial pop station… for now.

It's not exactly pushing these MCs towards a new rap revolution, tapping the past and present but skipping predicting tomorrow, but it's consistently engaging without overpowering the stars of the show.

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

f(x) is a record, sure, released on vinyl, digital and compact disc, but it's also a mantra, an inspiration, a bold and pure statement.

Ultimately, this is a rather gorgeous and engrossing collection, that borrows stealthily from a rich history of sound effect and soundtrack to build a tender poem to the night time. It’s all big plate reverbs and shuffling drums.

Chapter 3… is a record that has their trademark sense of restless grandeur and tough tunefulness.

Revelations very much sets the benchmark by which their subsequent work will be judged.

There are some enjoyable tunes on here that might appeal to the curious who lost track of Pollard and GBV over the years. But the numerous less riveting, just-a-bit-too derivative, run of the mill rock songs will leave even newcomers with the feeling that they've heard it all before.

Butler shows that there is strength in numbers and in being able to amplify the skills of fellow collaborators.

Smoke Fairies is full of great songs and shimmers with little details--a bit of spooky guitar here, an unexpected vocal swoon there.

Going, Going... is a little overlong, but it’s also bursting with some tremendous songs and a vitality that belies over 30 years in the game.

Savoy Motel’s eponymously titled debut has a lot going for it, full of interesting ideas, some of which come to fruition and some that could do with some development still. The next one might just be great.

It is enlightening, wry and devastating, but most of all, it's life-affirming.

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.

A mélange of harum scarum garage-psych, unabashed homage and carefully-crafted pop reprieve, it finds Black Lips at their most daring, exploratory and downright vital.

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

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.

In musical terms, this is arguably more robust and structured than any of the previous Vatican Shadow releases, with a well-defined narrative arc from beginning to end.

There are flourishes that hint the singer is still capable of reaching those heights in pop that few ever reach, moments when she still sounds like she’s actually having a good time recording the songs. Unfortunately, these moments are all too fleeting. When Hurts 2B Human works, its great. It reminds you why Pink is such a big star. When it doesn’t, it hurts.

Ozanne's brand of tentative indiestep is a new form of music in a landscape of few, and a still-evolving artform. And The Keychain Selection deserves special treatment because, in its field, it's somewhat of a zenith.

While the album is often indulgent, this isn't necessarily a downfall.

North London girl gang Girl Ray’s surprisingly pop-minded second album has more in common with the bard’s saucy woodland comedy than at first you might suspect: quips, troublesome romances, and pleasing rhymes abound against the backdrop of a hazy LA summer.

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.

It's ultimately a solid enough album, but one that's difficult to love.

It’s not bad, sometimes it’s even very good, but it ought to feel much more significant than this.

The sensation of Winterval's astral travel may be a familiar one for fans of Willis, but that feeling of being propelled there by a fellow living being, rather than the tools at his disposal, means it's one that's easy to embrace.

This album, for all of its sharp musicianship and the ever-brilliant play-off between vocalists Greg Barnett and Tom May, just doesn't capture the gravity of its predecessor.

In reconstructing their music to match the grand scale of their ambition, they've mapped out a whole new territory to explore, and Tape Hiss indicates it's going to be a hell of a ride.

Too strident to be remotely ambient, and too thoroughly liquid to be pure post punk, Sleepless is the kind of album you simply fall for, in a way that you embrace something that sounds familiar but almost aggressively fresh and vibrant; and like seductive but unnerving classics by Pink Floyd, PiL, Roedelius, Riley or Eno, it wraps you in fur but never quite allows you to relax.

Jassbusters is the first release where Mockasin is accompanied by a band--and it’s a revelation. His usual exaggeratedly washy, reverby sound is anchored and evolves into something fuller, groovier, twangier. ... Jassbusters deserves a big fat red marker pen A.

Throughout Fabriclive 100, Kode9 and Burial piece together their choices with little care for linearity or the kind of journey-led approach many might expect from a mix CD. Ambient interludes--many of them carrying Burial’s signature sound palette--weave in and out throughout the mix, perhaps bridging the gaps between the respective artists’ selections.

Ceremony's misanthropy has never sounded more genuinely punk.

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.

This new collaboration is a wonderful demonstration and crystallization of the best aspects of [Burger and Voigt's] combined canons.

With clicks, thumps and such acoustic subtleties, Vienna Blue unfolds like a rapid sequence of silver-screen freeze-frames: each too brief to comprehend fully, but collectively long enough to spark whole worlds of fantastic imaginations.

Despite the variety of genres and diversity of contributions, Thyrsis of Etna has a distinct sonic flavour. There is attention to balance. Each track has a cocoon-like sound that soothes and sedates a listener. ... Regardless of the names and history, the music has enough to keep one intrigued – or at least entertained.

Where 2008’s Rubbed Out and 2014’s Await Barbarians saw him reconfiguring Hot Chip’s understated synth-soul with impressive results, Beautiful Thing bears the outline of transition rather than bold progress.

A superb record--sharp and absolutely dangerous.

This is a smart record whose textures become more powerful with each successive play.

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.

Whales And Leeches ultimately fails to capitalise upon or recapture the spirit of their previous releases.

Recorded on an eight-track in her flat, Colt steadily emerges as a feature-length celebration of what solitude can yield when approached with creative ablution in mind and the right amount of inspiration at one’s disposal. Woods sounds at home in her seclusion and strikes a chimeric midpoint between electronic and acoustic worlds.

While it may not be the most musically adventurous or frightening albums you'll hear this year, when it comes to writing memorable, mature songs full of devilishly addictive hooks without trying to relive the past, The Pale Emperor breathes new life into Marilyn Manson's previously ailing music career.

There’s a passionate, earnest vibe that spills out to fill any cracks in quality, a window into Lavelle’s soul that somehow opens wider whenever someone else takes the microphone.

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.

Like Untitled, Excerpts is slow-paced (for the most part), grainy and sombre, with crumbling synth textures clustered around skeletal rhythmic shuffles and most human interjections rendered opaque, like ghostly shades mewling in the dark.

I does follow a certain formula, but the band’s execution of it is inch perfect. All of Föllakzoid’s music swells and convulses with desert spectres and spirits, it’s music that occupies a world wherein the horizon can never fully be focused on, and all is far from how it seems.

Tthe album plays out like a mood swing of rage, despair, and an ennui that threatens to consume. It’s in that ebb and flow that Sightless Pit as a trio have found their balance. There is space for softness and melancholy. The organic is allowed to creep amongst the distorted or the electronic. Noise is only meant as a temporary shock to the system, not as a punishment to be endured.

He’s come up with ten numbers that linger plenty enough for earwormery to set in.

Bossalinis & Fooliyones is, at worst, an amiable enough diversion, at best it's very entertaining.

Ultra is, at first, quite hard to get your head around. There’s a lot to take in over its 50+ minutes, not so much in the With Love sense of sheer musical volume but more in the new ideas and stylistic left turns that find their home on the album. Leave it to sink in, though, and Ultra works fantastically as an album experience, with sequencing that sees the level of intensity wax and wane as emotions freeze and thaw.

If you've grown tired of the retro-metal sound of recent years, The Night Creeper is a good place to re-engage. Uncle Acid might not be sonic visionaries, but they're masters of their craft.

This is their pointed after-hours comedown LP, it's not enough of a disclaimer to save what amounts to an occasionally flourishing, but largely frustrating and tedious record.

The Classic is a flawed piece of work, no doubt; overly cluttered and in sore need of reining in at times, it suffers for the hubris of its title. But when Wasser hits the sweet spot, as she does on 'Ask Me', 'Get Direct' and its ebullient centrepiece, she hits it with conviction.

At its best it is an almost physical experience. The two fundamental components (swelling synths and explosive rhythms) in the first case exemplify heart and soul and in the latter explode in every direction at once – the best tracks do both simultaneously.

With their uncanny knack of still sounding like very few other bands before or since their early stirrings, faith in letting the "moment" loose has once more revealed Levi, Pell and Khan to be a strange and sorcerous triptych unto themselves.



All in all, though, a sort of affectlessness emerges here as one songs blend all too smoothly since, not unlike an automated playlist, the whole becomes less than the sum of its parts.

On the bright side, at least it isn't as bad as Yuck.

Köhncke walks the thin line between pop and kitsch and remains focussed throughout Justus Köhncke & The Wonderful Frequency Band, which is his finest yet, and one of the best of 2013. Fernweh techno of the highest order.

This isn't an album; it's a series of OCD thoughts thrown together in passing, the only sense of cohesion coming during a rare chance for bassist Chris Wolstenholme to take centre stage on vocals.

The Lexicon Of Love has a brand new chapter. Read it and weep like a river, but then smile, because tears are not enough. The future that got away has got it going on again.

It's only at this point, ["Incredible Exhausted Bunny Ears"]... that Transistor Rhythm actually feels vital, resulting in in a luscious closing suite to an otherwise arid record.

Rather than simply throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks, together, the pair throw a lot, all while investing time and a marked sense of freedom to what each track could eventually become.

It’s a mixed affair, with moments of excellence interspersed with filler over a sprawling twenty-two tracks. The production is a strongpoint on FlySiifu’s, with fourteen different producers making a contribution across the project. Most of the beats are dreamy and relaxed, almost merging into one another such that the album frequently feels like one long, continuous melody.

The very best moments of World Peace... allow a rare slip of a perpetually teenage mask. It's the revenge of Morrissey the artist over Morrissey the cartoon character, and he's caught me completely off guard, the bastard.

Chain & The Gang are a band riven with appetites and desires--and, boy, do they let you know that--but on this record they vaunt a particular kind of self-discipline, and choices made with great care. Austerity can be hot.

Other than 'Been Away Too Long' there are no obvious singles here. Rather, each track takes on a propulsive and seductive weight far greater than the sum of its parts when listened to in succession.

It remains obvious that Wire's sense of wry intelligence and drama remain intact.

After a while, such frantic energy can get exhausting, and fans of Room(s) or Vapor City might feel bewildered by the whole thing, but throughout the morass, Stewart’s keen ear for rhythm and melody shine through, and his exploration of pop and r’n’b finds more common ground with his own aesthetic that might have been expected.

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.

Once you get past the gimmicks, be they dolphins, falsetto vocals or Japanese girls whispering "we love you Connan", you'll find genuine talent and quality informing the album's blissed out psychedelia. Caramel is a sugary-sweet treat to savour.

As musical accompaniment to Turnbull's visual imagery and bronze icons, 23 Skidoo's soundtrack juxtaposes perfectly in sparking off coloured patinas and twisted moulds to their mutual benefit.

It is a record that inverts and internalises its inspirations rather than externalising and projecting them. It's delicious. Try it.

This feels, in many ways, more like a compilation than a coherent album: a selection of tracks created in tribute to the late artist, rather than a cogent piece of art crafted by her exacting hand. It isn’t so much that this tries and fails to replicate what SOPHIE did best – or, more accurately, what only SOPHIE did – but more that it steers too far away from that, likely (and with good reason) to avoid criticism on that front.

Temples then. A bit retro--check. Noel Gallagher and Johnny Marr likes them--check. Singer has amazing hair--check. A debut album chock full of references to their sources, but elegantly reformed and futureproofed--check.

Some listeners are bound to find this repetitive too, and nowhere near different enough from his previous work. Yet To Syria, With Love is also Souleyman’s heaviest and hardest record since Leh Jani back in 2011.

Robyn Hitchcock's latest release, The Man Upstairs, stands amongst his all-time best albums. His finest work in years, the opening three songs are stunning, mesmerising even, in their intimate beauty.

In its loose instrumentation and sometimes confused layers (and some questionable lyrics) it does sound noticeably like a side-project from start to finish, and that it was written and recorded in a hurry. There is magic in that of course, but you do feel that is not the way to coax out Finn's A-grade material.

These are still audio waters containing complex depths worth diving into, revisiting, pondering over, dwelling over, dwelling in.

Despite that introductory flash, Newman and Spigel are equal partners in Immersion, and there's no way of telling where one's contributions begin and the other's end. The instruments themselves are also equal collaborators.

While there are undoubtedly a number of interesting tracks here, it is debatable how well they work together. With judicious editing U & I could have made a truly killer E.P