This is pop music, pure and simple: smarter, stranger than your average fare, no doubt, but don't confuse its oddness for inscrutable obtuseness.

Gossamer has enough going on musically to shift the focus away from the occasionally mawkish lyrics.

One of Strut's best compilations to date.

As ever with compilations of almost-lost treasures such as this, it is the certain out of time quality that is its greatest attribute.

Lyrically The House That Jack Built is a masterpiece.

Channel Orange is a staggering step upwards from Nostalgia.

R.A.P. Music is an album that takes the energy of hip hop's rebellious instincts as its heart and reminds us of their importance.

On Confess his tired, joyless music and moribund, hackneyed and hankey lyricism suggests a man whose concept of romanticism would go nicely with a Nairn cracker and dab of quince jelly.

If Mostly No lacks genuine innovation, the album more than compensates with a radiating glow of veneration.

As an album that can trace its lineage to tripped out rock & roll of The Cramps' classic Psychedelic Jungle, this is a record that will delight the type of antisocial delinquent given to dabbing, dropping and freaking out.

It's a strange album on the whole, though there's no doubting Corgan has his mojo back, and if you can stomach a 45-year-old man still whining on about isolation and stuff then this may well be up your proverbial alley.

Part of the album's cunning is owed to the time allotted for disparate strands to develop and take form.

This is an album that seems to spring from an indoor world of cerebral textures and bedroom experiments, a headphone odyssey for an era in which the rock gig has become a corporate-sponsored burlesque.

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

Blues Control are no longer noisy or childishly rudimentary, at least by most avant-yardsticks. Cho, on piano and keyboards, improvises with a new deftness; Waterhouse claws back a degree of rockism with thudding boogie drums and a guitar choked with the dust of its own basement.

Perhaps there's a danger here and there of Singh and Ayres getting their heads down and too deep in the blissed-out funk ... but really they just want to see what sticks. That's all they've ever tried, and most of it does.

This is not a live album, but an alive album, one of the most visceral, beautiful records you'll hear this year.

Each song has a very different message, although it is the highlife feeling that stays with the listener.

Make no mistake, this record sounds amazing... But in choosing to stick to classic song structures rather than utilise their incredible sound technology to explore the experimental avant-garde, or to make killer dance tracks, A Place To Bury Strangers run the risk of all their songs sounding pretty much the same.

The sense of meticulous balance that dominates 'The Dream' permeates MSOTT.

[On The Cherry Thing] the point in the middle where the two parties meet turns out to be a particularly sweet spot where jazz, punk, soul and even a hint of pop blend together beautifully in a dream come true.

As the title of the soporific, sunbleached skank that is 'LO HI' suggests, 'Lucifer' is more a subdued warm bath of than a plunge into the psyche.

It's clear that this band has focused too much on referencing and too little on songwriting.

Personal, moving, poetic, humorous, and engaging.

Where Bridges felt like extensions of his legendary freeform live set, Reeling Skullways is far tighter in focus and execution.

For all the talk of madness, it would seem more than ever that Sebastien Tellier knows exactly what he's doing.

A pleasant, professional offering that rarely goes anywhere you wouldn't expect it to.

If the first [issue] had sonic charms which seem extemporary, this one is somewhere between the sublunary murk of the earlier bootlegs, the original band-approved TeePee records version of 2003 and a brighter, modern-sounding studio demo, but it's not glaringly distinct.

Three good tracks [songs, "Motion Sickness," "Ends of the Earth," and "Flutes,"] do not an album make - and, unfortunately, this is the sum of the worthwhile moments on In Our Heads. Elsewhere the album is pure drudgery, remarkable only in its dullness.

Alexander Tucker may not make folk music, but he can weave a magic spell.

Valtari is by no means a bad record; it's extremely easy to enjoy. It's even beautiful at times. Unfortunately, it's even easier to forget.

A prayer of a record, despair turned into poetry.

Celebration Rock encapsulates the kind of affirmative, collective experiences that define an entire adolescence.

Everything works beautifully on what's still their most sublime piece.

The overall impression is of a lamp shone directly into the darkened corners of Shackleton's music, casting all its hidden detail in sharp relief.

Once you allow it to sink in, WIXIW becomes a hushed collection of voices.

This record is both symphony for sufferers of that condition and a treasure map to the Orkney Islands, whether walking their beaches, or stopped in a traffic jam on the M25.

The results are nothing short of magnificent, producing a set of tracks whose fizzing surfaces are always disturbed by some new action just beneath, where ridges of static ruffle and tumble over one another, and where harsh regions of higher density sluice violently into the foreground.

Like pretty much all of his previous work, C4C isn't really open for the casual listen. Music as densely layered and as assimilated as this tends to unwrap itself at different times in different situations and with varying results.

Lydon's ever-inspiring love of de-dub postulates continually throughout the album – it's such a perfect return.

The sheer ebullience, the devil-may-care attitude taken in the construction of these songs, makes it an album to treasure.

While nothing quite meets the precedent set by the first track, the album is a bracing adventure in texture.

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.

Words And Music By Saint Etienne is an album that reaffirms all that is glorious and brilliant about pop music.

Their musical vision is one that's so obviously well-honed that they know exactly when to kick the music into overdrive before lulling the listener back into a state of sonic paralysis.

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

This is an album that knows just how toxically repellent it is and it's this self-assured ferocity that makes for such an enjoyable whirlwind of a listen.

More or less everything here sounds anaemic, lacking in body, squashed, diminutive, like it could be pushed over by a strong breeze--or, worse, drowned out by light conversation on the dancefloor.

For the most part, Unpatterns is slightly sinister, stretched out, anxious, fidgety house.

Another eleven baseless mehs that belong nowhere else than on a blog that no one reads.

Bloom is in part brilliant but maddeningly safe and, ultimately, is a decidedly unsatisfying listen.

Da Mind Of Traxman, rarely overly solemn and ever-playful, is still far from a middlebrow defanging.

While in a way this record sums up everything the Cribs are about, it fails to foreground their most exciting aspects.

The reach of these records [Loveless and Isn't Anything] makes bands yet to form sound hopelessly out-of-date.

MMX11 is unexpectedly loaded with similarly bomb-laden gems.

Tonally and generically, the album is not so much a continent as a small country. But it's a beautiful country, warm and vibrant.

In Standing At The Sky's Edge Richard Hawley has forged his most fully realised and heartfelt collection of music to date. This requires your urgent attention.

A Different Ship is another exciting chapter in the story of a band who continue to improve with every release.

Despite the many hugely talented performers involved, Dr Dee is less philosopher's stone, and more curate's egg: a handful of fine songs where Albarn plays to his existing strengths, but mired in a sea of over-reaching folly. And ultimately, both Dee and Albarn deserve better.

Miles away from the poppy happy clappy smiley lovey dovey vibes of Twenty One or epic choruses of Serotonin, Radlands displays a new direction and confidence.

The album is a lovingly crafted ode to Judge Dredd, urban alienation, the cinematic sci-fi masterpieces of the late 70s and early 80s, electronic music of both the past and present, and it all hits with the weight of a cadmium steak tenderizer.

The problem here isn't Dr Luke smothering Marina's idiosyncracies so much as Marina/Electra herself crafting them into something paper-thin and paper-cut annoying.

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

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.

As a whole Pre-Language appears a little unfulfilled--a whole lot of build up, with minimal release

Harmonicraft often strays into pastiche when they attempt to cling on to their past, but comes into its own when it strides confidently into new realms.

A soup of electronic interference, exhausting percussion and smothering bass-cloud. It's stultifying like a bad case of screen fatigue; tangled and sparking - the sound of frazzled, short-fusing nerve ends.

[Chamber of Light] is like an exquisitely constructed mosaic of UK dance music signifiers, perpetually re-shuffled into new configurations and never losing that sense of possibility that lifts this album beyond the realms of nostalgia. LHF's modus operandi may seem anachronistic in 2012, but it's a damn sight fresher than most of the stuff out there right now.

With occasional flashes of their previous excellence, Spine Hits has too many drab moments to make this anything other than their weakest work yet by far.

Each track is executed to perfection as Santi morphs with chameleonic pizzazz.

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.

R.I.P practically begs to be handled, examined, shuffled and rotated in every direction, the better to identify each tiny grain of sand and dirt that's gone into its construction.

It is, by some distance, Krug's best work as Moonface. It's riveted with some glorious, soaring moments and the taut motorik rhythm is a compulsive mesh for the album.

Lissy's insouciant delivery and impressive range, which scales the heavens one minute and fills her boots the next, marks her out as a singer of some considerable talent, and her voice is always engaging and likable.

Black Is Beautiful is a still more refined musical iteration of displaced and replaced citizens: slow sirens and distant voices, as if urgently broadcast in foreign languages over distorted subway intercoms, soundtracked by free jazz and hip-hop, lover's rock and electro, j-pop and dub - themselves diasporic, oppidan genres.

Not only does Sweet Heart Sweet Light hit all patented Spiritualized thematic buttons squarely between the eyes – religion, drugs, sickness and redemption – it is also a record that covers everything with a Wyoming sized scoop of full-fat icky sentiment.

Iradelphic, which has evolved out of Clark's live shows, marks a change and may be a little surprising to longstanding fans of the man – it's less ethereal, more compact and cohesive than the electronic experiments of Clarence Park.

Wonky is Orbital's most pop album; it's supremely, relentlessly, even ruthlessly melodic, and laden with irresistible momentum throughout.

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.

Voices From The Lake is a love letter to slow, concentrated listening.

Boys And Girls is a somewhat predictable trawl through the back catalogues of Creedence Clearwater Revival, Stax Records, Janis Joplin and the recorded output of Muscle Shoals Sound Studios amongst others, but with none of the grit, passion or emotion.

From the rock & roll of 'Freaks and Geeks' to the ska-indebted 'I'll Reach Out My Hand', this is unadulterated glee.

There's strange stuff here even by the none-stranger Black Dice's standards. But again it's more purposeful and propulsive than that appearing on their previous albums.

Here is a group that doesn't seem to know where it fits; it can't decide whether it wants to rack itself freak-folk, or avant-noise, or post-rock, or even neo-classical. But it also understands that, actually, you don't have to choose.

If nothing else, this album is a guitar fetishist's dream, and sounds like it was a joy to make, too.

Throughout Valentina, and especially on 'End Credits', the Wedding Present's new streamlined and sinewy delivery certainly has something of The Fall to it.

Nicki Minaj's second album is pop postmodernity in an advanced state of hollow, banal meaningless, and the first causality is Minaj herself.

This is yet another chillwave album. An album so typical of the genre that it even has the audacity to use the word "polaroid" in a lyric. What rescues it from mediocrity, however, is the flawlessly melodic melancholy of Edwards' voice.

Koloss runs the gamut of Meshuggah's craft and technical prowess.

This new material represents not only their most heinous effort to date; it might in fact be among the most appalling things to ever exist, empirically speaking.

Grinderman 2 RMX provides an enjoyable enough distraction but ultimately this is a collection of material that would have worked better as an EP rather than an album.

All [tracks] are grand, and strong-hearted.

Feel their energy flowing through your mind. Satisfaction guaranteed.

Grinderman 2 RMX provides an enjoyable enough distraction but ultimately this is a collection of material that would have worked better as an EP rather than an album.

In The Shape Of Things Foxx, ably assisted by his new lieutenants and always with one eye on dreams of an imagined future, continues to make his most startlingly contemporary sounding music in years.

This is music that transcends the detached nature of its making.

Interstellar easily contains enough beauty to confirm that Frankie Rose is more than just the buzz-scene she once helped create and should provide lift-off into all manner of new sonic territories.

Put simply, this is one of the most exciting live albums to be released in many, many years.