A few instrumental passages could have been reined in, while the misguided inclusion of the irritating 'Dark Side' is an unfortunate blight on what is, overall, a cascading and rewarding listen.

It stands on its own two feet and crucially employs a refinement of ideas that proves that space is indeed deep.

A debut so exquisitely tooled I cannot find a thing wrong with it.

Open Your Heart is the most thrilling and exciting album of the year thus far and one that demands your immediate attention.

Once you're past the confusion of any preconceptions, it's a solid rock album.

Ekstasis is ecstatically good.

The more cultivated recording process allowed textures such as strings, Tacular's accordion and Moore's sonorous and charismatic vocals to assume a richness that has not been heard before.

Ceremony's misanthropy has never sounded more genuinely punk.

His vision continues to be as expansive and eccentric as usual.

There are moments when Soft Hills' sound slight; even middle-of-the-road bland. But there's a beguiling soulfulness and a darkness to this record that will seep into your heart if you give it a chance.

Even if some of the album's humanism cloys slightly ... it's reassuring to hear the argument against corporate greed advanced with such forthrightness.

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

More vibrant and engaged with the world than they've sounded at any time since Whatever You Love, You Are.

Instead of a coherent collection of songs, Animal Joy feels like a series of very clever blueprints that, while admirable in form, are often (despite that title), rather bloodless.

For such a self-avowed perfectionist, and judged against the admittedly high standards of his magnum opus, it comes up a little short.

For all this fitful odysseying around, Hukkelberg is never more than three paces from home.

Trimming back their signature embellishments leaves an album that strangely is more focused sonically, but somehow aimless in intention.

A curious listen, Sounds From Nowheresville is akin to having your memory wiped at exactly the same moment an experience is stored in the brain.

The covers portion is entirely without merit, Turner having managed to extract every last atom of enjoyment from every single one of the songs he's chosen.

It washes you in sound, and if you let that sound wash over you, what it does is exquisite.

Visions is a more focused album than the spaced-out Halfaxa or the disparate Geidi Primes but one of the key charms of Grimes' sound is its unforcedness.

The Something Rain is the sound of a band entirely reinvigorated, like a new band even, bursting with dreamy, soulful, intelligent songs, though you won't be surprised to learn everything is executed in the most understated way.

If Learning was a private primal scream, Put Your Back N 2 It is Mike Hadreas' first public display of his escalating talent.

The net result is a lack of texture and the element of surprise that made this album's predecessor so wonderfully seductive.

All too often Paralytic Stalks feels like an attempt to assume the role of indie-pop's Steve Vai by competitively crushing structural formats underfoot until there's nothing left but dusty granules.

Beautifully composed and beautifully produced.

It feels more that Earth have given us time to absorb what may come to be seen, in retrospect, as something of a magnum opus.

Ten$ion's depiction of modern South Africa is nothing less than thrilling.

Perhaps the finest distillation to date of the various elements that comprise the group's distinctive sound.

These are long form constructions, masterfully wrought from the simplest of sonic elements--basically just synths, the odd sample and plenty of percussion--and festooned with idiosyncratic detail.

A thoroughly good larksome house record.

The blend of soul and rootsy grit may not be startlingly original, but here, at least, it's Van Etten's and nobody else's that truly shines.

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

The arrangements are simple, often pretty ... but mostly they serve to support the delivery of some of Finn's most evocative and well observed lyrics.

This is a timid stand for a band who've made a career out of courageously embracing their fears.

This album's great strength lies in the rearguard action its brittleness mounts against kitsch accounts of authenticity.

The album also succeeds in capturing a spirit and essence of youth... the spunk, snarl and energy that comes with being one is integral to this record, even if isn't always fully realised.

Old Ideas is the most musically considered Leonard Cohen album yet, and perhaps the first that sounds like the kind of thing you'd expect from an old master of the 1960s and 70s.

Lanegan blends his most satisfying and heady aural brew to date.

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

An album of scope and unbridled invention, drawing from the past (in both music and aesthetics) to create a universe of sounds and textures that are quite unlike anything around at the moment.

It might be better to think of Hotel Sessions as a surviving collection of demos and rarities rather than a planned project. Handled in this way, the album begins to exude at least some charm.

Django Django are at their best when their sounds are at their gnarliest.

I suspect that you'll be unlikely to come across a better mixed and more punchy summary of current underground dubstep this year.

The result is something of a mixed bag: moments of tender and enduring beauty broken up by landfill indie pop with a French accent.

An enticing, at times uncomfortable and intoxicating record.

It offers astonishingly rich pickings--its pillowy-soft surfaces might have all the edges filed away, but there's a stunning amount of detail packed into each of its eight tracks.

Have Some Faith in Magic is very pretty and very meaningless.

Herrema and her group are obviously having a blast, and the fact that they have managed to blend so many disparate ingredients into a surprisingly potent brew is far more important than the supposition that they might not be taking themselves too seriously.

Lynchian undercoat aside...it's basically just a good old massive pop album, which can be a scary thing in its own right: the air of soulless, monolithic power and the unseen presence of shadowy string-pullers etc.

Despite seemingly throwing everything but the kitchen sink and every ounce of digital equipment they could muster at it, +Dome's spellbinding amalgam of jittery electronics, playful samples and conventional instruments--entirely charming rather than overbearing--strikes a fabulous pose.

It's the band's most mature work to date and perhaps the only one that feels like a true album.

Most of the songs flatline – ambient, rambling soundscapes that are largely indistinguishable...It's no coincidence that the briefest songs, when Syd really gets down and makes her personality felt, are also some of the best.

It's a brilliantly focused, glittering and energetic classy pop album that you'd never have expected from the authors of the disparate, overly quirky 'Does You Inspire You'.

Clone have struck a good balance, and there is not a single bad track amongst the 13 included here.

In practice and the long term of most, they're hysterically fun, but perhaps easier to admire in the abstract than really adore, unless you're a 17-year-old girl or bored at a festival.

Given to the Wild is resolutely The Maccabees best.

Sounding freer and better than she ever has before.

There is so much to be enjoyed on 'Evolve Or Be Extinct' though - such fluid virtuosity - that the occasional blip does not cloud the overall picture.

Track-for-track the birth of a new legend? Absolutely.

The Men's highly enjoyable chaos.

Future This is a coherent, uniform proposition, a proper album, rather than a melange of posturing and botched experimentation, as was the case with A Brief History Of Love.

This is a piece of work in which good-quality ingredients have been handled without a great deal of tact.

Some parts of Collections 01 show more expansion than others, and at times it does come across as more a collection of tracks.

An evocative sonic portrait that juxtaposes the human-made sounds of the railway and the surrounding landscape.

It's all too hammy, too rich to absorb.

Gorillaz helped re-unite both indie and pop with that most Paul Morley's jowl-wobbling of things: the abstract.

Lioness: Hidden Treasures is an appropriately muted set, with Mark Ronson and Salaam Remi producing an honourable and moving tribute to the Amy Winehouse.

I hated this kind of Lemonheads-lite, floral-dressed, clompety-booted, neurotic ninny inanity the first time round, I have absolutely no idea how anyone could be arsed to expend the (admittedly small) effort it takes to produce such a pointless photocopy ... [but] not even I can find it in my bitter heart to hate the Nickelodeon-Dinosaur Jr bounce of "Georgia" or the honey-toned amble of "Suicide Policeman".

New History Warfare 2 is superfine, breathtaking, at once unnervingly exploratory and highly accessible, a record which leaves you grasping in vain for adequate reference points and peer comparisons.

Is Walking On A Dream the sound of things to come then? Clearly not. Empire Of The Sun's grand ambitions are certainly worth applauding, but unfortunately they amount to nothing more than a cold and pale facsimile of the superior conquests of others who have trod these lands before.

[A] satisfying compilation with its lugubrious and luxurious electronic introspection created by an artist once again near the height of his powers.

Much more the clenched fist than Gish, their second effort saw an increase in intensity, ballast, grit, ambition and sheer scale.

It's magical, from start to finish.

Bangs & Works Vol. 2 straddles a fine line between function and dysfunction, innocence and dissonance--and not once in its 26 track run does it ever get boring.

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

Their energy is utterly thrilling and secondly, Hollandaze hints at so much more and should ensure that Tzenos is not reduced to journalistic footnote of merely being a cuddly version of Big Black.

There's something exhausting about this manic exuberance, too. All rush and almost no plateau, it's so fidgety and full of swarming textures that it wears you down.

All-in-all a promising preamble to the real deal.

When it comes to Kosmische classics, this is an essential. If you don't have this in your record collection, you're doing yourself a massive disservice.

His background on the harder edge of modern dance music means that, for all its delicacy, Severant never feels retro or overly derivative.

Plug in and turn on, baby, surrender to its augmented charms.

Probably the last recording of Reid playing live, before his death in April 2010, it is a fittingly energetic and exuberant performance.

A record that ranges widely without ever feeling tacked-together. A real feat of production.

50 Words for Snow is undoubtedly whimsical, but it's played and arranged so exquisitely that even the most po-faced should be able to acknowledge the scale of its achievement.

One of Haines' best efforts, Nine And A Half Psychedelic Meditations On British Wrestling Of The 1970s And Early 80s is an album that does much to encourage the here and now as it does to paint an impression of a time long gone.

Ersatz GB still trumps most records released this year as, one suspects, The Fall always will.

Under the rule of Worden's powerful vocal these sophisticated compositions provide a gripping, melodramatic exploration of a mindset both childlike and brooding.

Simply, we are left with more evidence of a true American original, who was also as important in his own way as Harry Smith or Alan Lomax and other such college-educated curatorial spirits.

Welcome to Condale is a refreshingly ambitious, variegated take on the 80s both conceptually and in its execution.

It's difficult to say Humor Risk is better than WIT'S END, but it is certainly its perfect counterpart.

The key success of Hurry Up is that his canvas has exponentially increased in size.

Put simply, nobody else could make music quite like this, no matter which part of the electronic fringe they might call home. Daniel Lopatin is in the zone.

A stunning example of the intermingling of bodies, both sonic and artistic.

On the whole, though, these songs are at their best when grounded in low region trickery: rumbles, clipping sounds, droplets, shudders, judders and all manner of absorbed low freak-uency eeriness, as exhilaratingly creepy as anything offered up by trip-hop's most skilled practitioners.

It is a peculiar little record, but it hangs together very well, and makes a reasonable case for his ability to wring something worthy out of whatever art form he chooses to tackle.

They've always been a subtle unit, resisting obvious moments of catharsis in favour of subtle dynamics, but here they manage the trick that Khanate mastered so effectively and create a tension that derives as much from the fear of silence as it does from the threat of noise.

One of the most darkly enthralling instrumental records of the year.