It feels almost too intimate for the world to hear.

The greatest achievement across Charm remains Cottrill’s execution of another large-scale reimagining of her desired sound.

The only way to respond to the sourpusses is to ensure the music is very, very good, something that KoKoro can more than justifiably claim.

There’s so much passion under the surface that Blumberg presents that some form of purging is not only needed, it’s inevitable.

Despite their EDM club appeal and pop sensibility, seven strikingly dynamic and expansive maximalist compositions are still locked in a very private headspace, a kind of solitude that contains multitudes.

Give this album time and an open heart, and you'll get an album that initially seems slate grey blooming into colour. In The Seams is Saint Saviour's best yet.

It's rich and hypnotic, but it's not an easy listen: the gloom of many of the tracks will feel oppressive to some.

Especially during this first cut, there are glimpses of rawness in the playing of the group, moments when they seem unsure of which direction to take. But it’s exactly this unpredictability that makes the quartet’s evocative sounds thoroughly captivating.

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

At times a song can simultaneously be baroque and noise, harsh and beautiful, and the contradictions aren't evident because their voices are one--but there are also times when the record is triumphant, precisely because they're torn away from one another.

Despite the inevitable ending, Amelia is an unexpectedly soothing record. This is largely down to Anderson having a calm, meditative quality to her voice that holds steady whether the arrangement is minimalist or intense. But much of the relaxing quality of the album is also related to Anderson’s ability to look at a figure frequently only cast in tragedy and mystery as a whole person.

Ultimately, Aventine is a triumph of carefully sustained mood; of a sadness that is not so much overbearing as it beautiful, and one that lingers in the silences between listens of this unusual, unusually compelling record.

At turns subtle, delicate, naked, brutal, and deeply affecting in a way rarely managed by contemporary dance producers, and it's both a continuation of his previous work and a departure further than ever before from the DJ weapons that made his reputation.

Holy Spring is a mature and enthralling work that gives us real ritual. Ceremonies taken seriously that generate real power.

There are nods throughout to progressive soul superstars like Isaac Hayes, and the slide guitar outro on ‘Never Know’ suggests George is in fact Sam’s favourite Beatle – though the album always strikes the right balance between vintage and cutting edge, never unduly nostalgic or pastiche-y, with sax breaks, searing synth solos and simulated Stax horns that never feel indulgent or showy.

Aromanticism is an exquisitely well-crafted piece of work, which retains a delicate complexity despite its minimalism.

Another great Pere Ubu record, one imbued with a more upbeat emotional sensibility than its predecessor, with some memorable songs and some wild sonic experiments. It’s a snapshot of where the band are right now, as well las a hint of where they might still go in future.

In The Same Room gives us more intimately friendly insight into the beguiling world of Julia Holter, seen here as thoughtfully poised and careful not to intimidate the listener, making this breezy recording a good entry point for novices in Holter's catalogue.

The menace and late-night melancholy is subbed for outright tragedy and romance here, and this is certainly their best realised set released in the decade since Black Earth's high watermark, bringing together all that makes this music both beautiful and ugly, while tentatively exploring new sonic territory.

What Tunng have shown with Presents…Dead Club is that addressing grief and death doesn’t have to be devastating. It can be thought-provoking. It can also be simply pleasurable.

Yeule sits in a coterie of future thinkers making eclectic pop music, and since the scene has become a cultural firecracker in the last few years, many artists are seeing praise for work that rests on its recent success. Glitch Princess moves the goalposts once again.

Lifetime of Love is a strange album, where songs with differing emotional foundations, sonic palettes, aural pace and textural aesthetics mesh into a cohesive whole. As Moon Diagrams, Archuleta has created a world where introspection, catharsis and redemption can envelop you and become something porous, to be inhaled and lived in.

Godfather 3 is more like a mixtape than an album. Many of the tracks are shorter than three minutes and the number of features gives it a collaborative, crew-project feel. But this is what Wiley does best.

It’s a relief to state that their new album Polymer is very much Plaid’s best album this decade, and at least their best since 2008’s Heaven’s Door.

There is a shadowy enigma within Esker that verges on the blissful, thanks to its peculiar melodic turns and idiosyncratic use of sonic effects.

While Memorial Waterslides (the title itself a perfect juxtaposition of the bleak and the playful) is shot through with a sense of longing and an awareness of the passing of time, it’s also a joyful celebration of creativity, and of a band who appear to have ideas in abundance.

Sarah Davachi is delving deep into the intervals between these states, to the place where emotion dwells, and is holding us down there until we can feel it roaring through our lungs. Just don’t forget to breathe.

Its confident shape-shifting compositional power and instrumental thunder make for one of 2014's most immediate and satisfying releases.

Hidden Fields presents a binary world of pure noise set against the briefest interludes of silence between the tracks. It's only during the quiet moments that you can comprehend just how vast this album is.

It's magical, from start to finish.

What really works in Dilate's favour is that this is very much an album, an experience that's designed through its pacing and mastering to be taken in a single sitting. That's a bold ask in a digital age of playlists and single track downloads but the rewards in acquiescing to their request are manifold.

With its huge, graceful scope, FIBS smirks slyly at any presumptions or hopes listeners may harbour. These fibs are alive – a thriving, amoebic album consuming the petri dish in which it was formed.

There’s an intrigue which lies in the way these are threaded together and you can hear the many musical influences at work which create a distinctive and well-crafted album.

The conceit of Bishop's new album, Tangier Sessions, is some serious guitar-dork lore that would make any bedroom noodler salivate.

While this particular take lacks the almost chaotic energy and sense of transcendence of the Coltrane/Ali version, it still overflows with riotous lyricism. The additional instruments expand the textural and rhythmical dimensions of the piece, before topping them with a rumbling drum solo. A fitting end for an equally inspirited, crucial live recording.

Across spheres of contemporary art, experimental music, noise and techno, Pan’s twisting trajectory as an artist is rousing to witness; Lack惊蛰 serves as yet another reminder of her thrill.

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

Chance Of Rain sinks its hooks in deeper.

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.

This is an immersive listen, full of eerie familiarity and suspended body horror; a quasi-mystical sense of oneness gives Anticlines cohesion and a sense of spiritual comfort, and somehow reminds of of the vast indifferent universe as we descend into environmental disaster.

As the album's outlook nosedives towards irreversible melancholy, Nobody Wants To Be Here And Nobody Wants To Leave becomes increasingly hypnotic.

The band have delivered a wonderfully cohesive set of songs, and in the process have ensured that Modern Nature is their best release in many a moon.

As a portrait of a great artist who has never stopped progressing and carving a niche that is equal parts challenging, enjoyable and moving, it does a brilliant job.

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

It’s a big, sonorous, unearthly offering, and it’s difficult to imagine it being created separately by two men, with cut and paste and some incredibly deft stitching. How they’ve managed to bring this Frankenstein’s monster together as a coherent work is testament to a modern friendship by two brilliant musicians using up-to-date technology.

It is certainly a dizzyingly contagious collection of songs that benefit from main man Dan Bejar’s scattergun technique of song selection. Not for him, the smooth transition from song to song, building neatly to a gentle climax. It is in his blood to unhinge the casual listener and provide a shifting backdrop for his lively lyricism.

Full of ire and desire. .... Gordon is no luddite. She’s incorporating sounds and techniques that – and apologies for bringing age into it – most other septuagenarians would recoil from.

Riderless Horse is quietly redemptive rather than world-razingly cathartic, and despite all the mental and emotional hardship she’s survived, Nastasia remains even-handed and philosophical.

The really great thing about this heavy, intense album, as punishing as it is beautiful in its resolve, is that it shakes to the core the philosophies that Björk laid out so methodically on Biophilia, but she still finds a dark difficult way back to hope and love.

As a whole, the record achieves something remarkable: a comeback record that overcomes the fractures and scars of its creation without trying to ignore them, a near-complete revival of the band’s former powers, and a bold delve into epic new territory.

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

They are now making music that, thanks to its lack of grandiosity and ornateness, has a seeming air of distance. It could almost pass through you unnoticed. But they leave traces in your brain that linger and slowly burn inside of you, long after you’ve stopped listening.

A Mythology Of Circles isn’t a radical reinvention for the Brooklyn-based composer, but it is a significant leap forward in her craft.

Our Love isn't an explosion of delight so much as it is an affirmation of the moment, in many different forms.

From the toughest moments are borne the most compelling work, and, in Evile's case, in crafting an album as assured as Five Serpent's Teeth they surely deserve to sit atop the modern thrash elite.

Brutal yet cathartic. ... Consisting of seven relatively short pieces across 36 minutes, The Hands plays like a succession of scenes or vignettes all attempting to communicate some opaque and unsayable knowledge.

It’s an exploratory, ebullient album from start to finish, and one that embodies the insatiable curiosity that led him to work with so many artists from so many different genres, a celebration of collective endeavour and of life itself.

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.

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.

There are clear signs of the heights he’d soon reach on A Love Supreme five months later. Observing such incremental shifts is both fascinating and valuable, and while the performances are all deeply satisfying it remains a tad disappointing that archival projects like this one tend to blot out contemporary work that proves that jazz continues to push forward in the present.

This is her strongest album to date and one where “noise” is but a tool towards a much more expansive expression of music.

It’s good to hear that 40 years in the game hasn’t jaded their urge for silliness. .... It’s all entertaining enough without breaking too much of a sweat.

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.

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

It doesn’t take long for the opening ‘Perspex’ to draw you into Plaid’s blissed-out dimension.

Peering out from the shadow cast by their Band on the Wall contemporaries Joy Division and The Fall, their thirteenth album It All Comes Down To This is their strongest since 1982’s Sextet.

Spread over four LPs, this Warm Leatherette box set is an exhaustive compilation that thankfully doesn’t dip in quality for the wealth of what’s on offer. For any Grace Jones fans this is as definitive as it gets, though it will take some serious powers of discernment to differentiate between LP one and LP two.

Mudflowers sees him reincarnating and embodying his city's passion for a soulful Americana that flourished half a century ago.

Thirty years later, Seefeel still know how to push our buttons.

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.

Silver Dollar Moment’s vibrancy is at odds with the current mood of the world, but it’s also a vital indication of where we’re at now in terms of indie music’s trajectory. It shakes off any negative connotations of modern indie, particularly in the ‘landfill’ sense of the word, and reclaims it.

The nine tracks on Frontera isolate Fly Pan Am’s part in the project, yet taking the multi- out of multimedia doesn’t dilute the themes seared into the music.

Xe's slippery moves might not set Zs on a path to your average teen or idiot Howard Stern fan's iPod, but it is a deft and focused work, demanding its rightful place on college radio and the blogosphere.

In an era of genre-less music, it’s nice to hear an album that does one thing and does it well, capturing a landscape so old it never really gets old.

The beauty of Sling is immediately apparent, but it is so much more than ‘pretty’, Clairo is letting us in to her safe space and reminding us to nurture one another. She is creating songs that throw an arm (or paw) around you and share the weight of your experiences.

In other hands an album as disparate and scattershot as this would fall flat, its moments of brilliance muddied by misfires. This is not one of those records.

Live At KCRW is a fine declaration of where The Bad Seeds are in the here and now. It would be a fool who would second-guess as to where they're headed to next but at this moment in time they sound as comfortable in their music as they do the fine suits they wear.

The trio’s real triumph is found by looking at the bigger picture, discerning the elegant way in which they connect the ends of these disparate threads, shaping a close-knit, immensely enjoyable whole.

For scope alone, Deathconsciousness feels important, but it also makes the band's new music sound contented and unfussy.

This commitment to inducing a full-body response, not merely the tap of a foot at a bus stop, has a lambent ferocity that Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam doubles down on.

The two pieces enhance and complement one another to make a combined whole. This is very much a considered and, with regards to its structure, composed body of work.

It is not pretentious and it is not pompous--here is an ingenuous album made by a couple of odd cherubs who just happen to be, inescapably, two of the Beautiful People.

Exploded View is the type of album that seeps into your soul. Consciously designed or not, it exposes various unpalatable truths about the way we live now and turns them into frightening, spellbinding music.

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.

Rhythm plays a strong role in all Pharmakon albums, but Devour has a stronger pull and a denser composition. One rhythmic track layers on top of another, sometimes swallowing each other up and sometimes taking songs into different directions. ... Devour isn’t a rallying cry for change, it’s a reflection of the ugliness of it all, from the inside out.

Ghost Stations is designed to arouse thoughts of “abandonment, empty spaces and dereliction”. But that denies the album’s soothing, ultimately positive nature. It may offer a melancholy tour of desolate scenes, but they’re lent the nocturnal beauty of ancient structures bathed in subdued lighting, any sense of threat exchanged for a reassuring sense of security.

Experimental music inevitably engenders pretentious music writing, yet when it's as good as Behold it creates a listening experience that altogether dwarfs any linguistic rationalisation. This is a record of light and shade, and one that demands your fullest immersion.

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.

It's a mind-bending metal album that casts the gaze of its extraterrestrial eye towards an unknown galaxy far away.

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

Moot!’s frill-free tautness makes it anathema for casual listening, while repaying your commanded attention not with the spectacular structures of build-up, breakdown, or resolution, but with a sustained, flattening tension which would be dissatisfying were it not so completely gripping.

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.

Highway Songs is David Pajo’s protracted gasp for breath, his slammed fist on the table and his most resounding act of defiance. As we await certain brilliance, it will serve as a very fitting departure in the meantime.

Fabric 91 deserves to linger in the public consciousness: it feels like a statement, a carefully curated bridge between past and present that evokes atmosphere and emotion.

Things crunch, grunt, and whinny with much effort and abandon, the band’s gurning labours hitting a sweet spot somewhere between Mudhoney and The Groundhogs. Occasionally they stretch so far for Earthless-like levels of jam band transcendence that you might be able to hear their vertebrae pop – were it not, of course, all so frighteningly loud.

It's good to know that, like you and me, he's swimming hard against the ever increasing tide of shit and still, in the main, coming up smelling of roses and refusing to back down.

There is great life and verve in these songs, teeming, irrepressible. Listen closely and you can hear the record breathing.

Much as Wolf himself has moved on from his string of tragedies to create something beautiful, what fuels this record is the belief that this is possible on a grander scale.