Medieval Femme plays to its strengths, with only a couple of disjointed cuts amongst an excellent collection, and even those keeping a tight ship on runtime.

It retains energy, but has enough twists and turns to still provide a consistently interesting landscape. They have made a beautiful confectionary, but one made with rigour, skill, and care. A joyful album, leaving me aching for a live performance.

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

Musically, it's painfully simple; sonically, it's painfully complex.

Everything you want from Richard Thompson is right here, right now, on Still. You wont notice Jeff Tweedy all that much, which is as big a compliment as one can make of any producer.

It sounds ominously worth, but on listening the level of fun is obvious too. Layer upon layer, spoken word singing weaves around carefully crafted atmospheric drum patterns and rudimentary grooves, sounding unpremeditated--spontaneously surreal.

Although some darkness is present, A Man For All Seasons delivers a sense of hope. The album’s charm is in its vulnerability.

Scar Sighted is still focused on conveying the noir duality found when the ugliness of atonality tries to devour moments of beautiful ill-quiet and creepy melody. This sonic ideology is perfectly produced and engineered by Billy Anderson (Pallbearer, Swans) who, along with Whitehead, captures the chaos in all of its multi-dimensional forms.

Who is William Onyeabor? is a surprising--yet camp--African reinterpretation of funk and disco, meant for our bodies and souls.

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

Hunter is a tempestuous album full of haunting, unsettling vocals; it resonates with evocative power.

Algiers will always be big, bold and unapologetically earnest and while you’d stop short of saying something like they’re a vital band for our times, it’s good to have someone around who cares for them as much as they do.

Threace possesses a wholly immersive sense of itself, and a free floating kinetic energy that is out of step with most contemporary riff-based music. Its command of sonic hypnosis is all the more impressive considering its brevity.

It is a huge pleasure and a relief that this comeback is so good, so strong.

Emerging as an outgrowth of Chicago house music, the principle formula is one that combines bubbling 808s and low end with angular snare patterns and looped snatches of vocal samples. It can often prove a jarring prospect in the first instance, but DJ Rashad’s Double Cup is a coherent and appealing starting point for the curious.

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.

Two sounds like Owls really ought to in 2014--as melancholic and complex as they've always been whilst expanding their sound as a second album should.

An extremely accessible record for a broad-range of new listeners and one that’s easy to return to.

There’s an endearing earnestness permeating Tuttle’s amble through the various landmarks of his beloved Alexandra Hills. Along the way, his arrangements, in a stream-of-conscious flow, create a childlike wonderment depicted in Miyazaki’s films, providing a restorative portal of escapism.

Howl is certainly at the more pop-oriented end of Foxx releases, and that is its strength.

While it’s a release that might disengage fans of her more sub-rosa earlier material of yore, Zola Jesus has evolved into an artist where pop--born from a need to mend from trauma or otherwise--is no longer a recurrent secondary descriptor, but a primary one. Danilova has loosened the shackles that have made this remarkable metamorphosis possible.

Each member’s lyrical proclivity, musical preference and sonic muscularity are given equal measure, a pagan triumvirate of penetrating, pointed liberation.

a softer focus feels like a breakthrough: simultaneously freer and more composed, closer and more abstract, sweeter and more caustic.

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'.

When we hear that scratch of pick on acoustic, we're trained to expect some diary-entry-type emoting. Pratt plays against that expectation beautifully, leaving us just enough breadcrumbs to get us lost.

Short Movie stretches its cohesive motifs through all thirteen tracks, without sticking to a plot or forced narrative structure. Instead, the themes of self-reflection and search for belonging and identity move you wantonly through the album.

Without sacrificing any of the solidity, astringency or brutality akin to their previous blood-lettings, Zu spit out their most astral of recordings.

At times, it feels as if Marcloid has somehow found a way to give her DAW a nervous system. This, combined with White-Gluz’ organic melodic impulses, makes for a pop album that is both strikingly deft and consciously playful.