Water often reminds me of Soused, the excellent Sunn O))) and Scott Walker collaboration. They are both albums where there seems to be so much unavoidable emotional distress on first listen but eventually it can sound exultant. The initial atonality is replaced by the surrender to a different way of treating harmony.

Harris deploys silence and sound artfully and masterfully throughout Ruins. And the closer you listen, the more intimate it becomes.

While Lazaretto occasionally hints at some of the excesses of the producer/songwriter genre, what's undeniable is the talent on display.

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.

She turns experience into art with a painter’s eye and a warrior’s heart, and Music For People In Trouble is a profoundly humanist work: her finest by some distance.

Bright Sunny South is Amidon's sixth solo effort and like previous releases, the key to the album's potency lies in how the Brattleboro, Vermont, native creates emotional dichotomies and then bridges the expansive gulfs in between.

On the Water is a 'love album', but much more than that--seldom has a long player narrated so fluidly, consummately and lucidly, a journey of self-realization.

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.

You might expect that pulling one part away from the whole would leave you with something solitary, but Weitz’s departure from his proverbial and literal ‘collective’ does not reduce him to a singularity. Instead, he emerges as a complex sum of parts all of his own.

The takeaway sensation of their epic and sprawling second record is quite simply one of pleasure. They embrace the ridiculous and the sublime in equal measure.

Where 2012's Pansophical Cataract was a bit of a meditative blur, Ryonen is more like an adrenaline hit, pumped with rushing rhythms that get the heart hammering against the ribcage.

Atkinson is a masterful, creative collector of such sounds, and she deploys them judiciously to great effect in her work. The Flower And The Vessel is no exception.

The issue for both Femi and Made’s records, is that they feel too conscious of both their modern international audience, and their own political weight. It feels like there is too much scaffolding and careful consideration around the tracks, and as a result, the spontaneity and freeform funkiness of afrobeat gets diluted.

It's a record that doesn't undermine their body of work, but nor does it stand out as a career-defining highlight.

As percussive as her previous offerings, A Man Alive is jaunty but perhaps less folky than normal, endowed significantly with the spirit of Tune-Yards' Merill Garbus, the queen of both loop and uke.... That's not to deny that this album is a step forward, however.

There is definitely room for some trimming. A third could easily be trimmed without damaging the listening experience too much. At the core of Face Stabber is a fun album that gets better with each listen but when it drags, and in places it does, it feels like a laborious chore to get to the good stuff again. The album lives up to its name. From the moment it starts it is an unrelenting, and visceral, album.

Slow Focus is the album Fuck Buttons were born to make.

This might be their most enjoyable release since 1991's Lived To Tell.

A direct response to the band’s dreamlike debut, Wicked City is a venomous inversion of the very world the group strived to create; where there was once playfulness, there is now fiendishness. It’s a frenetic and lively record, for not once does it stay too long in one place.

The group offers a dose of nostalgia for an era that never quite existed in this form previously in any case. Either way, this is medicine that you can imagine lighting up the most varied of settings. Yol is a transportive listen, offering portals to environments few could have ever envisaged.

On Physicalist, Forma, mind-bogglingly skilled with their synthesizers, push themselves further and further into new territory--almost literally--as they pare back, slow down, spread out, dig into the (American) soil beneath their feet.

The sound of Psychic is meticulous and luscious.

While Sleep can be regarded as eight plus hours of ambient drift, it also grows into a piece of considerable emotional weight.

City Lake is a stunning, humble record built on traditions we all understand, yet, somehow feels dizzyingly new.

In this transition from experimental noise that revels in randomness and discomfort, the album layers sound into intense, hypnotic rhythms that reveal compositional prowess.

In keeping with its title, Trouble arrives as a more explosive record than its predecessor, Birch’s first solo album, I Play My Bass Loud. .... The smooth and cohesive production (with the help of Youth from Killing Joke and Michael Rendall) makes Trouble an appealing listen.

It’s a bold claim to suggest No Geography with its reasonably brief (for them) 46 minutes is up there with the controlled chaos and warped psychedelia of their earlier work, but it is. With its unifying themes of freedom, unity and attack, channelled via the medium of boom and sirens, it really is. After the best part of 30 years, there’s still no one else like them. Amazing.

For a band whose titling and artwork is so important for the images they conjure, reverting to a tighter focus works for them. Carlson's guitars, clearly the focus, get to step back from the angular and the lugubrious. Instead, red-lipped riffs flutter over careful and precise percussion, evoking crimson dresses striding down gold corridors. And underneath it all--the star player--Adrienne Davis’s steady, world-eating thud has never sounded better.