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

Seabed never really gets out of first gear. The general vibe given off is that of a teenager moping about in his bedroom, albeit one with the skills to emote through slick, well-produced pop music.

Above all, it’s the melodies that stand out, whether in the wonderfully whacked out melodies of ’You Make Me Forget Myself’ or pacy ripples of ‘Sequence One’, all delivered with an insouciance that’s rather satisfying in these times.

The 20th anniversary edition of This Is My Truth… will by no means settle the long-standing war of attrition between its fans and it detractors, but it does provide a deep and rewarding dive into the band’s populist peak, an idiosyncratic era for one of the last two decades’ most idiosyncratic of rock bands.

This is an album of a depth and ambition that should, frankly, set a standard for contemporary art music.

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

[Wyatt's guitar work and his synths] manage to coalesce with his guitar on the album's strongest moments: as one becomes indistinguishable from the other. It is this coherency which arguably marks Lets… out as Wyatt's strongest work to date. He has created a rewarding sonic landscape that is consistently poignant, without ever being cloying.

Once More 'Round The Sun's many positives are consistently seen in the best possible light.

Terrestrials should first be seen as a meeting of chameleonic polyglots, and the result is most unexpectedly beautiful and luminescent.

Ones And Sixes is an album brimming with ideas, but with such a varied batch of songs, some work better than others.

Hood and Mike Cooley, the only original members left, handle all of the songwriting for the first time since the band's 1998 debut, and it makes for a unity of vision that prevents the grief from sounding gratuitous, that makes the uncertainties resonate with our own.

Mediation Of Ecstatic Energy is undoubtedly Wong's most fully realised, varied and intriguing set of compositions to date.

Keenly political, anti-fascist, and pro-immigrant, British Sea Power mine the past to give us what we need now.

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

Where Hubbert goes musically from here he may not even know himself, but with Breaks & Bone he's managed to pull himself from the quicksand of grief and cement his latest work amongst the top Scottish albums of 2013.

SD Laika compresses space to the point that That's Harakiri becomes constricted by its own sheer density; appropriately, the album is suggestive of inner space, one that is seemingly fraught with anxiety. As a result it's difficult to sustain such energy and tracks seem to be rapidly exhausted, most are less than three minutes. But such are the ideas and impact of them that they linger a lot longer.

The Body and Thou's collaboration, though at times coalescing into a perfect rumble (See: 'Lurking Free'), with its reverberations capable of rattling chest cavities (See: the pretentiously titled 'Beyond The Realms Of Dreams, That Fleeting Shade Under The Corpus Of Vanity'), lacks the desired cohesion from beginning to end to impart the feeling of a complete album.

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.

The immersion of oneself in I<3UQTINVU allows you to reacquaint yourself with their vast electronically-led arrangements and also appreciate Jockstrap’s endlessly adventurous spirit.

Shades of The Herbaliser's Something Wicked This Way Comes abound, and the sensation that there's some kind of malevolent presence woven through the eight songs that make up Sold Out never fully escapes you.

Take Her Up to Monto is the schizophrenic underbelly of Toys’ teary composure, and its much less interested in working through earthly lived experience than it is in traversing it.

There are no crescendos or sections that wrestle for attention, but rather, an ever-shifting soundscape that swirls and swims like a starling murmuration. The shapes it makes in the air are often wounding, but also graceful. And like all of his work, it is devastating in the best way possible.

A good album, but one better suited to a former time.

A Thing Called Divine Fits is a seemingly rare thing; a really good, life-affirming rock record that just works, and gets better and better the more time you spend with it.

There are plenty of nicely recorded aural treats dotted across 6 Feet Beneath The Moon, but they're swimming in a sea of dull mediocrity.

From Out Here is another beautifully crafted voyage into electronic music's substrata.

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

Haiku Salut could be a curious fit for this – certainly, anyone looking for an evocation of the honky tonk contemporary to that era of silent film will be disappointed. Instead, Haiku Salut have delivered one of their strongest works to date.