Mind Trap is a triumph of feelings over ideas, of making sounds bigger and more mobile than the spaces (or heads) that contain them.

In rock, rehashing the past more often than not results in music that sounds anachronistic, but Unfidelity is proof that in electronic music, a disregard for technological progression can still result in a forward-looking album.

The Take Off And Landing Of Everything is the sound of a band prising an encouraging aesthetic edge from the sheer enjoyment of ageing. It bodes well for the future.

Like a vivid dream melting away in the first few minutes of morning, Love Letters has an uncanny beauty, but one that remains firmly out of reach.

Boy confirms that Bozulich is at least as good as Cave or Waits at contemporising the blues, at crafting bold, gritty, assertive art that is enchantingly oddball yet still accessible, not to mention infinitely rewarding.

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.

While the Tinariwen formula may be familiar, Emmaar sees their sound refined without losing any of the group's rebel edge and defiant spirit.

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

Tomorrow's Hits is an easy album to admire--this is The Men stretching out and aiming for new targets--but a difficult one to fall in love with.

A record that may occasionally get on one's nerves, yet undoubtedly overflows with vitality.

Ultimately, nothing hangs together long enough to enable a consistent or enjoyable listening experience.

Not all of Spectre is quite equal to 'The Whistleblowers'. There's the occasional functional interlude--standard-issue industrial synth propulsion. But, compositionally and sonically, Spectre is intriguingly accessible.

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.

At her brightest and her best.

Blank Project represents one of those rarefied moments in which an established artist meets the expectations set by her previous career, and then exceeds them in the most exciting, tangential of ways, resulting in something thrillingly different, hella moody, and deeply exciting.

I was hoping for a leap forward, but Morning Phase just feels like a very pretty place to sit and wait for one.

It's a piece of surrealism and absolutely beautiful to listen to.

Padding the album with ambient interstitials would be a forgivable peccadillo were the other songs seriously weighty--after all, even Kid A had 'Treefingers'--but the remaining seven tracks can themselves come off as a little half-baked.

Benji would have worked better as a series of EPs, playing to Kozelek's strength as a songwriter of certain stylistic preferences.

St. Vincent's real genius is the way it manages to project an aura of perfection while simultaneously showing us its guts; it suggests that while the polished surface may not be a lie, exactly, it's based on a series of elisions that we're all uncomfortably complicit in.

This is a far more reflective affair, with the lyrical gymnasium packed away

There are just too many occasions where Malkmus' tone bypasses droll, flies directly over kitsch, and lands way out in the rough with no hope of ever retrieving the ball.

While songs like '5AM' and 'Aaliyah' are very much made with mainstream dancefloors in their peripheral vision, much of the album, particularly some of the supplementary tracks, are still steeped very much in underground dance culture, and its in these moments that the album really excels.

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

After The Disco is an exceptionally successful record filled with the type of uplifting melody we've come to expect from the pair, as well as more direct, clearer lyrics and an overall sharper edge.

Progression is a great thing to hear in any artist's work, and there's plenty of that to the largely excellent Burn Your Fire. Yet its louder moments at the minute seem mostly in place to provide contrast, with Olsen remaining at her most engaging when speaking to you in whispers.

Instead of trying to recapture the magic of their formative years, Hatori and Honda have written and produced a meta-comeback record about the impulses that inspire artists to reunite.

It's a work of music that seismically shifts in front of your ears. Melodies form crystalline shapes that grow, morph and solidify under a haze of generative ambience. Some of those ideas laid down on Get Lost have taken shape as an LP, designed to play through from start to finish.