A prayer of a record, despair turned into poetry.

Celebration Rock encapsulates the kind of affirmative, collective experiences that define an entire adolescence.

Everything works beautifully on what's still their most sublime piece.

The overall impression is of a lamp shone directly into the darkened corners of Shackleton's music, casting all its hidden detail in sharp relief.

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

This record is both symphony for sufferers of that condition and a treasure map to the Orkney Islands, whether walking their beaches, or stopped in a traffic jam on the M25.

The results are nothing short of magnificent, producing a set of tracks whose fizzing surfaces are always disturbed by some new action just beneath, where ridges of static ruffle and tumble over one another, and where harsh regions of higher density sluice violently into the foreground.

Like pretty much all of his previous work, C4C isn't really open for the casual listen. Music as densely layered and as assimilated as this tends to unwrap itself at different times in different situations and with varying results.

Lydon's ever-inspiring love of de-dub postulates continually throughout the album – it's such a perfect return.

The sheer ebullience, the devil-may-care attitude taken in the construction of these songs, makes it an album to treasure.

While nothing quite meets the precedent set by the first track, the album is a bracing adventure in texture.

At its best it is an almost physical experience. The two fundamental components (swelling synths and explosive rhythms) in the first case exemplify heart and soul and in the latter explode in every direction at once – the best tracks do both simultaneously.

Words And Music By Saint Etienne is an album that reaffirms all that is glorious and brilliant about pop music.

Their musical vision is one that's so obviously well-honed that they know exactly when to kick the music into overdrive before lulling the listener back into a state of sonic paralysis.

This new collaboration is a wonderful demonstration and crystallization of the best aspects of [Burger and Voigt's] combined canons.

This is an album that knows just how toxically repellent it is and it's this self-assured ferocity that makes for such an enjoyable whirlwind of a listen.

More or less everything here sounds anaemic, lacking in body, squashed, diminutive, like it could be pushed over by a strong breeze--or, worse, drowned out by light conversation on the dancefloor.

For the most part, Unpatterns is slightly sinister, stretched out, anxious, fidgety house.

Another eleven baseless mehs that belong nowhere else than on a blog that no one reads.

Bloom is in part brilliant but maddeningly safe and, ultimately, is a decidedly unsatisfying listen.

Da Mind Of Traxman, rarely overly solemn and ever-playful, is still far from a middlebrow defanging.

While in a way this record sums up everything the Cribs are about, it fails to foreground their most exciting aspects.

The reach of these records [Loveless and Isn't Anything] makes bands yet to form sound hopelessly out-of-date.

MMX11 is unexpectedly loaded with similarly bomb-laden gems.

Tonally and generically, the album is not so much a continent as a small country. But it's a beautiful country, warm and vibrant.

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.

A Different Ship is another exciting chapter in the story of a band who continue to improve with every release.

Despite the many hugely talented performers involved, Dr Dee is less philosopher's stone, and more curate's egg: a handful of fine songs where Albarn plays to his existing strengths, but mired in a sea of over-reaching folly. And ultimately, both Dee and Albarn deserve better.