Their most coherent, alive and plain best album yet.

It's full of the kind of heavy textures and atmospheric nuances that explain exactly why Johnson is also a movie soundtrack composer of increasing repute.

This is one mainstream marshmallow with an acidic coating worth a lick.

Good Shoes have home-produced a record worthy of similar plaudits; there’s both hope and future here in abundance.

For those Manics fans whose bearing on the band is centred by a Britpop firmament, rather than The Holy Bible, this record will prove a joy. It's jolly, but jolly good.

Vintage touches and modern twists combine on an irrepressible soul record.

These gifted siblings have come of age. You’ll want what they’re having.

You wouldn't expect soul from a Glen Campbell record, but it takes many forms. A veteran who needs help to express his memories of a life less ordinary, but ironically sounds on the top of his game, is clearly one of them.

Latin, the band's third album, is something of a side-step from its predecessors, Holy Fuck (2004) and LP (2007). It's less brawny and statelier, perhaps in part due to its producers Paul Epworth (Florence, The Rapture) and Dave Sardy (Black Mountain, LCD). But it might well be the closest the band has got to sounding as visceral and as rich on record as they do live.

Time will tell, but this opening salvo will certainly leave you pumped up for further Foster kicks.

"Powerful" is perhaps the most fitting word, and though the strength of certain arrangements can feel all-engulfing, there are too many moments of near-inexpressible, extravagant brilliance on The Silicone Veil to deny Sundfør's overall accomplishment.

At an economic 38 minutes and free of anything in the slightest bit terrible, you should welcome Head First like the first sun of spring, know it inside out by the time the band are slaying festival crowds mid-summer and possibly buying copies to give to close friends and family at Christmas.

Ontario's Junior Boys have been charming us with their soulful brand of electro-pop for a good few years now, but they've never sounded as much fun as they do on new album It's All True.

It's tight, concise and thrillingly sharp--what makes High on Fire's fifth album such a success is its intricacy and balance that allows it to appeal to more than your friendly neighbourhood metalhead.

It's not sonically unique. Yet there's a charm here.

Vultures isn't an album we'll be talking about 20 years from now, but for thrills, spills and hair-raising heaviness, it gets the job done in style.

If you peer hard enough, there are. Subtly, slow-burningly, Zero 7's wispy, placid emissions reveal charm and interest value; even the occasional surprise.

It's camp, but it's shadowy. It's epic, but it's introvert. It's highly peculiar, yet hugely commercial. It's one big, beautiful oxymoron.

Anxiety is as tight and catchy as a baseball mitt.

What remains is a solid collection of pop-soul renderings through which Ocean tries to find himself.

It works to the strengths of each, allowing Negro and Barwick their own spaces to shine while sculpting an overall, engrossing ambience around the pair.

At times it is so minimal and skeletal, the songs are in need of intensive care. Yet it is unafraid to rock (Trick Pony, Dandelion) or be resolutely commercial.

Philip Larkin memorably once noted, "What will survive of us is love". Whilst that's undoubtedly true, in Martyn's case there are also these glorious songs to savour and celebrate.

For Fitz and Co, few if any post-60s developments in black dance music are acknowledged. Still, when it's good and exciting, as on the standout Don't Gotta Work It Out, with its simply thrilling keyboard coda, considerations of originality become irrelevant.

Cultdom seems assured at the very least, and How I Knew Her is less an album to yield all its myriad charms instantly, more one to slow-drip its way to adoration

Maybe it shouldn't be altogether surprising that Knoxville is brimming over with bravura displays of improvisational nous. Similarly, it would be hard to find a finer study of the suppression of the ego; each musician's signature sound serving to continually complement, but never saturate, the artistry of the others.

Throughout the album, Lamdin's production offers a sense of clarity and understated confidence.

It all clicks into gear by the end, and it perhaps bodes well that they appear to have worked out how to finish things on a high.