A frustratingly slow-burning listen.

This third studio album struts in on a crest of rollicking beats and wearing the kind of snarl that even in this new century is likely to delight fans of balls-out, raucous rock‘n’roll.

Things remain pared back, but an ambition nurtured by classical training keeps things interesting.

Peace take the past and swish it about with a bit of swagger, and the results are just dandy.

This is the most exciting and substantial Coleman release of the last few years, rigorously challenging, pumped with insinuating melodies, sleek with propulsive energies and pulsating with a uniquely globular funkiness.

Those unfamiliar with ancient Greek literature need not be daunted, as knowledge of the book is not necessary to appreciate the moods and melodies of The Sirens.

Whether as the fanfare arrival of a unique new voice or the peculiar indulgence of a future cult classic, this is an album that has to be heard to be believed.

When To Dust takes flight, you don't have to squint your ears too far to imagine Alice Russell as a worthy successor to that notional throne [of British soul].

While keeping his music fantastically fresh and of the moment, this often causes a speedy ageing process.

Shaking the Habitual is something else, but it’s hard not to find that profoundly exhilarating.

While Sempiternal isn’t the equal of another genre-bending record Date has worked on, Deftones’ White Pony, it represents significant and successful progression for its makers.

Everything is meticulous, not a note out of place--but this studied delivery is successfully supplemented with resounding soul, proving infectious indeed.

Vanishing Point proves the quartet is still a thrilling proposition, in love with the simplicity of mayhem and volume.

The British producer’s fifth full-length is a worthy successor to his celebrated 2010 set Black Sands.

Meir is an album that will be regarded with such reverence that it’ll be a marker for other acts’ work to be compared to in the future.

Both as performers and songwriters, these guys have upped their game, and Head Down puts them well ahead of the pack.

Thirty-odd years after singing about ripping it up, then, Collins is calling on the past to help him through. It’s working brilliantly.

Fly Zone is streamlined, its production consistently excellent despite numerous contributors.

Nostalchic has a certain airiness, a focus on floaty atmospherics, that aligns it with the work of other washed-out boudoir crooners such as The Weeknd and How to Dress Well.

The way Marnie plays is fresh, but she does hold true to some central tenets of rock’n’roll in her fizzing songs: invincibility and defiance.

The songs here might take a little longer to unlock than their predecessors, but none of them strike a false note.

It’s a mixed manifestation of electronic pop.

ASIWYFA sound like they’re having fun shaping and performing this music, and you’ll want to be part of it.

Unfortunately, most of 20/20 falls into a rut; it sets the mood, but then fails to create tension.

Stick with this 10-tracker, please, as while its first number isn’t the most arresting of curtain-ups, what comes afterwards is entirely captivating.

The n’gonis are always upfront, but this is also an album of stunning vocals.

There’s no better way to shut out the din than by putting this record on.

The vivid nostalgia remains, with these all-original cuts sounding like they could easily have been laid down back in the golden ages of the 1950s and 60s.

Produced by Wilco's Jeff Tweedy, The Invisible Way is warm and organic, melodic and fragile. Twenty years into their career, and Low have created one of their best albums yet.

Angry and socially conscious he remains, though. Monkey Minds in the Devil’s Time, a sprawling, beautiful, brain-belch of an album, is an hour-long testament to this.

If You Leave is a damaged debut, then, but the way the hues of its bruises blend into each other is wholly hypnotic. It wants to love, again, but has chosen darkness.

This is electro-pop with palpable emotion possessing its fizzing keys, guided by a vocal performance that underplays the fraught feelings found on the lyric sheet.

It’s a fine Suede record, a passionate and seductive creature which reminds us of how distinctive and dynamic this most underestimated band can be.

While Mala retains an inquisitive aural attitude--there in its markedly electronic palette, and its squirly, scuffly sound--there’s also limberness to this set of songs, a feeling of them all moving happily together.

On the whole, this is an interesting experiment in the creative process, as well as the values of musicianship and friendship.

Through its songs he conveys truths about this country in a way that few other English songwriters, if any, are able to do.

Isles ends up an easy pleasure--nothing too weighty, but substantial in its way.

This is a second album that genuinely builds upon its predecessor. Exile reinforces the feeling in modern pop that no other group sounds quite as hurt as Hurts.

Muchacho is a vibrant, evocative LP, and a welcome addition to the Phosphorescent catalogue.

There’s no real ‘wow factor’ to Talé despite its star guests. But it’s a loveable enough effort.

The initial surprise on this follow-up is discovering that Grant’s songs work as well--if not even better--when paired with a synth-pop backing rooted more in the 1980s than the preceding decade.

In another dimension, this is the soundtrack to a high-budget sci-fi romp. In the here and now, it’s a great escape from the drudgery of everyday ordinariness, a rollicking ride on one seriously funky UFO.

The Deserters, given a chance, will completely negate any such journalistic silliness with just one listen, because it is a jolt of psychedelic, oozing instrumental wonder and songwriting magnificence.

Hookworms could become something genuinely astonishing in a few albums’ time, and Pearl Mystic is a fine foundation indeed.

Wray and Walker’s transatlantic pairing is beautifully natural.

While his customary playfulness in dissecting matters of the heart and cerebellum is a reassuring hallmark of Love From London, the album also proffers a brooding, politicised, sometimes incensed Hitchcock.

This latest collection offers a tantalising glimpse of how Hendrix's genius might have progressed.

Ash Workman and James Ford keep the production consistently intriguing, and repeated listens reveal fresh nuances and ideas. This is new music worth hearing.

Fluid and at times utterly beautiful, few will grow tired of these songs living in their headphones.

Graffiti on the Train is clearly the work of a man and an outfit that's done the rock'n'roll thing and is now easing into the next step. This is a solid enough start.

Admittedly, the album contains the odd soporific song like No Freedom, but these turns are outweighed by tracks with a strong tune or an unexpected hint of sadness.

Bad Blood is a really gratifying debut that feels like a solution.

Just because it is not music that shouts about itself, that dazzles with pyrotechnics or showboating guitar solos, its profundity and emotional heft is nevertheless, and perhaps even all the more, striking.

This is probably Foxx’s most superior post-Ultravox! LP to date, and definitely his best in a very long time.

It’s hard not to by won over, once again, by Moore’s indomitable, eternal teenager energy.

So Les Revenants has, by virtue of finding perfect inspiration, become one of the more satisfyingly coherent and rangy of Mogwai's records.

On Old Yellow Moon, in that hokiest of country traditions--the boy/girl duet--an old alliance triumphs with charm.

The two hours of Exai is something else. This is Autechre operating at their highest level since 1998’s LP5.

Innovative, dark, bold and creative, it’s an album only David Bowie could make.

From the disapproving father in Willie o Winsbury to the courageous, justice-seeking wife and mother in Geordie, the ballads’ centuries-old characters--and their dilemmas--are beautifully drawn.

Ores & Minerals, its [A Thousand Heys'] follow-up, is arguably less direct, but more fully realised, and likely more enduring.

All in all, it’s a refreshingly varied voyage.

While some of this album is beautiful and delicate, at other times its vocal and musical honey smothers the intimacy of the lyrics.

You want the mix to jump and pound and excite. But it doesn’t, and the choruses feel hung out to dry. This makes for a frustrating listen, because the talent is there – damn, even the songs are there.

With the ceaselessly inventive, engagingly cocksure 180, Palma Violets have given themselves a base to build a career, should they be in it for the long haul.

For a debut album it’s accomplished stuff, though like the Manics before them Anthems is not without its stodgier moments.

The result is a stylish, intelligent record that does exactly what it set out to do: Girls Names have reinvented their sound and come up smelling of roses.

Mainly, though, if Caitlin Rose is the future of Nashville and American country music, then it would seem that its future is in safe, appealing and mellifluous hands.

By calling their album Rough Carpenters, the Pickers are inevitably alluding to their creations as constructs of old timber, offered up with spontaneity and passion rather than precision. But it’s also a misleading moniker, for what is unquestionably the group’s smoothest ride yet.

This singer knows what suits his voice, an undeniably rich and powerful instrument, and uses it without showing off.

There are enough moments of deft, delicate brilliance here to remind us of what a gifted songwriter he is.

The broad, stuttering beats do fatigue the listening experience eventually, but music this animated and unrelenting demands a very specific ear in a very specific setting.

With its extra content engineered to appeal to collectors and casual fans alike, this is a justified addition to the many Rumours already making the rounds.

It’s accomplished, mixing studied nostalgia with current concerns, but not a standout in its field.

The overall impression remains of a bunch of clever chaps who are able to avoid over-intellectualisation and weave bags of charm and fun into their complex pop songs.

The reason that such a potentially pointless enterprise in trash retro works lies entirely in Lidell’s extraordinary talents as musician and producer.

What remains is an adequate compilation of nostalgic sounds, largely void of Clark’s unique voice. Greater consistency would have worked wonders.

Streten proves that potential mass appeal need not come at the expense of creative flair or fresh ideas.

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

Shorter is firmly at the helm, yet benevolent enough to play the background when needed. The rhythm has taken him far.

The results are both reminiscent of preceding emissions from rap’s fringe-mentality movers and shakers, and compellingly unique in their colourful fusions.

Not absolutely everything works, but so much of it does that Reason to Believe performs a neat trick: it makes the listener want to discover exactly where these songs came from and why Hardin wasn’t more appreciated in his lifetime.

It’s an album whose ingenuous, often nakedly honest songwriting offers an emotional fist gloved in arrangements of seductive velvet.

What remains is a nocturnal set of refined resonance.

An LP as weighty, compelling and brilliant as The Bad Seeds have ever produced.

Metheny’s use of it here delivers a pale, expensive shadow of what a real band can achieve. The project doesn’t feel like it has longevity, and this release is for the hardcore only.

Where that album [2008’s Supreme Balloon] over-extended a limited palette, this set bridles with impish imagination.

Easy on the ears they are not, yet it’s hard not to get swept along by Iceage’s droll, disaffected but ultimately joyous punk surge.

There’s enough ambition here to elevate The Mavericks’ comeback above the perfunctory.

There is truly nothing edgy about this collection.

Marr’s guitar work can be fascinating--but it’s forever shadowed by less-appealing vocal work.

This album unfortunately fails to showcase his strengths, and proves something of an obstacle course for the listener to negotiate.

While Amok--like The Eraser--is unlikely to arouse the same passions as, for instance, In Rainbows, it’s an often fulfilling and fascinating indulgence.

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

ANNA is strategic in its experimentation, but represents a fairly dramatic departure from its makers’ brand, so hats off to that.

This treasure trove of well-recorded European broadcasts from ORTF and Swedish Radio represents the first official CD set tracking Miles in transition from acoustic quintet to all-out fusion.

A Moving Picture proves a more nakedly ambitious--in the humdrum sense of the word--follow-up, which struggles to strike the right balance between street cred and pop appeal.

This is the stuff of vicious hangovers, unkempt hair being head-banged back and forth furiously, and eyebrow-raising debacles on public transport.