[Silver Age is] a man doing what he does best.

This is the most balanced album of Mason's career, or certainly the least precipitous. There is still a yawning void beneath him, but for once it doesn't sound as if he's about to fall into it, and you can't help but share his relief.

It meets expectations, and while surpassing them is something achieved only occasionally, this is a record that well complements a no-work state of mind.

The evocative lyrics sometimes suffer from overly mannered or just overdone phraseology.... But these are ultimately prices worth paying for the pleasingly poetic, adventurous and occasionally florid use of words that mark Villagers out as one of the more interesting, literate and imaginative storytellers of recent years.

A wonderful grab-bag of anomalous sounds that pilfers magpie-like from genre after genre as it charts its 41-minute course.

Heaven is a record with the power to grab your heart, like an ex-lover you just can't shake off--no matter how many years you've been without them.

A fans-pleasing eighth album from Britain's most consistently brilliant band.

The band either demonstrates a glorious and steadfast refusal to grow up, or become possessed by yelps that no amount of Auto-Tune could ever fix.

Twins is a pile-driving yet playful record that loudly proclaims is influences.

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.

The spacious production lends The Wonder Show… an appealing as-live feeling, an intimacy that Oldham has often turned to his advantage in the past and does so again here.

The Montreal-based artist has again delivered some fascinating and healthily progressive music on Visions, her third album.

The result is an album that is far less-crowded than previous works and one that, on the whole, feels suitably bucolic.

That voice, with its hint of Gene Pitney, is a piercing, precise tool which lifts him above the laddish milieu. Ubiquity may beckon.

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.

The familiar nature of this material takes nothing away from Trilogy. This is a great commercially available introduction to a young RnB talent who's following Frank Ocean into the mainstream.

At times it can settle too readily into a kind of country chug, and one begins to feel stuck for too long in a dusty, last-breath pick-up on some interminable road trip. But when it is good, it is very, very good.

This is a fully realised tribute to early 80s pop-RnB music, filled with candy-sweet keyboard sounds and beats that could be the work of a battered old Casio drum machine.

When the trio clicks it is utterly magnificent.

Swanlights succeeds exactly where you might not expect it to: Hegarty sounds content, revitalised. This is a record that revels in a sense of joy.

Now, it seems, her time has finally come.

It's a mesmerising album which confirms that Björk can weave dumfounding wonders from Silly String--whatever's placed before her, she can turn to her advantage, taking her audience on a trip the likes of which no other contemporary artist is capable of planning, let alone embarking on. In a word: amazing.

As tasters go, it’s exciting fare: the appetite for more isn’t so much whetted as left in a state of delightful fervent.

Ten is incredible. It's up there with Gold, Substance and Discography in terms of greatest-hits sets.

The Sea and Cake's music is more about mood than narrative, as with the largely acoustic Harbor Bridges' gorgeous evocation of summer's end.

With a signature sound established at the first time of asking, The xx's challenge was to both expand their palette and satisfy the demands of a huge audience. And through refinement rather than reinvention, they've succeeded in singular style.

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.

It's lengthy, but the sensitivity of every guitar tickle and percussive touch, as well as main man Christopher Owens' spellbinding voice, means that it is rarely boring.