Boris’ expansive approach acts as a foil to Uniform’s tense restrictions, and it really shouldn’t work as well as it does. And yet it does.

They deserve every bit of success this album brings them, simply because A Different Kind of Fix is one of the most accomplished albums of the year.

For the first time in awhile, however, the energies he has expended have converged into a proper piece of art.

It's worth giving Castlemania a few more chances, because beneath what feels like constant disharmony, is something quite refreshing.

Everything on 151a is mixed so that every sound is waiting to be heard. Every cherished moment is ready and waiting for you to hear it.

These 12 songs deal with death and loss – themes that have never felt so tangible for so many. Yet, Field Music pull off this balancing act for one simple reason: this was their very gift to begin with.

The height of popularity for this music may have come in the first half of the last decade when bands like fellow British trios Feeder and Muse were at their peak, but music this enjoyable never becomes unpopular, especially when it's done this well.

It's an album that ceaselessly overflows with love and a desire to reach out and relate, and it's this that makes such a heavy album so accessible and so resoundingly good.

Dirt Femme is a pop record and the compositions can be a little too close to something you’ve heard before. ... When she finds the right direction though, Tove Lo earns her place in the canon of the great Swedish pop song craftsmen.

Glasgow Eyes isn’t far off being a great record, but those drops in quality aren’t just blips, they’re chasms.

Many live records these days get a bad rap because of the stigma they carry (many reek of contractual obligation), but this is a respectable and enlightening release.

The songs he thinks up are somehow both resonate and impossible to anticipate--old and new at once.

Bully’s third album is nonetheless breezy, it’s unapologetic in its raggedness, and even if they aren’t exactly reinventing the wheel they still align perfectly with each other and support Bognanno wonderfully. Bully are still pushing the painful narrative begun on Feels Like, and SUGAREGG is a continuation of those themes in a way that works powerfully for them.

This newest effort is more interested in exploration than invention. Like following the development of a Miyazaki, there’s a sense of wonder to a fantastical realm, which harmonises in a dreamlike logic. Emotional archeology, for beginners and experts alike, it resides among the group’s five best efforts.

In the end Black Girl Magic accomplishes two very important goals of any record: reminding you Honey Dijon is an artist to watch, and being quite a fun listen.

Toledo has always been a lovably jaded ringleader, and Making A Door Less Open continues to dwell on his self-criticism and feelings of redundancy. What makes it a continuously compelling listen is how each song manages to use different sonic approaches to extract a new shade of his despondency.

What hurts The Don Of Diamond Dreams is how they get ahead of themselves with minimal regard to where they’re going.

The record is about opposition: it haunts but soothes, it repels while drawing you in. As you listen, this unbridled exploration of sound will become part of your own dialectic subconscious rather than a soundtrack on your dancefloor. You have to listen.

The results are just about as great as expected. Perhaps more than ever, the rapper paints the world of the faded, the dense and the spacey are a labyrinth for Curren$y's creation.

The strongest album of their career thus far.

Palberta5000 is a fragmented noise punk rock record that hypnotized itself into believing its pop music meant to be sung to the masses, and performed with the same kind of bluster. And really, it’s hard to imagine anything more awesome than that.

Granted, as they’ve smoothed out the rough edges a bit, some of the rugged immediacy has been lost, but they’ve more than make up for it in a newfound sense of lively rhythmic interaction.

Tarot Classics isn't remarkable, but it reminds you just how good Surfer Blood are when it comes to songwriting, just how much fun it is to listen to this band, even if they're getting a tad gloomier.

It's that care and attention that leaves the older songs sounding fresh and like they belong, the newer stuff sounding great and the album as a whole sounding cohesive and pretty awesome.

There is the obvious notable contrast between Roberts' blunt delivery and the lushly treated instrumentation. But there's a pillowy negative space between all the divergent aesthetics that creates a resounding heft and felt resonance.

The whole thing sort of pops into existence, an idea and a testament, and instead of resolving, wistfully swoons into silence, all a dream. But maybe that's what Lennox was going for.

It’s tempting as ever with Berninger’s work to let it do its slow burn thing, and while repeated listens are far from unrewarding or unpleasant, the depth doesn’t feel quite as vast as what we have come to expect. Still, there’s no doubting that Berninger fans new and old will welcome the album and embrace it too.

In the end, Sun And Shade proves far more complex than the label of psych-folk would indicate, to the point that its small flaws are easily forgivable.