It's likely to be a defining point in their career even if it's not their definitive release.

"Seven Swans" is as a graceful tour de force of an album - beguiling, bewitching and beautiful.

Three loud cheers for her scattershot creativity, please.

A dreamy, sun-dappled delight, blending pastoral folk, psychedelia, free-wheeling, West Coast Americana and orchestral pop with such apparent effortlessness that its darker lyrical themes - the workings of sinister, invisible forces and the destruction wrought by war - are uncovered only by careful listening.

[A] strong contender for album of the year.

This album feels like it's tuning into everything, connecting with everything. Welcome to Maii. And welcome to the future.

It's a canny mix and results in Hercules And Love Affair making music for feet and heart, but also for the soul.

A record to throw yourself into with the same glee Robyn clearly has.

Beyond the shiny surface of these songs lurks an unusual wealth of detail decorating the landscape through which the Furries power, scattering verse after chorus after verse at breathtaking speed.

"Thunder, Lightning, Strike" is an immensely derivative album, but one which cuts and pastes its influences in a strikingly original way. Chiefly, by piling them all on at once.

Despite its branding as work-out music, 45:33 feels more like an amazing club DJ set than something to quicken one's pace on the treadmill. [Review of UK release]

If you're the sort of person who can see music--even if you can't, perhaps--this is so colourful.

A mighty fine album which neatly sidesteps the tired alt.country tag, 'Feast Of Wire' is an engaging musical road trip that you wish would never end.

It gathers momentum slowly, making for a brew so quietly potent and pulsating with repressed energy you're almost afraid to leave the room while it's playing in case it explodes messily all over the walls.

A single-disc equal of "Speakerboxxx/The Love Below".... Even if it only sold 14 copies, it would still be the best record of the year.

Over fifty minutes of slick, loungey, cinematic music.

The record that Bright Eyes fans have been praying for - carefully played, quietly honest, dripping with glorious poetry and painful insight, truly the work of utter genius.

Exquisitely detailed, you can well believe that this is an album many years in the making and one with twice those years of pain inscribed in its emotionally wracked songs.

"Late Registration" feels more comfortable in its own skin than its predecessor.

They've resurrected with this, their fourth album, the seemingly outmoded concept that with enough nurturing and faith, a band - and by extension it's audience - can grow into a beautiful thing.

A far more sonically ambitious statement than its predecessors, perfectly fusing organic sounds with production techniques that are usually the preserve of underground dance producers or R&B mavericks.

It's startling that a commercial rock band could sound this blood-and-oxygen vital, this meaningful and mighty six albums into their career.

No doubt Helplessness Blues will win Pecknold further fame and success, whether he likes it or not.

Even if "Hypnotize" is simply more of the same, with SOAD operating at such astonishing creative and emotional heights, it'll still leave every other metal band on the planet scrabbling in the dust.

That every track here reinforces that memory of him makes it an unexpectedly fitting tribute.

Quite simply, "The Drift" is unlike any other record on Earth.

What really makes this record engaging is that the simmering tension often chooses not to explode, yet somehow it works.

They don't make a better sound than your average bunch of Sonic Youth fanatics, but they make it feel better, make it seem more important, more romantic almost.