A truly elemental opus.

‘Nurse’ is the closest to creating a landmark on parallel with ‘Daydream Nation’ they’ve come since that particular record's nameday in ‘88, and in it’s dense textures it maybe signals the extinction of the antediluvian No Wave idyll; a Robert Zimmerman trip that somehow got mixed up with Joni Mitchell, Black Flag and a conceptualist oddball.

You won’t hear a more exhilarating, dizzying record for a long time to come.

The opening half of 'Penance...' alone blows every so-called rock act polluting our airwaves clean away, such is the savage malevolence that resonates within every single syllable that spouts from Joe Cardamone's mouthful of poison.

Banhart is a complete antidote to all the consumer focus groups or hit-writers, too scared to tamper with the formula. He has stumbled upon a personal Eureka that says there're no laws governing what can be written about in song except self-imposed ones and he's taken that to his heart, and in Technicolor.

'Mercury' from 1993 is widely regarded as AMC's finest moment, albeit their flawed masterpiece. This new album is right up there with it, and 1990's 'Everclear', too.

It's the (insert made-up genre here, including the word 'progressive' and/or suffix '-core') album of the year.

Stunning and dizzying, Sung Tongs’ strangeness will spin around your head for months to come.

Encompassing chamber pop melodies, angular art-rock, lavish orchestration and post-punk vocals, its sheer sonic size and ambition goes some way towards justifying the amount of gushing praise that's been heaped upon this album since its September release on Merge last year. The fact that the music is so paradoxically life-affirming and euphoric makes it much easier to write, what now feel like, trite hyperboles.

One of the most assured, unashamedly danceable albums that we’ve heard for quite a while.

The new album, Relationship of Command, is one of the most amazing collections of music I have ever heard.

It’s spellbinding.

It’s the closeness and the honesty which makes ‘I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning’ a thing of awe.

I Am A Bird Now is a beautiful, emotive, glorious, and sometimes sinister album that will top many a critic's list come the end-of-year polls, and justifiably so.

This is ageless music, and utterly, one hundred per cent essential.

It's practically a compulsory purchase.

It's an absolute must-buy release.

It is utterly engaging, totally absorbing and, well, absolutely essential.

A work of formidable and pristine beauty.

It's an exceptionally accomplished piece of work that should place Matchbook Romance at the forefront of the cutting edge, POST-emo scene.

This is one of the most rich and accomplished albums of recent times. Essential.

If you’ve any interest, whatsoever, in rock music in any of its subgenre forms, you need to afford Blood Mountain some considerable attention.

Where Subtle use many words to convey many things, I will use one: perfection.

It’s a vivid and beautiful painting that you can walk into; a magic window into another world that I'd be happy to get lost in, and never come back.

It’s unpredictable, ridiculously clever, catchy as hell and as perfect a pop album as you’re ever likely to hear.

'Cuckoo Cuckoo' is another moment in which Animal Collective reach a new level of compositional mastery and broaden their territory.

With his debut record Jamie T has--whether he meant to or not-- sound-tracked perfectly the condition of being, as described in Michael Bracewell's book "England Is Mine," today's ‘suburban dandy.'

Seriously: this is one of 2007’s finest LPs, no question.