Darnielle's lyrics are as true as ever to his incisive yet confused style; 'confused' because, as his myopic cleverness makes for phrases as bracing and direct as can be, his words always--simultaneously--obfuscate or complicate themselves.

Don't listen to it because it's dubstep, or R&B or soul or from a singer-songwriter who isn't a David Grey clone, although it's all those things. Just listen to it because in any genre, it's a great album.

Amply weighted for a debut, Silence Yourself comprises a balance of really excellent stuff and the simply very good.

A Raw Youth aims to sabotage meathead rock and succeeds. Le Butcherettes preserve all the best parts--the rush, the muscle, the vocalist as GOD--but expose the celebrated macho ego as a terrorising other.

Despite their implacable cool there’s a lot of soul searching going on here and the band turn their back on the superficial and hedonistic L.A, setting out in search of something deeper and more profound. In Worship The Sun they find it.

They have evolved from the formula of the debut album, delivering a better album without compromising that which made them good in the first place.

Both musically and lyrically, Utopia is extraordinarily gripping and majestically consistent in its intent to shake and uplift. If there is one aspect that runs the risk of breaking the spell it is its duration.

Livin' in Elizabethan Times is 28 minutes of big dumb fun. Big dumb fun with a great concept. Each song is full of hilarious deadpan lyrics, delivered like only Mason knows how, intricate composition that showcase both Mason’s and Duffy’s skill and prowess. If this is a one off, then we’ve been given something special, if this is the first instalment in a series of releases, then we’re in real treat.

Iris is that very rare thing: a soundtrack that can make a superb stand-alone listen.

She may be about to extract herself from the heat-warped dazzle pop of Good Evening, which is probably a good idea considering the amount of opaque imitators crushing hard on her heels, but for now Gonzalez has created one of the most understated and beautifully murky pop records of 2009.

This is a record that demands your reflection and immersion, rather than just mindlessly wigging out.

This is the most immediate album Cocker has put his name to in ten years.

Thee More Shallows have, in a short time, perfected their sound to an extent that they can take multiple left turns without losing their way.

Pale Young Gentlemen–-as an album--is musical theatre. Switching between moments of mid-tempo melancholy to upbeat cabaret, they strike a perfect juxtaposition.

There’s an ever-so-slight lack of the precariously raw noise that made Ugly so thrilling, but the crisp, imaginative songwriting redresses the balance.

Hormone Lemonade is an endearing listen that focuses primarily on the here and now, and as a result messrs Gane, Dilworth and Zapf have every reason to be overtly satisfied at their latest creation.

Because past the pop songs, past the soaring (and let’s not make any bones about it, this album soars in places) this is a supremely clever album.

It's something that can be quite brilliant: to paraphrase Special Agent Dale Cooper--Squarepusher's path is a strange and difficult one.

The worst thing you can say about anything on this record is that they’re solidly crafted, faultless songs.

Wild Mountain Nation stands alone as something of interest and disregard to the normal guidelines and restrictions in guitar pop.

On The Optimist, Anathema really do cement their title as one of the UK’s most revered rock bands, prog or otherwise: it’s a big jumble of ambitious ideas, executed near-perfectly--a mess, but a big, sprawling, dense, euphoric, beautiful one.

Keepers of the Light is a rarity for a double album: its indulgence (seriously, 144 minutes?) rarely grates, and its individuality doesn't cramp its funkiness.

In the midst of the beautiful descending piano chords of the Twin Peaks referencing ‘Leo Needs a New Pair of Shoes’ a blade of static erupts without warning, coming to life with an extremely high-frequency version of a distress flare’s hiss. Once this has faded the track’s coda becomes the most beautiful section of the album, clean descending string-playing blending with a more frenetic bowing and echoing wolf cries.

While 4:44 may not be his greatest album, it is a much valued deviation from the norm, a surprising feat considering his kaleidoscopic catalog

By the time of Smote Reverser's finale 'Beat Quest', it's plain difficult to not be impressed by this insanely talented band yet again--may their reign long continue.

Haters are gonna hate given the artists in question – but to be disappointed with Watch the Throne is to be disappointed with the rap game in 2011.

Ditherer also displays sneak-up-on-you tendencies, initially bewildering, tough to get a handle on, eventually beguiling and beautiful in a manner magnified by casual boundary obliteration.

This isn’t a revivalist vanity project, oh no, it’s full of contemporary production and composition, as you’d expect given Cook’s crucial CV.

With the pop landscape becoming increasingly homogeneous, more artists need to experiment, and the variety displayed across Froot's 12 tracks is impressive.

For all its reference points, it's a remarkable and original record.

If you have even the teensiest taste for the guilty charms of Kylie, the ‘Babes or Girls Aloud, this album is a must.

It’s hard to overstate the extent to which the excellence of this record is sealed by Timony’s bullish approach to sonic economy; there are no flourishes, no accentuations on Rips, only precisely what needs to be there; noodling guitar parts and an unyielding punk aesthetic.

Julia Holter’s is a talent best shown stretched, pulled-out and free-flowing in live performance. This recording environment suits her just right.

As a document of the (musical) times, a beautiful, sundry package and admirable unification of today’s very finest towards a common goal, Dark Was The Night is unbeatable.

If any criticism is to be levelled here, it would be that the album could so easily have been a double-disc effort, but this is a minor gripe on an otherwise flawless live document of a band striving for--and arguably achieving--greatness.

Axe To Fall makes good with an appetite for reinvention.

In execution, 13&God is a surprisingly sombre album that'll appeal to fans of forward-thinking hip-hop and beyond.

As you’d expect from a band as clockwork tight and renowned for perfectionism as Kraftwerk, the quality of sound and precision of delivery is so spot-on as to be worthy of a studio recording.

This one takes a few listens, but in aiming for less, Girls Names have easily achieved as much as they have in previous albums, if not more. Time should be kind to the invention on display underneath all the layers.

It’s an intriguing and refreshing listen.

With prog moodiness and pastoral folkiness both hanging heavily over The Amazing, it's the more psychedelic edges that twirl around the songs, dragging them into tangled and weird territory, that makes Gentle Stream occasionally exceptional.

An escapist Jamaica-pop lark with a traditional bent and a big heart, in the realms of good-times bass you could do a lot worse than the classy and charming Watch Me Dance.

The first thing to say is that the remastering is pretty good: it's in no way a record that needed remastering, but it's definitely one that suits being remastered.

There’s only two real weak points to the album.... That’s it. The rest of this is good to great.

Feelin Kinda Free could be the best apocalypse soundtrack you’ll ever hear.

At 14 tracks Dancer Equired is at a glance their second shortest record, with the added bonus that the cleaner production job makes subtler variances more discernible and the record as a whole a more varied experience.

Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light 1 is not just an inevitable player in album of the year discussions for those with more avant garde tastes; it's yet more proof of Earth's symptomatic tendency to continuously re-evaluate their own legacy and drag themselves forward simultaneously.

Whilst the exposure of O’Sullivan and Tucker’s pop heart has been more than welcome, one senses that there are many more sides to this complex, stubbornly esoteric collaboration that are yet to be revealed, and that’s an exciting thought indeed.

The EP alternates between dense metaphor and wistful candour; the places artists invent to retreat from their problems, and confessional accounts of the places they literally go, in retreat; solo piano as a cipher for authenticity... and ethereal synthscapes as a cipher for utopian fantasy. What distinguishes it is that there's an epiphany at the end.

Emma Pollock’s confident third solo album.

Despite being an album that appears to be made up of such personal and reflective lyrical themes, the tunes themselves mostly rattle by in a flash with less regard for steady contemplation.

Do It is simply a case of Clinic once again doing what they do best; but with a new-found vigour that rediscovers the confident swagger of earlier releases while building upon realms explored on later excursions.

Throughout the album Ronson plays the role of puppet master to an impressive collection of musical talent.

The Age of Adz is not an unqualified success; occasionally it does feel like a little too much, and until the dust has settled it is difficult to say where it will sit in his discography as a whole.

This is essential listening and a likely cult classic for years to come.

The thing is absolutely laced with wall-to-wall bangers.

You could accuse Cymbals Eat Guitars of being derivative, but the idea is that all of these influences are broken down to component parts and then reassembled into something different. Some of the pieces are still recognisable, others disguised or twisted.

Everything’s so crisply atmospheric, and Stelmanis is such a talismanic presence, that the album’s momentum never flags, even if there’s sometimes a minute or two without a hook.

What Live At The Hollywood Bowl, and its parent movie, shows us is their primal power. The sound and the fury (not to mention the banter) that conjured a roar unheard since, both on and off the stage.

What is most interesting about this record, apart from it’s self-assured collection of off-beat laments is the amount of exciting doorways it flings open for the future.

No Luscious Life exceedingly delivers on all the promise Golden Teacher have shown so far in their still relatively short careers and is perhaps the moment that breaks them through into a wider audience.

When the mood is right, Trust sounds like one of the purest doses of emotion you can experience.

Questions aside, it sounds badass; dope, even, like any good hip-hop record should.

They’re not inventing any new wheels at this stage of their career, but dEUS are delivering the goods at a level where established fans will immediately click their subtle steps forward and newcomers can get a grasp of what to expect from prior long-players should they decide to delve into the catalogue.

This is music that the listener can plunge into and summon up her own images and sense from.

For while the aforementioned songs all have recognisable parts borrowed from their peers, they all also contain moments of genuine beauty, fear and grandness which demands you to fall into hell just as Dante's Devil demanded him to.

Will this please die hard fans? It surely will, being filled with the signature Don Broco charm and sound, but shows elements of growth and diversity--as a third album should. The year is off to a good start for them.

It’s a well-rounded album that defies the notion of a man being allowed to rock himself to sleep on the porch of rock’s sappy dotage.

To conclude that Bromst is a triumph of inventiveness is too easy. It is wildly inventive, but what impresses most is that for all the levity, Dan Deacon has managed to impressively reign in his flights of fancy.

A refreshing debut.

On this record they have taken a bold step forward. It shows them as a band with greater vision and ambition than they first seemed and one who want to lead conversations rather than follow them.

Yet despite being a busier effort than …To The Beat of a Dead Horse, it's probably on the whole more accessible due to a sharper production job and a new found clarity in the vocals.

Kiss Each Other Clean makes Sam Beam four for four--more if you count the EPs and 2009's rarities set Around the Well.

The album, while inevitably stuffed with humour as per the MO of any good rap set, is as dark as coffee, especially as it comes to its close.

Far from being just a gifted synthesiser experimenter, then, Sarah Davachi is increasingly establishing herself as a multi-faceted explorer of the many liminal terrains of minimalist music. Gave in Rest is a work of disarmingly simple, yet often extremely profound, beauty.

Fading Frontier is another superlative achievement from a band who are, unfailingly, one of life’s great mysteries.

Chardiet’s electronic manipulations are subtler and more thought out than those of many of her peers. This, ultimately, means that Bestial Burden, like Abandon before it, deserves to be considered as near the top of its class.

It’s not so much sidestepped the perils of the second album as trampled them, taking the sound that won the band all those packed festival tents and driving it forward, matted and bloodied like Miles Teller at the end of Whiplash, no longer weeping and withdrawn but pulsing and alive. And it’s genuinely exciting to hear.

Dougall’s voice, which is always sounds faintly sad (all the best voices do) laying a melancholic consistency across the whole thing. Star-shaped indeed.

Imperial Wax Solvent is another remarkable batch of brilliantly deranged tales no whiskey-breathed war veteran across the bar could trump.

Just as Waits has the power to infuse you with familiarity with the return of a chord, so do the songs of Oh My God, Charlie Darwin, like an embroidered pillow on an old porch that says ‘home sweet home’.

Fleet Foxes might have put a lot of worry into the making of Helplessness Blues, but thankfully it was worth it.

No Grace is raw, quick and dirty, just as rock 'n roll was always intended. Glorious stuff.

It means you can put on LP4 around any mixed group of people at a barbeque or house party this summer and people can simply enjoy the sensory pleasure of interesting, lively music without analysing the cultural baggage than comes with it. The King of Space-age Pop would surely be proud.

This is the album Morrissey could have made if he'd been treated to MDMA and burgers.

Perhaps they're settling into their identity... Fast and furious often, melodic often, powerful often, diverse always.

Last Days Of Summer marks the point where White Denim left behind their schizophrenia and started speaking in one voice.

The Bells is an excellent foothold into the baffling world of neo-classical composers. This is well worth a shot.

Sure, Abraham's vocal style guarantees an intense outcome, but Glass Boys drives forward, constantly questioning.

It’s great that Electric Wizard are still around and are still pushing the limits of heavy music--not just for metal itself, but for British metal in particular.

Comparisons or not, Rose exceeded the expectations that her EP drummed up and delivered a beautiful and tender, youthfully energetic album that crosses the line Rose herself has been toeing so carefully between indie and country.

It’s a pleasure to hear a group take a step forward on a record of reflection and insight, and whilst it may lack a visceral thrill for some and needs to be approached with a careful ear, many will appreciate the nuance, engagement and depth it offers.

Honeys is a savvy, all-inclusive slab of disenchanted rage that doesn't hold back at any juncture.

It is chocked full of majestic pop hooks, but these are offset by ad-hoc rhythms and synths. Trágame Tierra is a remarkable album, but you’ve got to give it a chance.

It's certainly the most arresting record that she's made.

Ever changing and insightful, Arms Around A Vision never becomes staid or complacent.

DOOM has taken a backseat in an attempt to mentor this young talent and under his guidance Nehru has put in a spectacular performance.

If there is one thing in this world that can elevate even the weakest of lyrics from the trough of personal diary hell, it’s a catchy melody. Thankfully this record overflows with them.