EX is not awful, but it’s certainly not good either.

In My World is a counterpoint to McQueen’s recent work: while the introduction of vocals reveals another side to Matthewdavid, the humour--too often overplayed--is its weakness element.

By and large, the songs on Why Do the Heathen Rage? are brilliantly executed hybrids that manage to subvert received ideas even once you’ve processed the album’s premise, thanks to superb transposing and Daniel’s knack for lashing together motifs from utterly different styles.

It’s an honest album, and while you may not skip back to all of it, its jagged pieces all have their place.

Even given the sheer wealth of variety and detail Fhloston Paradigm crams in, it’s never lofty or inaccessible; instead, it both upholds an electronic music convention even as it carves its own singular niche.

It does occasionally miss the mark, but that there are any hits to speak of at all shows that Eno and Hyde have a good deal more to offer than the uninspiring gruel of their debut.

The album’s periods of gestation and decomposition so outweigh its moment of flowering that a full listen is much more a chore than a pleasure.

Krell’s most complete album to date: not because it exactly answers the question of where his position is in relation to pop--nor the question of the title, nor any questions at all--but because it perfectly captures that oscillation that has always been at the centre of his work.

It’s all genre-splicing and too little genre-defining, and I can’t help but think that Martyn, with both his musical knowledge and his production chops, is capable of something better.

Packed with bold ideas and striking new forms, Da Mind Of Traxman Volume 2 is as good a testament as any to the ongoing vitality of footwork.

In The Lonely Hour is an album made by an artist who spent years waiting to be famous, but when he got there, found that he didn’t actually have that much to say.

Ominousness is woven into the fabric of Until Silence, where beauty and bleakness coexist synergistically, as though it’s impossible to have one without the other.

With Ultraviolence, Lana Del Rey remains a singular figure in music, sounding (and addressing the idea of authenticity) like no one else.

An uncharacteristically difficult end to a record that’s not quite a paradigm smasher, but a must-hear for anyone who likes their hip-hop weird and with teeth.

Cutler’s music hasn’t tended to concern itself with tension so much as otherwordly harmony. When he introduces a bit of friction--between the real and the imagined, the grit of life and the sheen of fantasy--the results are all the more seductive.

There’s very little sense of a uniting personality, and you’re left wondering how genuinely great an album H&LA might make, how much more they would feel like a band rather than a conceptual project, if they cut loose as much as they do on ‘The Key’.

Their music is about 40 per cent less exciting shorn from the lurid splatter of their videos, but music in 2014 is a more interesting place for their presence.

It succeeds as an exploration of bodies, but more specifically, of the kinds of tension created by the dichotomies between them and within them, throughout an intimately crafted pop record that treads that careful line between wallowing and pleasure in the way that all the very best pop records do.

You could even argue that To Be Kind is Gira’s first rock ‘n’ roll album, and though Swans’ records are invariably seedy, To Be Kind is downright sexy, tender like a snake and surprisingly intimate.

Despite her Instagram and “turnt-up” references, the bounce brought to the album by of-the-moment hitmakers like MikeWiLLMadeIt and Hit-Boy and her undeniably personal subject matter, the record just doesn’t have the same candid, bold edge that characterised Beyonce’s huge statement.

Government Plates is sometimes just incoherent.... But in the end these are minor quibbles.

If his aim was to give musical form to the eastern DRC’s “unnerving beauty and unflinching horror”, then A U R O R A is a dazzling success.

The result is an album of experimental electronic pop that, sadly, doesn’t do much of any consequence, sounding both big-studio glossy and curiously cheap, busy but largely flailing around in the hope of finding an interesting direction.

In Conflict is an impressive record of worthy content, but the day he finds a way to reconcile his musical chops to his pop ear, then Owen Pallett will surely make his masterpiece.

Generally the album hits all the right notes, with great vocals and solid sounds, but at times you may be overpowered by the sickly-sweet nature of the beast.

Indie Cindy plays just like one of Black’s solo efforts, but with better session players: good, yes, but never great.

Possibly, some will leave Luminous disappointed that The Horrors haven’t pulled off another quantum leap, but by slowing down and bedding into their sound, they’ve made a record that feels both studied and instinctual, elevated and elemental, and that’s no mean feat.

More sweeping and grand than any of their previous records, the trio’s fourth LP is by far their most cinematic.