It’s different enough from its predecessor to show marked progress, but with all the original essentials present and correct. The bar was set high; All Pigs Must Die have set it higher still.

This is a record with so much swagger, poise and confidence it could have been recorded by a band twice their age.

It pays to listen to the originals, to form a full appreciation of just how much Jones brings to the table in each interpretation, expressing more emotion than he probably has at any point in his career. The instrumentation is the icing on the cake.

In an interview once, she admitted, “I see things in my head. I dream in colour”. This posthumous addition to her near perfect catalogue confirms that statement, expertly revealing how attuned to the universe she was and how vibrantly her imagination shone in the dark.

Clever but debauched, silly but serious, this is the best album of their career thus far.

That they emerge victorious is a tribute to the strength of these fine songs as well as some seriously glamourous production attitude.

This is a staggering record, displaying not only a golden streak of songwriting but also a band newly energised to their cause - making it a return to form of near biblical proportions. Highly recommended.

Where an artist as eclectic and unpredictable as this might go next is anybody’s guess, but on the basis of this quietly spectacular album, it’s likely that listeners will be more than happy to follow him into the unknown.

This is a brave but captivating debut album, exploring the inner parts of the mind, and proves a very strong addition to the Brownswood canon.

Maya Shenfeld’s towering achievement is to craft a highly effective polemical record with no words, the music saying all that needs to be said: throw in imaginative sound design and a deft approach to pacing and the result is an out-and-out triumph.

This is very much an album that feels necessary right now--one that packs a political punch without being didactic or evangelical--and offers positive thinking, including a clarion call of co-operative and community responses to global issues.

The Year Of Hibernation is a powerful bit of emotional alchemy, arresting and enchanting in its naked simplicity, and Powers has accomplished a tour de force far beyond his bedroom walls or his 22 years.

Field Report’s debut maintains a wondrous sense of ambiguity while still creating an unbelievable urgency.

Julianna Barwick is crafting gorgeously effecting sounds in a way that nobody has quite heard before, far beyond the snickering Enya comparisons or the reductive ties to Eno's ambience, this isn't music for thinking or studying, this is just music for living.

It’s easily Alice Cooper’s strongest album in decades, a testament to the resilience, and seemingly endless creative capacity the man has.

An album that sits comfortably in the 4AD canon of excellence.

The soundtrack brings together the two phases of Walker, so to speak: the rich, sweeping orchestral one heard from The Walker Brothers and through the solo Scotts 1-4, before morphing into the avant-garde, claustrophobic, doom-laden one from 1995’s Tilt onwards.

Weezer have made one of their most catchy and insightful records to date.

Complete Strangers is one of those collections where over the course of several listens each song enjoys time as being considered the highpoint of the album only for another track to supplant it soon after. Whisper it, but Vetiver may have just made one of the albums of the year.

Swing Lo Magellan affords generous breathing space to Dirty Projectors' music: a context in which new levels of unpretentious eloquence positively flourish.

There’s the archetypical vulnerability lurking beneath each track, but their sound suggests something everyone from that mid-2000s period has (hopefully) done--matured and become more assured. With it, indie pop mk II has as well. Excellent, this.

One of the 21st century's most intelligent and satisfying bands (musically, lyrically, emotionally) have once again set out their stall, and once again produced a work of inspired resonance, capturing truth after truth, in all its muddled, human realism.

It’s a remarkably assured album that shines light on Hayes as an artist of note while further enhancing Brewis’ reputation as an irrepressible source of creativity. It might only be January but this is an album that will bring joy right up to the end of the year and beyond.

Anyone with even a passing interest in Royksopp--whose ears have been pricked by an Eple or Poor Leno--could do far worse than immerse themselves in one of 2009's greatest releases.

Songdreaming is a big musical event. It is a great place to start if you are less familiar with folk music, opening its arms to ambient and electronic influences while simultaneously celebrating traditional instruments and old melodic forms. It is also a great place to visit if you’ve lived with these forms of music for decades.

At times, it’s so honest that you may feel like you’re prying into someone’s diary, but it will be a major surprise if this funny, clever, heartbreaking record isn’t nestling at the top of the Album Of The Year polls come December.

Falling down, getting up, and persevering through music is something Superchunk have done time and time again. On I Hate Music, they’ve bested even themselves.

The stronger of the two records by a clear mile, it breaks away from Sword’s definition of drone to incorporate clear distinctions in its abrasive mise-en-scène.