Parker's music is approached from a post-Coltrane, post-free jazz aesthetic, with the rhythmic edginess of bebop elided into an all-the-time-in-the-world fluidity. A masterpiece.

The world adored the xx's Mercury Prize-winning debut album xx. Coexist is, if anything, an even finer piece of work.

It is absolutely beautiful.

Even though the album comes in at nearly 80 minutes, surprisingly it doesn’t feel too long. This is largely because it doesn’t get stuck in an Afrobeat rut.

Feels Like Home is musically conservative, socially ingratiating, politically vulnerable. It is unmistakably a piece of product. But it is also brilliant.

ODIGTS is the soul album of the century. It might yet turn out to be the album of the year

A genuine classic, in fact.

The first really serious contender for album of the year thus far.

Her self-produced fourth album executes another dramatic confidence leap.

All of this adds up to something very special indeed.

MBV leaves all other post-rock experimentalists looking like trivial dilettantes. If jet engines could sing, these would be their hymns.

Stapleton's writing for this recording, satisfies on every level.

It's a rather beautiful thing.

This may well be Henriksen’s most approachable album--certainly for people coming to him for the first time--and even the semi-commercial breakthrough he deserves. It is also absolutely sublime.

The most perfect suite of music recorded in my lifetime.

Marvellous.

Fear Fun is the kind of album that can name-check Sartre, Heidegger and Neil Young in the same song.

What comes across most is the sheer unbridled enthusiasm expressed in the complex, racing rhythms, squalling sax solos, twanging electric guitar and crooning vocals.

The most compelling Spanish album I've heard in ages.

But where Learning drifted into the ether, this captivating follow-up thrives off harnessing his fragile sensibility to fulsome melodies.

There are four CDs' worth but it's enormously rewarding, like mid-period Miles Davis playing Ligeti.

The occasional familiar, Carpenters-esque track aside, it makes for an exhilarating musical progression--even as his lyrical style remains unchanged.

Drawing on anything from Medieval plainsong to free jazz, she creates an extraordinary sensation of light, air, and space.

Funny, sad, perfect.

This is a band for fans of Leonard Cohen, Scott Walker and Nick Cave who wondered where their next great love was coming from...it's already here.

To the relief of anyone who carries a torch for the reclusive genius, it's a beauty.

It's that rare commodity: an album to immerse yourself in and spend time with, both things no one does any more.

Wonderful.

Always may well be the Californians' finest yet.

There are overworked beatscapes and confounding lyrics, sure--but also multiple sublime, fully formed songs.

If you like smart pop and are not familiar, hearing Bird for the first time will feel like discovering a new planet.

Hot Cakes is a rock-solid home win from the band who still do feelgood hard rock better than anyone alive.

Words and Music, the first full studio album in an aeon from Sarah Cracknell, Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs, is a masterclass of pop theory and practice in perfect harmony.

These songs bounce, buzz and bubble along with timeless life.

The eighth Marilyn Manson album features some of his finest lyrics yet and, musically, it often approaches the heyday of Holy Wood and Mechanical Animals.

There is joy in these grooves; the attentive care of studio perfectionists, and the warm embrace of an old friend.

A delicious hybrid of Portishead and Nancy Sinatra.

The songs are sparky and Cherry is in excellent voice as she raps, sings and swings against the sparse, drum and bass-style backing orchestrated by Four Tet.

If music be the food of love, Kelis has cooked up something tasty enough to satisfy all but the hungriest of hearts.

Porter has made the best vocal album in an age.

Annie Clark’s fourth album is frequently extraordinary.

A good “deluxe” remaster job will do at least two things: one, it’ll strip away centuries of digital compression and make the music sound as if you’ve never heard it properly before; two, it’ll include additional material that gives insight into how the finished work was shaped. Moondance delivers on both counts.

Ghost on Ghost is as dense stylistically as it is lyrically.

There's not a duff track or dull moment in this 75 minutes of studio material.

The most vibrant, organic and energy infused African hip-hop debut since K'naan's The Dusty Foot Philosopher.

Love This Giant is a skewed and funky instant classic.

Everything is great.

As with some diseases, the album gets worse before it gets better, but by the end you're left stunned in admiration. Hell, there's even a redemptive arc. Amazing.

Gruff’s gorgeous voice helps humanise Feltrinelli. Never more so than on “Hoops With Fidel”, which, rather than demonising him and Castro, conveys the ideal of international revolution as a beautiful thing. As beautiful, in fact, as this album.

The Cumbrian quartet haven't fumbled the ball with the follow-up. Smother, recorded in the shadow of Snowdonia, tinkles and twinkles like the classiest adult-alternative pop of the 1980s.

The mood of uplifting-melancholia survives and this time out Vernon needs no dramatic backstory. Clearly, his is a talent that loves company as much as it loves misery.

Bad As Me is as good as it gets.

Meta-pop doesn’t come much more moving than this.

This is one of the most exhilarating albums of the year.

A welcome addition to the Beastie canon, and if it gets them back out on the road, it'll be an absolutely precious one.

Catchy yet abrasive, noisy yet intimate, kind of funny yet also kind of scary, this is post-pop at its most vertiginously original.

This is Cash at his rawest and most riveting, singing his soul out to platoons, prisoners and presidents alike. Hard to describe in terms that are adequate.

Bloodsports is effortlessly superior to its predecessor A New Morning, and averages out roughly on a level with Head Music (though more consistent in quality).

It sounds like a soundtrack for the end of the world, or the birth of new worlds. Extraordinary.

The none-more-Nietzschean, grandiose-apocalyptic mood continues through the utterly splendid Olympic theme "Survival", with its über-ELO arrangement, and "Animals", with its sound effects of an angry, riotous mob.

Post-millennial indie boy-rock has taken a savage beating here. And it may prove the best it’s ever had.

First Aid Kit sing harmonies so close you couldn't run a Band Aid between them.

As always, Ladytron make the world feel a more haunted, evocative, romantic place. Faultless.

14 songs of keening, romantic acoustic music of great seriousness and lightness of being.

The worldy influence remains but never overwhelms and the album contains at least half a dozen songs that are as simple and profound as anything Simon has ever written.

This one's a beauty.

A cool, edgy soundtrack for the summer, should it ever arrive.

An unprecedented futuristic hybrid of dubstep, speedcore and math-rock, with lyrics which charge towards unexplored lexicographical horizons.

Wilfully abstruse, then, but still one hell of a talent.

Between the pub and the high seas, Elbow reset their mission statement here: to navigate the heart’s tides with their art intact.

King Lear probably sounded like this after a couple of days on the heath.

Tracks such as "Epilogue to a Marriage" here, serve as a reminder that there's always room for the real thing, and you'll know it when it hits you.

This is an album that's ostentatiously overloaded on melody, and on all-round sonic luxury. This is the one.

If his follow-up doesn't evince quite the same exuberance, it still twinkles with a well-travelled exoticism.

When it's good, it's a thrilling and ambtitious state-of-the-nation address.

She's on the cover, smirking in front of an old map: a naughty sea god(dess) in a Cruikshank cartoon. Which somehow suits the discursive post-folk rompery of the music: highly arranged, wordy as an Elvis Costello song with larks taking the place of bitterness.

The majority of A (clever title, in the context of Faltskog's history) consists of dignified, age appropriate ballads.

It's a clever, sensitive record.

This album shimmers.

The internationalist (Scouse-Chinese-Scottish-Bulgarian-Israeli) electro-rock quartet may not have presented a comprehensive summary of their career here, but it's a superb starting point for Ladytron latecomers.

One day, maybe the Lips will play nice again. Until then, they and their Fwends have given us plenty to get our heads around.

It's lovely to fall asleep to. Which is a compliment, not a complaint.

CocoRosie [is] squat, inventively, somewhere between Fever Ray and Joanna Newsom.

Here are a dozen more such, all beautifully crafted and conceived with poetic flair, arranged nicely for restrainedly plucked instruments, sung in a thin soprano which strains into a yelp.

With treasurable details – the dubbed-up refrain of "Black Icy Stare", the Merseybeat-ish groove of "Karmatron" – feeding into an overall ambience of lotus-eating sensuality.

Glowing Mouth is so subtly soaring it could restore words such as "atmospheric" and "portentious" to the rock lexicon.

David Bowie's perpetual predicament is that he can't escape David Bowie's past. In that respect, he's just like the rest of us: we can't escape David Bowie's past either. The Next Day leaves you wondering why you'd ever want to.

While this may once have been filed under 'shoegaze', now we can call it 'noisy dream pop' and just wade in its wash of guitars.

The set list's rather obvious and the interstitial chat goes on a bit, but the heart of the man is there to be heard.

What's revealed is what's often been outshone by the originals: the sheer quality of the songwriting and vocals.

Built for repeat listening, this will keep on giving. Don't you just hate it when the hype is right?

D&B&G is delicate and unaffected but clever and soulful--a balm and an inquisition.

The perfect soundtrack for early summer, and all the possibilities it holds.

You might even argue that this and its predecessors, My Name Is Buddy (2007) and Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down (2011), represent the most cogent work of his long career.

At what point does a child prodigy turn into a talent so exceptional that we no longer talk about age? Sarah Jarosz’s third album answers that question in style (though just for the record, the banjo, guitar and mandolin supremo is now 22).

A genuinely empathetic production, then, which does not pull up many trees.

Rokia rocks, and it's a fine and bracing thing to hear.

Her debut is an accomplished, glossily shimmering thing.