[Life is Good] proves once again that Nas is one of the smartest and most skilled players in the game.

PTSA may never stare you in the face, but you'd be a fool to turn your back on it. It's carrying a knife.

“Organic moonshine music” she calls it, and no one could argue with that.

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).

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.

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

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

There are times in this 100-plus minutes of a concert recording duplicated over two CDs and one DVD where you want to jog Mehldau's elbow, but overall it's a triumph of imagination and structure.

Slinky, spooky, superb.

Lovely album from a true one-off.

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

While there is nothing here which startles, the spirit of the music is vivid.

A passionate, heartfelt, serious, dogged effort, pregnant with reflection and as wise as you could hope for.

The Village largely whispers rather than shouts, and it's all the more powerful for it.

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

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).

Stephen Malkmus is back making amiable but unchallenging off-kilter country rock songs.

There isn’t a shadow of doubt expressed here about where Mavis is going, but there is plenty of feeling that the journey, like all journeys, is bordered with darkness.

Believers is made of a darker, spookier Americana than its predecessor: full of small-g gothic, anti-Chris Isaak-ish songs that submerge you deeper and deeper in their dark charms.

Her first UK release is a polished, bluegrassy thing of no small wonder.

Boy manage to tease something close to pop perfection.

"What's Wrong with America" is the masterpiece, doo-wop and social protest mixed with God-bothering. Someone book them for a festival, quick.

Classy pianos, minor chords and brushed drums back her ever-elegant, half-spoken syllables.

A couple of tunes, including the title track (one of two West Side Story selections, along with "Tonight"), can even sound a little pedestrian, the swing faltering. But, given time, most of it works.

The warm human purr of her ethereal vocals is juxtaposed towith fluid electronic elements and the occasional welcome interjection of bluesy guitar and jagged off-beat percussion.

It's as close to a perfect Americana album as there's been this year--fans of the California sound from CS&N to the Jayhawks will find much to love.

Big only because Arcade Fire think big, Reflektor stretches stadium rock’s reach in the acts of self-reinvention and revitalisation. Now that’s entertainment.

Taken on its own merits, however, there's plenty to enjoy, as Bush sings new vocals over remixed and re-edited backing tracks in a deeper, more weathered voice.

Fluent melodies, nature metaphors, and expressive settings are the robust ties that bind these reveries.

This album shimmers.

These are tipsy juke-joint stompers with feeling in their heart as well as dust in their grooves.

Daves is a guitarist, Thile a genius of the mandolin. Both sing. Together they hammer and tongs the songs like smiths.

Simultaneously grounded and spiralling off into the stratosphere, this is urgent, epic stuff that doesn't let up for a moment.

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

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

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

The King Of Limbs, named after a famous oak in the Savernake forest near the studio where In Rainbows was made, is good but not great.

Ageing is a war they can’t win, but by facing it head-on, the Manics have found the spur to move forwards.

It's testament to his songcraft that it feels all of a piece.

One Breath draws on choppy emotions--grief, depression, anxiety--but Calvi commands the tides with the imperious authority of Barbara Stanwyck leading her posse in Sam Fuller's wild western Forty Guns.

Truth is, the release of Tin Star should set Ortega’s adopted home town alight.

It may not be for everyone, but it's evidence that there are still some restless minds out there.

Ten out of 14 tracks are outstanding, especially considering Bugg's only 18.

There's no progression or narrative, it's immersive rather than engrossing. Slow Focus is an album to steep yourself in.

The Instagram of albums, which is to say a source of instant nostalgia, its 70s- and 80s-inspired cocktail of disco, house, lounge, samba et al, could be merely kitsch but is elevated both by the meticulousness of its production and the sinuous seductiveness of its melodies.

It's a rather beautiful thing.

It finds the singer in meditative mood--this is, by some distance, the least playful Björk album--and, amid soundscapes made from tinkling harps and bells and deep electronic burps and farts, she's an uncharacteristically discreet presence, a humble narrator of the wider story she's trying to tell.

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.

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

From the self-mockingly banal title onwards, it confirms them as that rare thing: a band able to combine grandiosity and groundedness.

while D contains strange time signatures, proggy flute solos and syncopation aplenty, it soon reveals itself to be a work for the heart as well as the mind.

It's all very gladsome, technically fine and will lift your day. But, as with all such heritaged musics, it won't make your day over. Pleasant though.

Stuart Staples and his band delivering nine pieces of beautiful bossa-nova noir, daydreamy reverie and existential easy listening.

The songs are mostly shaped in her traditional chord-to-chord method, their melodies looping behind the tempo of the guitars and, for once, in a spirit of uplift.

Even if [Psychedelic Pill is not essential], it's by some way the best non-essential album Neil Young has ever made.

Their music which, as it happens, is a thrilling mix of raw vocal harmonies, rattling homemade guitars and handclaps.

There are enough album tracks and B-sides to make the case that what we actually had in 10cc was a British Steely Dan: clever, funny and funky as hell when they wanted to be.

Whether this Blue Note debut featuring Robert Glasper is better than his two albums with Brownswood is moot, but the best tracks--"Trouble", "Heaven on the Ground", "Do You Feel"--are very good indeed.

Arc is built with daytime radio in mind as much as the indie disco.

Though some of the good-girl-gone-bad shtick has been sacrificed on the altar of go-for-it jangly pop, she's still as good as it gets when she finally opens her pipes on "Dallas".

Just simple, old-fashioned talent and charm.

It marries a downbeat songcraft to an expansive sound courtesy of producers Guy Garvey and Craig Potter.

It may be a bit rushed--too sickly sweet for one sitting, while their youthful lyrics will ripen yet--but the hit rate is nonetheless impressively high.

How you respond will depend on how you react to such gubbins being brought to bear on Merritt's A-to-B-and-back melodic sense. No doubting its realness, though.

All of it frothed up into an accomplished brew and delivered with good-timey vim but without a whole lot of charisma, especially in the vocal department. Snake oil, in other words. Good fun snake oil.

The second studio album from the experimental New York trio oozes colour.

Danilova's commanding tones evoking nameless terrors over wonderful doom-laden synth-rock.

While nothing grates, all it really achieves is to make you want to hear Hank sing them.

IOH is their most emotional release yet and also their most philosophical.

Redemption by plucked string. Buddy Miller produces analogically.

Two non-trad covers (Anais Mitchell and Fleetwood Mac) remind you that he's earnt the right to do what the hell he wants.

While Wagner's voice is not always up to it, Tidwell's authentic country pipes are the real revelation here.

Give it time and the intensity of the music--the Hagar of the title is Lloyd's great-great grandmother, who was sold into slavery--comes through.

Almost every track sounds like a potential single in an indie rock/Americana kind of way.

Jamal sounds close to his 1950s Chess Records best.

He sets his bruised but unbowed soul against a stark musical backing and rediscovers the power of keeping it simple. Beautiful.

For all its faux-primitive origins, their seventh studio album is every bit as likely to ship platinum as the previous six.

Scratch beneath the surface sheen of It's All True and all kinds of depths emerge.

It's a skilled blend of the organic and the electronic.

Always may well be the Californians' finest yet.

James's voice is slightly diminished but not so as to sound like anything other than itself. She's the real deal.

It's half George Harrison, half Keith West.

In a crowd of loudish country and R&B guitars he tells brief stories of everyday lives with a correspondingly everyday voice, but with a kind of unslung abandonment that goes rather well with the guitars. It's very good.

A natural wonder.

Either way, we get what we always get: the analogue rendition of a stick of Southern yarns, long on observation, short of syllable and rough as your old boots.

As we glide through Post Tropical the tracks steadily grow bigger, with gospel-style harmonies and languid slide guitar lending texture to create a dreamy, if cold, soundscape that may leave some with a sense of frustration, as if we are building towards an ever-shifting point on the horizon.

While the presiding atmosphere is retro, the Avila brothers' production keeps things properly real.

Old Fears is the sound of a quick, keen mind at work and play.

Great tunes, decent voice, scary attitude.

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

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

Exquisitely poised solo pieces that subtly pay homage to the likes of fellow keyboard masters Abdullah Ibrahim and Erik Satie.

A real gem.

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

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

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.

Happily, the North Carolina’s modern hippie’s second album is too ambitious, too fluently fluently surprising and too lovely to appeal to 1970s retro-heads alone.