Tracks such as "The Bay" have enough to get heads nodding, but if you hear this on a dancefloor, it'll be courtesy of a seriously hard-working remixer.

Walker is almost unique among his generation in continuing to provide mind-food instead of cosy nostalgia. If you go into Bish Bosch half-wishing he'd belt out a ballad, you leave it with absolutely no regrets.

His major-label follow-up wisely keeps the retro aesthetic.

The danger is that they might spread themselves too thin, but on this evidence they've kept their best ideas close to their chests.

In spite of the self-conscious effort to create something "beautiful", the songs slowly reveal themselves to be things of real beauty.

Enchanting stuff.

It borders on the twee. That it doesn't cross the frontier is the reason this is worth your attention.

This is meditative, spacious, profoundly dark music, evidently haunted by Miles Davis's early-1970s excursions into free electronica, as well as the wolves of the Nordic imagination.

This is heartfelt, sweetly sincere and as good an album as BPB has made for some time.

Not really "folk" at all but a programme of music for solo guitar (and occasional clarinet) drawing on three centuries of complex harmony; or at least the harmony which appeals to the gruff old Pentangle picker.

They are awfully thoughtful, though the thoughtfulness does frequently give way--sometimes you feel with a sigh of relief--to the technical liberation of jig and reel.

This is jouncey, mostly R&B-derived pop with a keen ear for what supports a melody. It's good.

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

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.

It takes a few plays to acclimatise to but, once won over, whatever you listen to next will seem pedestrian by comparison. Lovely, but wholly on its own terms.

Love This Giant is a skewed and funky instant classic.

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.

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

His most enjoyable LP since Our Favourite Shop.

A close to fine debut.

Contact is shamelessly allusive, never remotely challenging and characterised by a get-to-the-chorus immediacy.

There is no shortage of shimmery songcraft here.

Here, Beam adds funky Stevie Wonder synths to the mix. And marimba. Lots of marimba.

A classy, well-made record.

The live stuff is consistently inventive.... Randomness dogs the remixes, but that's standard.

You won't have heard anything like it before.

Giddily debunking sacred falsehoods with good, honest scepticism, Bauer’s raucous rebirth offers the best of both worlds: intrigue and instant reward for Walkmen doubters and acolytes alike.

There’s something artificial and experimental in the project’s very DNA, but that need not be a bad thing, and it isn’t.

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

Funny, warm, eloquent, dynamic, oddly soulful and technically delicious. An unremitting joy.

It's rather fine.

The impeccably hip credentials of HN's Roberto Carlos Lange are rather at odds with the wonderfully gloopy Latin-cheese of this Spanish language, old school synth-session's best tracks.

Somewhere between Ladyhawke and M83, it's 1980's fetishism all the better for the apparent lack of irony.

While it may, at times, sound a little too familiar--A&F is almost good enough to banish the memory of the dozen or so albums--influenced by grams not Parsons--since.

All diva froideur and drum machine snap, it nevertheless transcends pastiche via a pervasive air of murky ambiguity.

Krall's smoky contralto lacks the pungency of Wilson's, but compensates with greater mobility.

It's a bright, optimistic, emotive world, Heidi's, and well suited to the neutral "roots" pop sound which frames it.

Unless I'm going insane, On a Mission sounds like a modern pop classic.

Fans of Raising Sand and O Brother...will find much to love. As – more surprising this – will fans of classic-era Fleetwood Mac.

In short, if Land of CanAan were a Stevie Wonder album, it would be Hotter than July rather than Innervisions.

Their self-titled debut, aptly enough, is one of the most bitterly anti-romantic albums this side of the third PiL offering.

Very enjoyable package.

The music is softly strummed, and Bird’s voice is a high, lonesome thing like the wind on a prairie. Sort of.

If the Mayans were right and the world really is going to end this December, you won't hear many better soundtracks than this.

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

Isbell is an accomplished and serious songwriter and what keeps Here We Rest from being the stonker it so nearly is is not the writing but the slightness of his voice – and his band.

Tough, soulful, rockin' songs.

A feast of vulnerable balladry with a political heart and, audibly, much surrounding air.

There's enough on the highly politicised Macaroni to justify stepping outside to find him.

An atmospheric yet danceable debut.

Memphis is a late-night delight.

There’s singing going on, all right, it sounds lovely, but little is conveyed other than loveliness. However, there’s no arguing with their authenticity or technical excellence.

Unrefined, unresigned, occasionally clunky, frequently obtuse but always, always fit to bust.

Proper, stop-you-in-your-tracks talent with the occasional song to match.

Crain’s third album has proved something of a breakthrough in the US.

Within the first 60 seconds it's alluded to Blue Peter and Taxi Driver in successive lines. Wind in the Willows it ain't.

Her debut is an accomplished, glossily shimmering thing.

Funny, sad, perfect.

More important on first contact, anyway, is the feel of the music, which grooves. Really good.

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

It is a near-total triumph.

It's a less distinctive incarnation, but as evidenced by the stutteringly propulsive "Ye Ye", hardly less hypnotic.

Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon and Pugwash’s Thomas Walsh strike another fine balance between cricket’s arcane specifics and its universal metaphors in cucumber-crisp batches of catch-all pastiche-pop.

In its own downbeat, understated way, Tinsel and Lights does more for festive good cheer than any number of more traditional Christmas albums that go straight for the razzle-dazzle.

Gossamer is hard to fault, besides the fact that it's more of the same.

The second Nixey solo album is a thing of subtle gorgeousness, with Nixey's none-more-English, sexy school-mistress diction dealing with topics as bleakly improbable as the Bridgend teenage suicides.

Sweetly soaring stuff.

If this isn't Foals' pop classic or their art masterpiece, they're having a huge amount of fun squaring that circle.

The odds-and-ends nature of this compilation is spelt out by its title, but the quality barely suffers for that.

Wonderful Glorious alternates between distorted rock and freewheeling country-pop interludes.

There are 36 performances, most of them evincing a spumey "aaaargh, Jim-lad" recreational vibe.

Gentle Spirit is impressively inert.

Nonchalant no more, here they spike their sparse blues-print with humour and humanity, dub grooves and Southern gothic flavours.

“Inside the Idle Hour Club” is the comedown: woozy, wavy, lush, long. Not exactly cohesive then, but hey--it’s a trip.

An intimate, introspective album that takes tentative steps to reveal the soul behind the star.

Simultaneously the most and the least pop record of the autumn.

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

This one feels much more like a group searching for a sound together, even if the sound once belonged in a Venn diagram linking Led Zep, Deep Purple and Dio-era Sabbath. And it rocks most periodly.

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.

Drake is revealed as a serious artist whose gossamer-light songs can sound painfully vulnerable, and there's more than a bit of black dog in the poems.

Just like Levi Stubbs, he can't help himself.

It's good, but you want to hear them live.

This darkly amusing, awkward yet oddly graceful return of the ostensibly dead, more than measures up.

Most of LTHS consists of thumping soul-pop reminiscent of JoBoxers or high-energy Hives-like garage rock, and even if it errs on the side of sameyness, it's rarely dull.

Tales of Us has a stately pace and woozy beauty, with cinematic orchestration of swaying strings over acoustic guitar or mossy cello.

And whaddayaknow, this ugly duckling – out of a hoodie and into a tux – turns out to have a fine white soul voice and has followed a record you couldn't bear to hear more than once with a record you'll want to play over and over.

Not a perfect debut, but one that leaves you with the feeling that we're dealing with a living, thinking artist here, not just another Brit School waxwork.

Liars revel in keeping their listeners on edge and entertained making Mess their most wickedly enjoyable album yet.

With guests such as Jack White and a surprisingly bearable Norah Jones, Rome makes a fine fist of recreating the elegance of prime 1960s Euro-pop. All good, no bad, and never ugly.

Rocky's rhymes are believable when reminiscing about growing up poor.

There are standouts aplenty and, as song rolls seamlessly into song.

It induces a heady sense of perpetual forward motion, whether graceful or full pelt. Stunning.

It may not be as mind blowing as FutureSex. But, frankly, what is?

It's a blast.

The music treads a gingerly path between the lighter textures of honky-tonk and a sort of indie lounge-pop. Charming.

Generation Indigo is a hugely enjoyable electro-pop album.

On record, this is a joyous burst of blissed-out world pop.

Neville almost levitates through doo-wop, soul and R&B standards.