Experimental yet built on superb songwriting, fresh and surprising but still somehow recognisably a Bad Seeds record, the amount of innovation and inspiration found on Push The Sky Away proves that Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds must still care an awful lot about this rock ‘n’ roll stuff.

Images Du Futur is exciting in a way that few albums manage to be, dangerous and compelling like a first cigarette or fumbled sexual encounter, and nothing here quite seems real.

If You Leave is staggeringly beautiful from beginning to close, a catharsis that’s both bracing and woozily amniotic.

Despite the level of fastidiousness that’s standard to Daft Punk, Random Access Memories still sounds loose. The album doesn’t feel synthetic or disingenuous, as it perhaps should. So perhaps these two are cooler than anyone you know.

There’s simply not a wasted second on the record; all fourteen songs are simple and direct, immediately recorded in inglorious mono with nothing--save the cheap Casio autochord presets on ‘Blues in Dallas’--but voice, guitar and the album’s secret third instrument--the insistent hum of an increasingly-broken boombox.... The main draw of this reissue for hardened Mountain Goats fans, an obsessive breed at the best of times, are Darnielle’s new liner notes and a selection of seven bonus tracks from the same era.

The music on Big Inner is so wondrous that it seems entirely obvious that we’ll always find that peace, joy and contentment in music rather than anywhere else.

This is a great record. Talk Normal are clearly indebted to the foundations of post-punk and no wave, but crucially they never feel like a throwback.

Everything Everything have their cake and they’re eating it too--Arc proves that they can keep their zany shade of indie and still be taken very seriously.

This second album is less of a record than an experience. You truly get a sense of cosmic alignment here.

It triumphs not as a continuation of a musical conversation that Isn’t Anything and Loveless began, but by forging its own distinct modern dialogue, one that at once sounds rooted in its own imaginative time and place, perhaps even dimension, with any telling outside influences dissipating as soon as the songs truly take their pleasurable hold.

It can be powerfully sweet, but it’s never twee. It’s often busy, but never cluttered. Flowers is, put simply, a beautiful album.

The Next Day is very, very good. Purposefully good--the work of someone who seemingly knew that if he was going to come back at all, it had to be with something blessed with brilliance.

On The Invisible Way Sparhawk has managed the rare trick of rendering that language not only intelligible but lustrous and attractive to even the staunchest naysayer while simultaneously steering his band around a fresh and perhaps uncharted musical turn.

Wondrous Bughouse is a delicious collage: provocative, allusive and consistently engaging.

Wolf is both a departure and a refinement for Tyler, combining his best traits in such a way as to nearly eliminate his weaknesses.

That the new stuff doesn’t make you pine for the comforting certainties of early solo classics à la ‘Naked as We Came’ at all is a sign of just what a successful evolution Ghost on Ghost is.

This time around, however, the influences are mashed together more thoroughly, creating a uniquely rich stew where country, soul, rock ‘n’ roll, gospel, folk and more exotic influences mingle freely.

Savages own a gravitas, a brooding confidence and effortless cool, that no matter how cynical or wary of pretentiousness you are, will be suck you in.

Kveikur is a record you play for the sheer catharsis of it--a work of art to plug into when grey buildings and greyer skies tower too densely around you, and you wish for nothing more than to close your eyes and feel the terrible greatness of nature swallow you up.

In other words, Moderat have stepped up to the plate and then some.

Nepenthe is a very special album, one which doesn’t sound like anything else around but which also sounds like music you have unwittingly known your whole life; the quiet hum of life itself, re-appropriated and expertly sculpted into a shape where all of it’s complexity and simplicity feels a just that little bit sweeter.

Its stylistic diversity can be off-putting at first. But the more you listen, the more it all comes together.

All in all, it is one of the most exceptionally realised albums to enter the world since her last release, and confirms that both as an artist and a role-model Monáe really ought to be celebrated as Electric Lady number one.

Made In California does a great job of confirming just how much more there was to The Beach Boys than sunshine and girls.

This is a near-faultless EP, and one that’s so incredibly moreish.

There really is a veritable deluge of ephemera attached to the deluxe editions of this release, so there is certainly plenty for fans and collectors to hunker down over. Be warned though, there is plenty of dross to wade through until you’re able to reveal anything of true value.

All told, The Island Years contains an embarrassment of riches and must rank as amongst the most exhaustive and impressive undertakings of its kind; it’s the kind of towering tribute Martyn’s talents richly deserve. However, it’s hard to figure out who it’s intended for exactly.

Fade is vintage Yo La Tengo, but somehow gorgeously grown-up, with moments which your head will tell you sound normal, as if you have heard them before, but which make the rest of you feel contemplative and still.