Clockwork Angels is an extremely accomplished piece of music composed and performed absolutely flawlessly.

Whilst it may lack the game-changing originality of other big 2011 releases, the record spans half a century of musical history more effectively than any other in recent memory.

It's that mix of astral expensiveness and strict artistry that makes Thundercat's debut LP The Golden Age Of Apocalypse as grand and visionary as its title.

The Hunter is an example of how to crossover without selling out--something Metallica never learned--and no matter how many copies it sells, this is the mainstream heavy rock album of the year.

50 Words for Snow is undoubtedly whimsical, but it's played and arranged so exquisitely that even the most po-faced should be able to acknowledge the scale of its achievement.

When it comes to Kosmische classics, this is an essential. If you don't have this in your record collection, you're doing yourself a massive disservice.

The results are nothing short of magnificent, producing a set of tracks whose fizzing surfaces are always disturbed by some new action just beneath, where ridges of static ruffle and tumble over one another, and where harsh regions of higher density sluice violently into the foreground.

Everything works beautifully on what's still their most sublime piece.

This is not a live album, but an alive album, one of the most visceral, beautiful records you'll hear this year.

Mission Of Burma are excellent, their new album is equally excellent, and an easy contender for best rock album of the year.

Channel Orange is a staggering step upwards from Nostalgia.

There'll never be another band like them. And if this is really it and they leave Blur to the history books, then it's a perfect way to remember this unique, occasionally annoying, but genuinely quite amazing band.

What it proves to be is an exhilarating, uneven, thought-provoking, over-egged, over-long, lucid, barnstorming, soul-infused hip-hop album of a type that, as I may have mentioned once or twice or five times, you just don't get any more. Except, of course, you do, and here it is.

Melody's Echo Chamber is a glorious album. Its success lies in the balance between Prochet's ability to break out of the (supposed) shackles of her structured classical composition education, while still delivering a suite of songs that are coherent, eminently listenable and blend lightness with dark foreboding.

Smoke has certainly raised the stakes for any aspiring Chicago producer in creating the most consolidated longform effort in the genre to date.

Metz [have] easily made one of the finest and most ferocious punk albums in years on this sledgehammer of a debut.

In another rapper's hands the concepts might have been overcooked or the messages too self-righteous, but Kendrick manages to achieve scale while remaining firmly grounded on two feet.

It's not often an album of such stature exceeds one's anticipations, but Honor is too astounding to not be revered.

Autumnal, witty, sad, lovely and very, very English The Violence is the high watermark of Hayman's career and one of the finest British releases of 2012, a record that neither floats, nor drowns, but soars.

This is an album of a depth and ambition that should, frankly, set a standard for contemporary art music.

{Awayland} is a treasure trove of an album, brimming with ideas, most of which work and all of which, at the very least, prove that O'Brien is not simply another little-boy-lost lamenting the fact his parents wouldn't pass him the salt, but a songwriter of real note.

It's ambitious, personal, unusual and, crucially, touched with brilliance.

Iceage's You're Nothing is one of the most exciting, open-minded pop punk (not THAT sort) albums I've heard in years.

Cave is always the first to give fulsome credit to his band, and they aim true here in the most explorative, coherent and well-realised Bad Seeds album in years.

So more than half the album is fantastic, and the rest is very, very strong.

With the soundtrack to Les Revenants, they have created a work of aural tension; a masterclass in how implied threat is far more effective than a million scary monsters.

Pearl Mystic is the best British psychedelic album since the 1990s; maybe more than that.

Outsider soul from a true original.