Hell on Heels is one beautiful amble.

In its loose instrumentation and sometimes confused layers (and some questionable lyrics) it does sound noticeably like a side-project from start to finish, and that it was written and recorded in a hurry. There is magic in that of course, but you do feel that is not the way to coax out Finn's A-grade material.

It may just be Anthrax's most consistent material since Among The Living in 1987.

Floreat isn't simply a seduction--in the most understated way, it's too intense for that.

Crucially, her sense of humour remains intact, sharp and lethal – the sweet laments carried by her increasingly accomplished voice feel often to be one step away from, not laughter exactly, but self-deprecation, or a mordant smile at her own expense.

In its explicit references towards woozy psych, soul and even glam, Tripper is better, and marks Johnson as being a songwriter and rock auteur deserving of comparison with the likes of Mercer, Andy Cabic and Jim James.

The voices are huskier, the music juicer, the innocence of yore starting to chip away as Paradise sees them explore the dark side of vice and life. They're are all the better for it.

It may not be the Rapture many were expecting this year, but this triumphant return to form is pretty glorious nonetheless.

Where debut EP Summertime! and the über-hyped eponymous first album's songs had an oddly melancholic joyfulness that captured a number of imaginations back in early 2010, here there's a quiet switch to an oddly uplifting melancholy. On the best songs, that is – too many just sound gloomy and dull.

The engagement with dance music and half-improvised feel lends it an irresistible forward momentum, something that picks up pace throughout the album to exhilarating effect; the album's second half in particular creates a disconcerting sensation of constant acceleration, until it finally collapses into its closing throes and falls away.

On the bright side, at least it isn't as bad as Yuck.

Each featured artist at the top of their games, masterfully dominating their segments, leagues above Tha Carter IV's comparatively tired host.

Leave No Trace favours synths over horns – in fact, it's not until about ten minutes in that we get our first taste of brass - and whilst the sound is still impressively full-bodied, without the continuous stream of interwoven saxophone and trumpet solos that made its predecessor such a joyous affair it feels pretty empty in comparison.

Dense, professional, and thoroughly realized, Mirror Traffic will become a lot of people's favorite Malkmus album. He sounds more like Malkmus than ever, and it makes me shiver.

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 first Shjips album to be recorded in a proper studio, with an engineer, West is Wooden Shjips' fullest exploration of these tensions to date, and sees the band stepping up their game in every aspect.

The combination of Eno's obsession with stasis and his attachment to novelty for its own sake does the album in.

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.

Where the warm, bright finish on Fondo made it gleam expansively, occasionally here you wish for a little more space in the mix and in the arrangements, if only to allow us to explore Vieux Fara Touré's beautiful songs more freely.

From a purely musical perspective, however, it executes that very most rare form of retroism--the type that makes the tired, forgotten and domesticated once again radical.

Hype and arrogance created Watch the Throne and stifled the creative revelation it could have been. It would be nice if that could serve as a kind of lesson for the hip hop world, but somehow that seems unlikely.

Its huge, cocaine-pricked melodies remain present and correct throughout, but the tracks themselves are among his best so far.

'Someone's Gonna Break Your Heart' goes some way to harking back to their former glories but moments like these are in all too short supply.

The result is a woozily involving mood piece that encompasses everything from the shimmering heat of daytime ('Lifesized Stuffed Animal', where music box chimes rub up against disoriented square wave bass) to the dead of night, caught in the lairy drunken lurch of 'Kitties'.

When the album stops playing the temptation to categorize Family and Friends as a literate Streets project or Buck 65 with a flair for topic sentences is irresistible. Only one song exceeds the five-minute mark, though, and most are just over two minutes, so boredom isn't a problem.

Bermuda Drain is, from the off, a massive step forward for Prurient.

The Family Sign commits a few of hip hop's cardinal sins and doesn't provide nearly enough justification for doing so.