Basses Loaded is excellent. Like every other Melvins record it holds its own identity while oozing the same sweet black guitar sludge they have re-perfected many times over the years.

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'.

Throughout Valentina, and especially on 'End Credits', the Wedding Present's new streamlined and sinewy delivery certainly has something of The Fall to it.

It's hardly that nearly everything else completely clones itself song for song, but you can almost pick any song and get the same feeling from it, making it a little hard for individual moments to stand out. But they're there.

Advaitic Songs doesn't feature one of the lengthy, insistent, sense-dissolving tracks they usually supply. Instead the tracks feel restrained and poetic, but not always very substantial. A pity, but at the same time, Advaitic Songs does reward multiple listens. It's a subtle and meaningful album.

While sonically the music does not possess the 'hard' edge of neighbouring Tuareg rock groups, there is a great fluidity in which the desert groove unfolds over spiralling guitar riffs and propulsive rhythms.

For all its conceptual flaws, Asiatisch is both a pleasurable and an intelligent take on sinogrime--proof that its initial wave of productions was brief not for lack of potential.

Iradelphic, which has evolved out of Clark's live shows, marks a change and may be a little surprising to longstanding fans of the man – it's less ethereal, more compact and cohesive than the electronic experiments of Clarence Park.

While the album is by no means a disappointment, one can't help but long for the return of a less inhibited Krug, free of – albeit self-imposed – limitations.

Miles away from the poppy happy clappy smiley lovey dovey vibes of Twenty One or epic choruses of Serotonin, Radlands displays a new direction and confidence.

Dark Hearts marks an astute shift away from the energy of the clubs, focusing instead on hazy synth pop. Languid ballads run through the album and their production feats, led by the work of Stefan Storm, are best enjoyed on headphones.

This resultant collage, produced by all this cutting and pasting of personal experience and observational wisdom, is a wonderful snapshot in time of the thoughts behind one of the most unique voices in British rap.

The instrumentation, forms, and concepts are familiar: “pure” country, as it were. Lyrically speaking, love, companionship, and family (‘Mama’) represent persistent threads; even more so, though, the passing of time seems to be Parton’s chief concern.

A debut so exquisitely tooled I cannot find a thing wrong with it.

So what you have is an album that's very recognisably Ed; the Steve Gullick photography, the tipsy melancholy and romance, the ballads... but without the need for too many frills it sounds complete, nine gorgeous songs that sit beautifully together.

So in short Welcome to Mikrosector 50 is rather excellent, with the only real dud on the album being the slightly tedious 70s porno-funk of 'Quadraskank Interlude'.

This Is What I Do leaves you spoiled for choice. Ruined, in fact.

Rather than concentrating on a single, memorable event, it takes the best bits to offer an idealised representation of the Howlin Rain live experience that's very much the aural equivalent of a Cameron Crowe movie.

This brand of brooding synth instrumental has been so long entangled with narratives, it’s perhaps the ultimate test to make it work without without any framing context; to inject enough substance into the music for it to carry itself. Jean-Michel Jarre managed it, Tangerine Dream (sometimes) managed it, and with The Capsule so have Necro Deathmort.

Home Time is an album by a songwriter whose distinctive style has more than a little of the music hall. Hayman is a modern storyteller whose curiosity means he just cannot stop uncovering material.

With their fifth album, Artificial Sweeteners, Fujiya & Miyagi once again mine opposite ends of the lyrical spectrum whilst delivering their most musically satisfying collection to date.

This is a revealing, thrilling album by an artist who took a very particular experience and used it to create a beautiful project.

Lifetime of Love is a strange album, where songs with differing emotional foundations, sonic palettes, aural pace and textural aesthetics mesh into a cohesive whole. As Moon Diagrams, Archuleta has created a world where introspection, catharsis and redemption can envelop you and become something porous, to be inhaled and lived in.

Hot Cakes [is] proof if it were needed that there's plenty of life in the old dog yet - and that dog still don't give a f***.

It's to the remixers' own credit--and perhaps, also, to the homogenous nature of the source material--that TKOL RMX 1234567 does a fine job of highlighting each producer's own idiosyncracies.

Breakthrough is an eclectic and challenging record that features more than a few sublime moments of heady bong-haze depth.

In places, when compared to their earlier works, it sometimes feels like songs don’t get the space to grow and unfold. Other than that, this is a sublime and beguiling record, and a milestone in the evolution of a unique creative voice.

It ain't no Raw Power. But once you get your head around the fact that it rightfully doesn't even attempt to imitate its antecedent, and really is more a belated sequel to Pop and Williamson's 1977 album Kill City, then this is, in places, a pretty damn good rock & roll record.