I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead is a triumph that will, like its predecessor, take years to unpeel.

There are sublime moments here, and occasionally the interplay is breathtaking. This is pretty rare however, which leaves the rest of the record sounding just as you’d imagine it would, which isn’t a bad thing, just not at the levels of creativity we’ve come to expect.

The beautiful melodies and harmonies don’t actually go anywhere, they just kind of float in and out of earshot, failing to develop or do anything harmonically interesting.

Picking highlights is futile; the record might run for less than twenty minutes but it burns brightly for the whole duration.

A mature, assured, and beautiful album.

Not as poppy as either Moon Safari or Talkie Walkie, not as out there as 10,000khz Legend, Pocket Symphony instead boasts songs that deserve more attention than previous numbers without performing the prog histrionics often found on their more experimental works.

The music is beautiful, spiritual, intense, fun and, as Lester Bangs once called the Clash, righteous.

While the record isn’t perhaps as instantly impressive as Scale or Multiply, there’s much to enjoy on The Third Hand for an appreciator of the finer points of this thing we call pop music.

If GY!BE is the Tolstoy of the Constellation label, DMST has to be its Chekhov.

Their jokes and concepts and imitations have sunk into their bones and become tools for them to make some of the best music of the year thus far.

As a whole, it leaves you thinking that Bobby Conn could have, if he wanted to, made a seminal underground record.

Heroic, monumental and wondrously sensual.

Great art must provoke or inspire you, and I’m sorry to all the folks out there “awash” in Eluvium’s dreamy “soundscapes” of pure “emotion” and “beauty”, but this record does neither.

This music is intensely free, ecstatic and original. But make no mistake - it’s very, very hard to listen to.

You absolutely, positively cannot go wrong buying this one.

Loney, Noir is a beautiful serving of melancholia, and one of the most interesting and fully realised home recordings I’ve heard in a long time.

Despite some missteps (sadly, a few egregious ones), Some Loud Thunder is successful in displaying the group’s breadth of talent and ideas.

The lack of engaging realism has always been one of the major problems for Of Montreal and the new material goes a long way towards solving it.

It’s grandly impressive and points to potentially greater things in the future.

The Bird and the Bee end up sounding like the soundtrack to some glossy drama about a bunch of over privileged kids living in Notting Hill.

Both immediate and a grower, Boys and Girls in America stands tall as The Hold Steady’s masterwork – full of grace and gritty charm, full heartbreak and raw emotion.

Compelling and emotionally charged.

Endearingly sorrowful without descending into outright misery, Leaders Of The Free World is exactly what we the listeners should expect from a band's third album.

One good single does not a great album make, and unfortunately, the rest of the record becomes pretty tedious, pretty quickly.

Glossily produced, the new album is much less thorny than Marshall’s earlier works, showcasing the artist’s songwriting and soul singing talents.

What’s most apparent on this record is that despite having a fairly eclectic approach to creating a pop song, and cooking up the occasionally psych-y moment to epic-ify the songs, if there’s one emphasis on here, it’s on great melodies.

The overall effect is of an album written and recorded on prozac that never achieves the emotional highs or the lows needed to make this kind of country soul great.

It’s confident and cohesive, but the precision may not be the Gossip’s ideal sound.