Much of 'Trust' dallies down the dark end of the street, where graceful Velvet Undergroundisms lounge around sharing tabs with gentle folk implosions.

'Young Prayer' is a piece of work that feels both mysterious and honest; a truly rare combination.

A travelogue of even richer and stranger territory than its storming predecessor ‘Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts’, although, inevitably, there’s more than a sprinkling of dead cities and lost ghosts throughout, to say nothing of the occasional red sea too.

The most poetic, bookish and winsome of the anticon crew, his new album as Why? sees [Wolf] creating lavish wordscapes over the deceptively straightforward folk rock music.

A honky tonk Leonard Cohen, the music of Smog sounds like it's spent all its life half cut in a saloon bar way out in the American mid-west thinking far too deeply about love and life for far too long.

Like 'Deserter Songs' and 'All Is Dream' before, 'The Secret Migration' is a compelling, visual album. And yet within this, Mercury Rev have moved on.

Where 'Parklife' was exuberant and almost knowingly callow, 'The Good, The Bad & The Queen' is weary, confused, almost mourning for what once was.

If anything this year's model raises the stakes on its predecessor.

Whereas 2001's 'Confield' often felt like a thankless task 'Draft 7.30' is often, by Autechre standards at any rate, a much more welcoming beast.

Compelling. Devastating. Amazing. And rocks like a bastard.

Despite the unconventional approach, it's definitely an album.

'The Loon' retains a genuinely empathetic sincerity that deserves applause, but should be praised to a greater degree for bringing weird, left-of-centre indie back to the fore.

This is probably the most exciting record that Domino will release in 2006, eleven songs of hillbilly hoe-down, gothic atmospherics, scuzzy rock & roll, acerbic post punk noise, and dark sexuality.

For the uninitiated, they churn out a joyless mess of badly tuned indie guitar, spasmodic jazz drumming and cutesy vocalisations, and on 'O'Malley, Former Underdog' they overlay this with irritating electronica that is reminiscent of the noise your discman makes when your mobile phone is in the same pocket.

Restraint they were always good at, but now they're masters, and the melancholy that swelled up all over Young Team like a particularly ripe bruise is here for all the world to see in 'Rock Action''s damp eyes.

Almost everything about 'Kicking The National Habit' is righteously unfashionable.

The confident arrangements throughout 'No Shouts, No Calls' are the finest Electrelane have yet committed to tape.

An assortment of evocative instrumental journeys that warm the cockles.

The Birmingham band's finest hour yet.

The signature wordplay and musical ingenuity are as strong as ever here... but they're rolling with a far harder edge than you remember.

The Rapture may not quite be wholly heavenly, but they've made an album that's entirely admirable and often lovable.

Everything feels bolder than before, more assured of the rightness of singing from places that most lyricists fear to tred. In textures and words alone, 'Open Season' is a country mile ahead of any of the supposedly heroic guitar debuts knocking around in 2005.

'Suspended Animation' is less a compendium of songs and more a splurging, raging, raping jazz metal fusion machine, weaving in samples, gong noises and assorted cartoon horror.

This album is bollocks. Not the bollocks, mind, just plain old fashioned middle-American bollocks, the sort of 70s, vaguely psychedelic-tinted, vaguely funkdefied bollocks that Lenny Kravitz and old school MTV made their own.

While Wayne Coyne has been carving out and presenting to the world the manifestations of his crazy mind for an age now, the possibilities have so often been superior to the finished article. That is certainly not the case here.

This is music that never quite settles; it's in perpetual motion.

'Young Machetes' is both a magnificent and important album.

Anyone expecting something similar to his early doom-laden musings will find nothing of the sort here.