Three bonus tracks included with the re-release are almost as good, though they stretch the album to a daunting 75 minutes. City Lake's main effect is to make you appreciate the charms of its successor all the more. Its main effect, but not its only one.

The mechanistic form and function can feel totally lifeless, but there's a layer of mourning beneath the gleaming metal.

Product is simply forward-thinking, flawlessly-produced electronic music that wants no more than to slap a grin on the dance floor.

Ultimately, Rustie's purism exposes the limitations of his style.

The forms are extraordinary and the surfaces dazzling, but it's unclear how to navigate through them. You're impressed but also confused, and you keep an eye out for the exit. Several tracks shine regardless.

Despite its shortcomings, Howl is a fine album for those interested in analog electronics and curious what can be done with them outside of a club environment.

GOD's interest in questionable styles and its elaborate backstory seem designed to keep things interesting after the giant step forward that was R Plus Seven.

Art Angels wipes the fog from her lens and lays out her vision, clear and uncompromising.

Shepherd's flawless Eglo catalogue had the power to coax his followers off the dance floor with him, and Elaenia's sophisticated sense of musical accomplishment ought to keep them there.

Under The Same Sky might not be the most original or ambitious album you will hear this year, but it's arresting, it moves quickly and it never looks back.

Much like switching on a 24-hour news channel, No No is engrossing for the first ten minutes or so. Then the parade of lurid images continues, and sure enough, they give you a headache.

What Burton nails on Communion is how to fold in sounds from all over--electronic music and the real world--to make powerful and terrifying music in 2015. If the club is a shelter from an oppressive and dangerous society, then Communion is what waits outside.

Baio's tunes are short and snappy, and at around 40 minutes long, The Names takes less time than reading most chapters of a DeLillo book.

Vibert's turned in a brazenly colourful, glitter-dusted and streamer-throwing affair, so have fun with it.

The result is an album split between brilliant and head-scratching moments, and it's all a lot take in at once. Anxiety dressed up Ashin's neuroses in glossy textures, while Age Of Transparency lets them writhe all over the floor. Like his live show, it's thrilling, confusing and uncomfortable in equal measure.

Making good on Quattlebaum's professed interest in radical queer politics, the music on C-ORE feels suitably radical, queer and non-conformist.

St Germain conjures up rich and atmospheric landscapes equal to Navarre's earlier work. They're different from where we last left him, but they still seem to find him right at home.

At almost 70 minutes, Where All Is Fled may take a few unnecessary detours across its 14 tracks, but it's ultimately Hauschildt's most cohesive work. Here, he's matched his well-established talents as a composer of cosmic ambient with a new depth of artistic direction.

Safe is an incongruous blend of calm and anxiety. It's also full of raw human emotion.

Without any contrast, his vibraphone seems to grin vacantly, as if pumped full of sedatives.

This is a record of great technical skill and imagination, and one that's also nonetheless soulful and sincere.

The music on µ20 is equally a view into that mind and its peculiar tastes. Though he rarely gets the level of recognition and respect as his good friend and one-time collaborator Aphex Twin, Paradinas is a visionary, an incredibly talented producer and a savvy curator.

They've become powerful songwriters since they focused on the craft in 2010, and Foam Island shows it off more than anything else.

Days Gone By focuses on the band's smoky, bedroom-ready style. It's only half the story, but it's still a pretty good one.

Even if Have You In My Wilderness is Holter's most accessible record to date, it's riddled with enough puzzles, lyrical twists and delicate refinement to remain intriguing listen after listen.

Caracal has the effect of a magician performing a trick twice in a row, rendering once clandestine, miraculous movements suddenly obvious, over-rehearsed and unnatural.

The Curved Line is a pretty harmless, quirky listen, and enjoyable enough if you've got a bit of a sweet tooth.

It's certainly still bleak as ever, but there's more hope than before.

It's something more functional, familiar and safe.

Some of the best moments on Discreet Desires occur when she's flexing these unexpected songwriting chops.

Where a lot of modern Balearic music can sound cheesy and banal, Idjut Boys have a keen sense of melody and a fondness for unexpected left turns, which keeps their tracks tight and surprising.

There is a feeling of accomplishment throughout Invite The Light.

An entire album of the stuff would likely be twee overkill, but Gonno's endearing quirks and lighthearted sensibilities are charming in small doses.

This series has always been Kompakt’s annual attempt to try to shape mainstream house and techno in its own idiosyncratic vision. Once again, it has done so in style.

His architectures still have an unreal sheen, but they're convincing enough to get lost in.

Staring into a murky void, Thundercat has actually made his clearest music yet.

Whatever James puts his name to could and should never be expected to make conventional sense, so Orphaned Deejay Selek only falters when denying his own slippery logic.

Born In The Echoes follows the duo's formula of saving the more psychedelic tracks for the end.

There's the occasional hint of another, more vivid album.... Elsewhere they often seem all too separate, like combatants squaring off in a strange, airless room.

Each production here feels less like a 10-minute single than a condensed DJ set, and The Orb navigate these spaces with a fresh wind in their sails.

It's a total weirdo crossover success, and perhaps Bahdeni Nami's standout if club fodder is what you're after.

Blondes' new arrangement seems to working fine so far, and suggests that subsequent live shows will be pretty special, too.

Though his abilities with oddball party jams are unquestionable, Davis proves he can be equally compelling when he tones it down a notch.

Pattern Of Excel succeeds during those little moments that capture Bannon's way with mood and melody.

Sometimes Walker can have his cake and eat it, too, and on the best moments of Knockin' Boots, he does.

What does it feel like to be alive in a digital age, overloaded and confused, but excited, too? What perspectives are possible now? Piteous Gate is a captivating attempt at putting those feelings into sound.

In its best moments, Morning/Evening is perfectly paced. Less convincing is the Evening side's coda.... Even with these faults, though, Hebden has brought a refreshing addition to his discography.

LP might be Ren Schofield's shortest album as Container, but it's also the one that best captures the full elemental force of his music.

This is a minor work, but a minor work from a master of his art.

This is machine music for a machine-ruled future made by someone who truly loves machines.

This new LP is understated by comparison, with fewer jarring moments and more shifting grooves.

Portraits resonates at a level of button-pushing sentimentality, but Maribou State are such deft directors of their sound, and so melodically gifted, that they still create moments of magic.

It hardly bears Moroder's personality at all.

Starfire won't get stuck in your head for days, but you could spend weeks unpacking it and still never quite get to the bottom of it.

On Tundra, the duo's debut long-player for R&S, Lakker seem fully in their element. The ideas have room to breathe and consolidate themselves.

Since the beginning, DJ-Kicks has been about finding unique takes on this craft. Kozalla's 50th instalment more than lives up to this tradition.

Nozinja Lodge is joyous, colourful dance music from one of the electronic scene's most eccentric and promising personalities.

Walk Dance Talk Sing shows you can't have too much of a good thing.

When Lantern hits its high points, it ends up somewhere in the stratosphere. When it falters, it's mostly because it's too ambitious, either thematically, as with the overblown love songs, or technically, as with the roller-coaster sequencing that halts the momentum over and over.

The Shakes is worth hearing for the sonic detail alone. The best tracks have an inclusive, sweeping abandon that rivals the high points of Scale.

Ambiguities can make Olympic Mess's charms difficult to excavate, but it's well worth making the effort to do so.

The LP hops between ideas and experiments in the tradition of the rock music double-album, and even within individual songs things are rarely straightforward.

Stylistically, it's more of a grab-bag than ever before, occasionally tipping the scales from charming to bombastic.

Platform is full of beautifully corrupted, synthesised signals.

What we're left with is an uneven album that's rarely as profound or as meaningful as it tries to be.

It's slightly ludicrous, highly theatrical and great fun.

This is a short album that toggles around pretty familiar sounds without doing anything new with them. But in this final salvo, Walls have proven that they are a force.

For all their strange angles and squeaky sonorities, these songs satisfy in the way that pop has always satisfied, no more and no less.

Cunningham focuses primarily on selection for his hour-long jaunt through murky technoisms. All too often, though, technique and sequencing seem to have been banned from the booth.

Runddans is an intriguing and sometimes fun experiment, but it's not quite a meeting of great musical minds.

The album is a ultimately a disappointment, but it has its moments nonetheless.

Very little of Trickfinger could be called surprising, but it isn't without its charms.

Captain Of None places Schott's voice front-and-centre and folds in her long-burning love for dub and reggae rhythms, making for her most approachable and otherworldly record yet.

An elegant, heartbroken album that wraps its dance floor influence in thick pop overtones.

Where Ufabulum felt like a garish souvenir from the performance built around it, Damogen Furies is more substantial and self-contained.

Where Bad Vibes had a dynamic range of feeling, Dark Red is melodramatic to the point of being alienating.

Jlin has plenty to say, and she has a remarkably strong and distinctive voice with which to say it.

Beneath its stylish veneer, Unspell lacks substance.

The gussied-up politeness that has followed Greene throughout his career is still an issue here, making the less adventurous material sound slightly anonymous. That's why the thick textures on "Folle" stand out so much, or why it's so exciting when Greene lets it all float away on "Lately." There are more than enough of these moments to make the record worthwhile.

Instead of trying something new, he focuses on what he's good at, which makes Claustrophobia a lateral move rather than a step forward. It seems Rose is trying to recapture the brilliance of his peak-period work. In Claustrophobia's best moments, he does.


Rather than an earth-shattering opus, Dream A Garden is a stepping stone to a new sound, one with enough promising moments to suggest it's only a matter of time before Latham gets there.

He may be trading more in the glow of nostalgia than the shock of the new, but he can still deliver the goods.

Excerpts feels like a series of glimpses into Gast's world, where past full-lengths have been an unbroken wander through it.

An album that finds Cantu-Ledesma orchestrating perhaps the most gorgeous ambience of his career so far.

Without its academic trappings, Projections starts to grate, with its middle-of-the-road niceness and mood of tepid celebration. With them, it's borderline offensive.

For all the dub diehards, Late Night Endless is a must-have. For the rest, it's a leisurely detour in the catalogues of two great artists who proved themselves a long time ago.

"Junkies" is the album's only weak moment. The others, while never delivering the thrills of "Six Figures" or "Solemn Days," slowly reveal a different kind of charm.

Coming from a producer who habitually finds new ways to dazzle, Pearson Sound is uncharacteristically average.

Modern Streets may lack ingenuity, but it works as a sincere and relatable portrayal of the artist's experience.

Over its 20 minutes, the EP pushes dance music through violent twists and turns until it becomes disorienting and startling.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but Fatima Al Qadiri, Nguzunguzu and J. Cush have delivered a surprisingly solid record with a global outlook and more than a few surprises surprises up its sleeve.

It's all meticulously crafted with a keen ear for mood and emotion, and yet Creatures has trouble moving beyond a pastiche of Castex's record collection.

If The Mainframe is a film, then it's a Michael Bay blockbuster: slick and engaging but totally adolescent in worldview, its plot tortuous, its characters flimsily drawn, all of it an excuse for a string of eye-popping action set-pieces.

Body Pill is thoroughly understated throughout. It's an odd little album that only shows us part of the Anthony Naples puzzle, which is probably appropriate for an artist whose work seems to come in small and unusual bursts of inspiration.

A beautiful collection of tunes as striking as they are subtle.

James spends most of the EP in that exploratory mode, and though there's a certain pleasure in listening to an artist figure things out, a full 28 minutes feels like overkill. Regardless, it's comforting to know James isn't settling into a routine.

Some tracks, like "Mouth Mantra," simply feel overcrowded. The Haxan Cloak, who mixed the album, struggles to find clarity in busier moments. But the story, visceral and tragic, transcends these imperfections in the telling.

Ghost Culture is a good record from an artist who is probably capable of a great one.