LISm is a sprawl, a circuitous meander, but one in which every second counts.

As ever, there are great songs here, underpinned by sharp, imaginative production.... The problem is that Lidell doesn't go far enough.

It's not long before Punk Authority ceases to feel abrasive and is instead perceived as soothing, continuous streams of sound.

The result is a record that's sensually stark, with not one extraneous moment marking its naked contours.

Most of these tracks feel like they would evaporate instantaneously if they tried to leave the house, let alone take their place in any public space. As a debut collection of electronic oddities, it works just fine, though.

For those of us in between, it's like that aforementioned jigsaw puzzle: confounding, occasionally satisfying, and forever keeping you guessing as to what image its shapes are trying to form.

Ambitious and homespun all at once, Welcome to Mikrosector-50 is like diving into the overgrown imagination of a young child.

Taken as a whole, Incubation is an album that lures you into dark places in your brain rather than moving your body on the dance floor.

Though far from the full-on dance album Yorke's DJ gigs and 50 Weapons single had presaged, Amok does feel like a collection of tracks, not songs.

It is a real gem.

While McIlwain is operating within more rigid structures, another hangover from his ambient productions is that he can sometimes sound a bit directionless.

House of Woo may be playful and irreverent, but that shouldn't disguise its status as a potent exploration of sound.

Mood-wise, the three tracks are more in line with his debut, Hazyville, than any of his more recent output via Honest Jon's, although the techno that pulsed and glimmered through his older material is largely absent here.

[A] formidable, baffling, often delightful behemoth of an album.

The appeal of this LP lies in the adroit splicing of this aesthetic with that of dance floor techno, a combination which has the potential to be horrifically stale, sterile, smug—but ends up being anything but.

Wraetlic has the lingering feeling of prematurity, offering snatches of brilliance too easily snuffed out by its own tendency to hide its features in the dark.

Like all good pop, News From Nowhere is brief, never falling victim to the temptation to get lost in soundscaping. Instead, it builds those immersive realms in just a few minutes with each track.

It's unclear if Elements of Light represents an evolutionary mark for the producer or a one-off exercise inspired by a summer's day in Oslo, but as an effort at minimalism, it's a modest success at best.

Stones and Woods is a frustrating body of work, with good ideas poorly realised and arresting moments interrupted by annoying ones.

Rhythmically, Ben UFO is giddy, ebullient even. Which is why, even at his most corrosive, he is not just a very smart "crate-digger," but also a phenomenal party starter.

It's not often one comes across an album that is somehow both more evolved and primitive than its predecessor, yet it's a trick Container has pulled-off with LP.

Movement, then, is more a proof of concept than a fully fleshed-out thought, though Herndon brings enough passion to her sound to suggest one is coming.

While Orbits is a tighter record, its joints are still too weak to hold it all up.

Some of Orbiting still sounds a little sketchy, like a bunch of good ideas that have yet to coagulate into fully-rounded, purposeful bangers, but clearly Jeremy Guindo is a real maverick talent.

If there's one major criticism of this record it's that its excessive length--13 tracks totalling 58 minutes--means that standout tracks can be missed through sheer volume of material.

The sound of Pangaea doing his thang, then? Yep. Ahead of the game? On this evidence, most certainly.

It's a more expansive, more ambitious and more accomplished Raime than we've heard before.

As you unspool slowly into Aimlessness, you can't help but wish for a more mediating human touch.

The truly ambient moments of Living With Ghosts are easily its most arresting, providing brief periods of respite amid the album's unrelenting greyscale grasp.

And while there's no percussion in any conventional sense, the likes of "Uptown Psychedelia" jerk manically to their own spasmodic rhythms. Yet where those tracks are marked by an almost feverish nervous tension, from "Racist Drone" onwards Hecker and Lopatin seem to drift into an almost tranquilised state-one which strays closer to ambient clichés.

There are no new tricks at hand here, no experimental forays into the goonier psych-prog ends of the space disco genre. And you know what? Thank f*** for that.

His third album is easily the tightest record yet. Jumping from sound to sound, Ital Tek has covered a startling amount of ground in a short time.

Though he's had plenty of strong releases in the past, this one has the inspired feeling of an artist truly finding his footing--a breakthrough, in other words.

With By Your Side, Ed Banger and Breakbot seem more and more lost in a Tumblr-tinged display of self-referencing: very now but just not very new.

Dusk & Blackdown have an idiosyncratic grip on texture and structure, which Dasaflex wholeheartedly emphasizes.

It feels like a miniaturized epic, and it sees Mendez touch on all the established hallmarks of his already renowned sound, embellishing it here and there with grandiose flourishes.

Atonal but definitely not without its charms, it's the producer's most distinctive statement yet.

For the most part, Mantasy is a serious record that confidently takes its own sweet time.

With its intrepid nonconformity, masterfully undercooked programming and swagger, it's hard not to view Transsektoral as anything other than a resounding success.

Fleshed out with flecks of African-style guitar and tumbling bass...there's still the trademarked bedrock: that motor-fueled, machine-grind churn.

Pink sits in between: not sonically and melodically rich enough to be digested with the bedroom fervour of, say, Rounds, but somehow not fully metamorphosed into whatever new form Hebden is pushing towards. Nobody's doubting the man's incredible skill as a producer, and the delicacy, intelligence and maturity of his ideas. But here, alchemy isn't quite achieved.

JIAOLONG is one of the year's most consistently compelling LPs, whether as home listening evening fuel or out and about in the sweaty rooms for which it was designed.

Fetch picks up right where Horizontal Structures left off: von Oswald allowing the group's myriad tones and timbres to bleed out and coagulate.

Pleasant is the word. But not simple. Quiet has just as many corners worth peeking down.

The Predicting Machine sounds more like a homage to various styles, from the naive, exploratory ambient works of Radioactivity-era Kraftwerk ("Radio Channel"), to the whimsical homespun techno of label-mate Superpitcher ("Orbiter").

This album represents an intriguing compromise between Fell's distinctive language and the friendlier environs of the contemporary dance floor.

Amidst all the flying debris and heart-stopping drama you have the most cohesive and powerful single statement from Terror Danjah yet.

It's one of the most engaging and gripping techno albums of the year anyway.

Dependent and Happy sounds like the hungriest dance music that Ricardo Villalobos has recorded in some time.

To say that Sommer is a piece of sonic architecture of which Klein himself would be proud is more than just hot air.

With Steam Days, Fake returns to the fuzzy melodies and subtle, static-laced gleam that marked not only much of his best early work but also his better remixes.

Sebenza sounds like nothing else out there and yet LV's knack for genre-mincing produces an album that sounds both timeless and completely of its time, crossing musical and political borders with confident finesse.

Despite the occasionally fraught listening experience, Will Happiness Find Me? remains a record that is as fantastically compelling musically as it is thought-provoking.

A somewhat stunted, companion piece to their debut, all the more frustrating for their lack of real development.

Mala in Cuba is a statement of consummate mastery-of a form, of a tempo, of a set of tools-shaped by the implacable creative imagination of one of the finest producers of his generation.

With arena-size atmospherics and every sound endowed with a fathoms-deep dub delirium, Eight is an album as focused on its meticulous sound design as it is on the musicality.

Key to the Kuffs certainly finds one of underground music's true antiheros in irresistibly infectious form.

As gripping as the album is all the way through-it seems to chart an on/off relationship even more directly than their eponymous album did-its best moment is actually its first. Opener "Angels" is one of the meekest xx tracks, but it's easily among their most powerful.

The album has a swampy, overheated feel, which takes some of the impact away from its sharper moments but enhances its more languid stretches.

It's almost too easy to become completely enamoured with the very sounds it's employing, rather than the mood it's ostensibly trying to convey.

Oft-delayed, long-overdue, but quietly, subtly worth the wait.

It's the "electronic music" aspect of Strange Passion that's most fascinating.

Adorned with production that's as sympathetic to UK underground dance as it is to modern R&B and classic soul, Devotion is a classy affair that delights in its own refinement yet stays pinned to the earth, a talented singer and songwriter realizing her potential at just the right moment.

The fundamental problem with Mst is not that it sounds like someone else, but that these ten tracks rarely match the profound emotional gravitas of that significant other.

The album stays reasonably well-balanced throughout, straddling that fine line between understatement and being sledgehammer-esque obvious.

Bring Me the Head Of... will not win Dunn an army of new fans, you are either on his wavelength or you're not. It is, however, among his finest work to date and shows an ever-growing refinement and understanding of his chosen medium.

Regional Surrealism [is] somewhere you'll want to lose yourself again and again.

If such moments [a typically slurring yet splenetic Prefuse 73 contribution or Siriusmo's "Modern Talk,"] constitute the highly enjoyable base level here, then the best moments are staggering.

The Killer seems to reveal a pattern on Pawlowitz's part, yet it somehow remains every bit as viscerally captivating as his best material, a formula still as cryptic as it ever was.

As a closer [song "Shuck"], it's an interesting moment and one particularly reflective of Shrines' strengths and its dualistic intrigues: the serenity of Roddick's buoyant, burbling synths amidst James's hallucinatory full-moon visions.

Overall Passion is an angst-free experience, finely wrought with a view to banishing the black and the blues.

There's no doubt you'll hear a lot of records in 2012 that sound like Whispers in the Dark, but you'll rarely hear it done this well.

If you come to Foals from an exclusively indie rock perspective, this may blow your tiny mind. But if this is Foals' attempt to infiltrate clubland proper, it falls short.

Most tracks have so much going on that it begins to feel like tectonic plates pulling in opposite directions, heaving two ways at once and leaving the listener dizzy and disoriented. It's Ryat's crystal clear, wriggling voice that's the glue just barely holding everything together.

There isn't a bad track on Black Boulder and it is certainly an accessible crossover release that's suited to the long-player format. But it's not very original either.

[The album's] obfuscating mires of navel-gazing perhaps precludes it from attaining Ninja Tune classic status, but those of a darker disposition will likely be of the opinion this challenging opus collates Ortega's strongest work to date.

For those of us undeterred by Halo's vocal approach, Quarantine is an often breathtaking piece of emotive reverie that stands sonically as one of the year's more consistently inviting ambient LPs.

Naturally, the good tracks are sublime... [yet] familiar overreaching, archness even, creeps in elsewhere.

Salton Sea feels engineered for eminent listenability.

For many, it was going to be hard for Tellier to surpass Sexuality's sensuous odyssey. Thankfully, My God Is Blue does at least equal it.

Rinse Presents: Brackles is a cohesive, singular statement that finds his sound truly rising to the occasion.

Though the record at times leans toward Pantha du Prince's slowly evolving, dewy-eyed sense of melody, Urpsrung is without question Weber's most experimental and evasive work to date.

Unpatterns is very now, yet by employing key electronic music touchstones it sounds classic as well.

There's so much blood and soul poured into Music for the Quiet Hour that it almost feels effortless. Along with the fascinatingly fragmented Drawbar Organ EPs, the box set presents what's either a closing chapter or a new beginning in the career of one of electronic music's most luminous illuminati.

It could just be good timing, or that he remains the same ingeniously innovative songwriter, but Club Rez is yet another victory for the young producer.

Quite possibly represents Edgar's most full-blooded work yet.

Its banging moments are the best of Feldwick's career, but the album's dips into gentler territory are confusing drains on the momentum, lazy Sunday afternoon beat music for nerdy kids with oversized headphones.

In its studio form, though, II remains a lukewarm, ambivalent understatement.

Sleek, confident and totally captivating, New Epoch is bound to attract interest and even incite excitement in those who might have thought the 140 BPM form outmoded and uninteresting.

It's an album of contrasts that can prove difficult and overlong one listen and breathtaking and fascinatingly complex the next, not a masterpiece by any means but a unique kind of impressive nonetheless.

Biokinetics has aged so well that it could easily pass for a new album. The production level is exceptional by today's standards, and it has more teeth than much of the music it inspired, especially contemporary dub techno, most of which sounds vanilla by comparison.

Lone hasn't fully reinvented the narrative thread he started with "Pineapple Crush," but he's enriched it with a deeper exploration of his music's other referents, finding new dimensions to a sound that was beginning to feel awfully one-dimensional.

Modern Jester is one of the most accomplished noise albums of the last several years. Excellent are the chances that it will go down as one of his very finest works.

Lazer Sword's somewhat gloomy sophomore album does still represent a largely enjoyable body of work that packs in plenty of well-executed ideas.

The best moments here are almost indistinguishable from Grouper's best work.

In some ways it's arguably dubstep's first concept album, an expansive and visionary "what if," a dreamscape of a post-globalization, collapsed multicultural society where cultures collide uncontrollably.

Reform Club is full of conventional beauty; protracted strings and pads which soar, pulse, float or shimmer on a dub-tinged substrate.