Post-millennial indie boy-rock has taken a savage beating here. And it may prove the best it’s ever had.

First Aid Kit sing harmonies so close you couldn't run a Band Aid between them.

As always, Ladytron make the world feel a more haunted, evocative, romantic place. Faultless.

14 songs of keening, romantic acoustic music of great seriousness and lightness of being.

The worldy influence remains but never overwhelms and the album contains at least half a dozen songs that are as simple and profound as anything Simon has ever written.

This one's a beauty.

A cool, edgy soundtrack for the summer, should it ever arrive.

An unprecedented futuristic hybrid of dubstep, speedcore and math-rock, with lyrics which charge towards unexplored lexicographical horizons.

Wilfully abstruse, then, but still one hell of a talent.

Between the pub and the high seas, Elbow reset their mission statement here: to navigate the heart’s tides with their art intact.

King Lear probably sounded like this after a couple of days on the heath.

Tracks such as "Epilogue to a Marriage" here, serve as a reminder that there's always room for the real thing, and you'll know it when it hits you.

This is an album that's ostentatiously overloaded on melody, and on all-round sonic luxury. This is the one.

If his follow-up doesn't evince quite the same exuberance, it still twinkles with a well-travelled exoticism.

When it's good, it's a thrilling and ambtitious state-of-the-nation address.

She's on the cover, smirking in front of an old map: a naughty sea god(dess) in a Cruikshank cartoon. Which somehow suits the discursive post-folk rompery of the music: highly arranged, wordy as an Elvis Costello song with larks taking the place of bitterness.

The majority of A (clever title, in the context of Faltskog's history) consists of dignified, age appropriate ballads.

It's a clever, sensitive record.

This album shimmers.

The internationalist (Scouse-Chinese-Scottish-Bulgarian-Israeli) electro-rock quartet may not have presented a comprehensive summary of their career here, but it's a superb starting point for Ladytron latecomers.

One day, maybe the Lips will play nice again. Until then, they and their Fwends have given us plenty to get our heads around.

It's lovely to fall asleep to. Which is a compliment, not a complaint.

CocoRosie [is] squat, inventively, somewhere between Fever Ray and Joanna Newsom.

Here are a dozen more such, all beautifully crafted and conceived with poetic flair, arranged nicely for restrainedly plucked instruments, sung in a thin soprano which strains into a yelp.

With treasurable details – the dubbed-up refrain of "Black Icy Stare", the Merseybeat-ish groove of "Karmatron" – feeding into an overall ambience of lotus-eating sensuality.

Glowing Mouth is so subtly soaring it could restore words such as "atmospheric" and "portentious" to the rock lexicon.

David Bowie's perpetual predicament is that he can't escape David Bowie's past. In that respect, he's just like the rest of us: we can't escape David Bowie's past either. The Next Day leaves you wondering why you'd ever want to.

While this may once have been filed under 'shoegaze', now we can call it 'noisy dream pop' and just wade in its wash of guitars.