John Calvert

At its heart, ‘Depression Cherry' is an album about the wonder of true happiness, with space, or the infinite used as a metaphor for love ... But it’s difficult to share the singer's awe when the musical backdrop sounds so tired.

Though Swans’ records are invariably seedy, To Be Kind is downright sexy, tender like a snake and surprisingly intimate.

Government Plates is sometimes just incoherent. ... But in the end these are minor quibbles.

Though a marginally lesser album than predecessor MAYA, Matangi is nevertheless dynamite.

Tattoos is a disjointed hotchpotch of incompatible tones, styles and sentiment – a product of today’s collectivised producer system whereby long-players are constructed like playlists.

The good news is, MGMT is by some margin the New Yorker’s most intuitive, sincere and naturalistic record. The bad news is that it’s not at all musically interesting.

They’re magical, not least in their ability to conjure that British combination of epic and vulnerable without recourse to fey wetness.

Occasionally subtlety spills over into insipidness, but overall this is a masterclass in restrained beauty.

If you’re a fan of melted inversions of pop tropes then there’s ephemeral thrills for the taking here. If nothing else, it’s proof that the king of all flash-in-the-pan fads ought not to be written off just yet. 

On ‘Pythons’, the Floridians have ditched the surf rock of 2010 debut ‘Astro Coast’ and, instead, plundered college rock for all it’s worth.

It’s these tracks that make for a far less jittery album, as does the dialling back of Everything Everything’s math-y structural density to make way for uncluttered hooks and big choruses

An r’n'b album with few equals in terms of narrational ambition, Trilogy doesn’t just expose or subvert the womanising male archetype of modern r’n'b, it destroys it, by rendering it quaintly one-dimensional. 

For the most part this is a composed, nourishing pop album.

Though dependably abrasive, anthems of doomed youth just aren’t as brilliantly nihilistic when they sound like they’ve got AC/DC’s Angus Young on guitar. 

Below the surface of their post-hardcore box-ticking – the filling-pain feedback and off-tone notes – Metz are something quite orthodox.

By mothballing the swampy fug and tensile detail, this time Death Grips pivot on razor-edged resolve and naked might. 

So just to be sure it’s said, for the last time before the rush, for the sake of posterity, and I’m sorry to be predictable… but this record is truly awful. 

Neither spectacular or deflating, Coexist is simply the sound of the xx, more or less just as we left it: minimalist, intuitive, romantic and enchanting.

America is a profound statement; splicing Fuck Buttons with Sigur Rós in a state-of-the-union address balanced between hope, despair and an accomplished collision of strings, brass, soaring choirs and beats.

In the end, much of Fragrant Blood seems significantly less exotic than their bygone pop tunes.

Where ‘Undersea’ falls down is in their reluctance to organise their woes into anything approaching a song, preferring instead to meander in opaque sedation.

Without compromising their rustic, Grimm fairytale undertone, they’ve turned in a chromed, hi-tech pop album.

A largely beatific album, it propagates love over high living, but also shipped is the urban locale ... substituted for the same precocious wisdom, emotional intelligence, writerly nuance and reasoned portrayal of lust displayed on the Tumblr post.