With Love Comes Close, Cold Cave mixes in elements of noisy rock and dance music on an extremely strong album. The dancier portions of the album never venture into, say, Cut Copy territory, but still pack loads of melodies into an array of scuzzy arrangements.

Some will simply be happy that this supremely talented group of friends, who toured under the same moniker a few years back, are finally putting some songs to wax. Others, myself included, will take a step back from the record and come away with the feeling that the group’s self titled debut is little more than a patchwork quilt of songs that would serve no better than B-Sides for their main outfits.

And on In And Out Of Control Wagner and Foo return with a record that’s less overtly gloomy than the band’s 2007 breakout Lust Lust Lust, yet more morose and macabre than ever.

Childish Prodigy jumps all over the place over the course of its 11 songs, ranging from dreamy, strung out folk music to stomping rock and roll. The main strength of the album is the timeless sound that Vile creates, both representing new and exciting sounds while keeping an eye respectfully on the past…

After a self confessed creative drought, Peter Pisano has channeled a violent outburst of songwriting into a new project, this time with a different Eau Claire expat, Brian Moen of Laarks. The project is called Peter Wolf Crier, and the duo has just released their debut album Inter-Be.

Us has everything you’ve come to expect from a Brother Ali album: powerful production from Ant and groundbreaking lyrics from Brother Ali. His storytelling abilities come alive like a beast awakening from hibernation, and the outcome is simply stunning; Ali is quickly on his way to becoming a legendary emcee, and Us is yet another nail in the pivotal coffin of truth.

xx is one of my favorite discoveries of the year and offers a rare occasion where a band comes out of the gate with a disc that is not only enjoyable, but doesn’t sound like a pastiche of other bands.

While I Fear You, My Darkness was a pretty straightforward shot at creating electronic pop songs with killer hooks, the band extends its sound on Wild at Heart.

I dread saying something along the lines of “they’re playing music that is mature beyond their years,” “Total Babe is the next big thing,” or “you’ll be hearing about them a lot in future.” And I won’t. But if someone were to say any of those things, I wouldn’t disagree.

Rascal is gunning for superstardom on this one, and he doesn’t really give a damn who he has to knock out of the way to get there. Though in his gun for a wider audience, Rascal mostly ends up knocking himself out of the way, eschewing the sparsely populated bleeps and blips of Showtime, or the southern crunk through way of East London of Maths+English for a much more mainstream club sound.

Though it only has three tracks, the disc is long enough to establish Free Energy as a band (potentially) worthy of its hype, and short enough to make listeners want more.

Despite A Brief History Of Love’s occasional missteps, the album is brimming with cocksure confidence, and is packed with layer upon layer of compelling beats, rhythms and melodies, as well as a lyrical theme that everyone with a heart that they’ve given away can relate to.