London Grammar – If You Wait
There is not a single weak track, but amongst the many highlights is a spellbinding cover of French house artist Kavinsky’s “Nightcall”. There’s a particularly gorgeous moment around the two-minute-thirty-second mark when the instrumentation is peeled away and, for a few seconds, you think the song will end – before Reid’s dazzling vocal is re-introduced amidst a haze of swirling keys. It’s nothing short of transcendent. Also, the flawless sequencing leads to an album that begs you to drink in its beauty by listening to it from beginning to end.

This is an enthralling, stunning, deeply emotive album that perfectly marries understated electronica to sublime vocals and melodies. In a year dominated by titanic LPs, London Grammar have not only made the most perfectly formed debut album of the year – they’ve made one of the best LPs, period. Read the full review on Pretty Much Amazing

Hold Steady – Teeth Dreams
If you’ve ever had that dream where your teeth fall out or crumble apart, you can recall that tossing-and-turning feeling of helplessness and existential dread that you can’t escape from while you’re asleep. For the Hold Steady, though, its Teeth Dreams are about being trapped in reality, what happens after coming down from a high and facing up to the latent fears and nagging disappointments that all the self-medicating could fend off for only so long. This time out, there’s not so much about booze and drugs, and nothing about hoodrats, with the key terms on Teeth Dreams being frustration and anxiety. Read the full review on Pop Matters

Bad Plus – Rite of Spring
Of all the jazz groups to tackle such a hurdle, The Bad Plus seems like the right horse for the course. It’s a group with an affinity for quirky, proggy original music; a reputation for transformative covers of anything from 20th-century classical music to Aphex Twin; an evident love for music history, whether jazz or otherwise. It’s also been touring frequently for well over a decade, with sizeable fan base and media attention, making it possible for a few major performing arts institutions to commission it for something of this scope. So they did, at first performing their adaptation of the Rite with a video installation and later with a dance company. Now the music is on record for anyone to hear. Read the full review on NPR