So after reviewing Isle Of Wight Festival last week and discussing Hip Hop and the music industry’s progression in the last two editions of Stumble Into The Night, it’s time to get back to something far more practical, as I review a week’s worth of high profile album releases.

So let’s not beat around the bush, let’s forgo foreplay, and get right down to business.

Out Now

Bon Iver – Bon Iver

While Julian Vernon clearly had an affinity for auto-tune prior to collaborating with Kanye West, it appears that Mr. West’s maximalist electronic tendencies have rubbed off on the Wisconsin born songsmith as he follows up the insular For Emma, Forever Ago with this vibrant and bristling eponymous effort. Naturally, Bon Iver is a far more discreet than Kanye’s gaudily brilliantly ode to excess My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, but it nevertheless bears the hallmarks of an artist exploring, combining and stretching sound to its limits.

Album opener “Perth” gentle migrates from pulsating rhythms and arpegiated shimmers into the understated strings, gorgeous horns and pitter beats of the magnificent “Minnesota, WI”. The way each track, and each palate of sound glides into the next is divine, feeling both intricately studied and effortlessly, airily natural. Even as booming crunches of bass inject, and are juxtaposed with, Vernon’s fragile falsetto a judicious and frighteningly beautiful balance is struck.

Despite brimming with a deep variety of instrumentation, it’s not the jazzy flourishes, eerie shimmers or gnawing scrapes that make a track like “Holocene” so special, it’s Vernon’s croon. He’s at his heart breaking best as he sighs with a noble reflective dignity “I was not magnificent…I can see for miles, miles, miles”. His voice alone has a tearful resonance that is only enhanced by a series of rhythmic crescendos, and an arrangement of such depth that it demands, more than warrants, considered repeated listens.

There is a wonderful sense of space on Bon Iver, if Vernon’s debut felt claustrophobically internalized, then the follow up exists on misty meadows, rolling plains and imposing mountain ranges. It’s still one man’s distinctly personal grief but spread out across, and lost within, these luscious and lonesome natural expanses. Vernon has taken the scale of Arcade Fire and creative scope of Sufjan Stevens and made them terrifyingly desolate, retaining the breadth and brilliance of both, but replacing brazen sense of universality with a shivering fragility.

Strictly Our Opinion: For Emma, Forever Ago was a specific, intimate affair that struck its listeners on wholly personal level, making deep internalized and direct connections. Bon Iver is broader, but no less resonant, carefully constructed diverse and expansive layers of sound combine to create a record that is wholly modern, thrilling electric, but wonderfully rustic. As an album Bon Iver is mammoth in scope, universally poignant, full of arresting crescendos, while remaining fragile, isolated and lonesome in its catharsis. A 21^st Century masterpiece, a unique, but magnificent companion for My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and Illinois [4.5/5.0]

Wiley – 100% Publishing

Few artists have enjoyed as much critical goodwill as Wiley. Despite many misfires and so many close calls with superstardom, Wiley has maintained the interest of grime and pop fans across the UK. Proudly grime, willfully commercial, and defiantly independent, Wiley spends as much time battling record label bosses and haters on twitter as he does nailing down a focused sound. Unfortunately, his carefree approach to promotion and his art has left Wiley with a frustratingly inconsistent back catalogue.

100% Publishing is no expectation; there is an abundance of brilliance as Wiley dispenses some fantastic lines over a series of enticing beats while maintaining an unmistakably smooth and entirely engrossing flow. Sadly, just as one sublime track begins to flow into the next; we hit the half waypoint with a thud. The painfully bland “Talk About Life” kills Wiley’s momentum stone dead, and one of the year’s most exciting LPs descends into the frustrating mediocrity we’ve come to expect from Wiley. The rhymes remain slick but the subject matter feels lightweight, even petulant at times, and sadly while the hooks are far from poor, tracks like “Pink Lady” and “Up There” fail to inspire.

Thankfully, the momentum built up during the albums first six tracks, including the brilliant “100% Publishing”, “Your Intuition” and “Numbers In Action”, is slow to dissipate and the album has a wonderful fast following joyous vibe. Wiley’s ability to switch from the trivial streams of consciousness to self-assured lyrical assaults remains captivating. The pointed mission statement “Wise Man And His Words” captures a rare moment where Wiley marries a grinding flow to a focused sense of purpose, with electrifying results.

Strictly Our Opinion: Wiley remains a captivating voice on the UK scene, a true individual, who is frustrating consistent in his inconsistency. Thankfully, Wiley’s highs are so high, and his flow is so addictive that he comfortably holds his audience’s attention through the album’s shakier moments. Fun, and at time thrilling, 100% Publishing isn’t the focused masterpiece that we know Wiley is capable of producing, but it is one of his best and most complete efforts to date. [3.0/5.0]

Austra – Feel It Break

Within the opening thirty seconds listening to album opener “Darken Her Horse” the words Fever Ray and The Knife immediately spring to mind. Few would balk at being compared to the magnificent Karin Dreijer Andersson, but sadly for Austra the comparison is not only hard to avoid, but it casts a shadow of artistic excellence that few would want hanging over them.

Luckily Katie Stelmanis croon is so consistently striking, recalling both Florence Welch and Zola Jesus, and her beats are so willfully engaging that Austra feel like the fun loving danceable alternative to the multitude of 21^st Century’s female gloom-mongers. The atmosphere on Feel It Break is impeccable, dark creepy, propulsive, but Austra have a cunning flair for the theatrical; Katie’s hoots give “Lose It” a wonderful sense of colour while “The Future’s” ironically hoity piano line offers a knowing sense of frivilotity to an otherwise straight-laced effort.

From beneath the goth/chill-wave aesthetics the playful beat of stand out single “Beat and The Pulse” kick in, and it becomes clear that Katie Stelmanis takes her cues as much from Lindstrom and Christabelle as Fever Ray. Combining the histrionics of the latter with the relentlessly addictive beats of the former. “Spellwork” thrillingly unites the type of uber stylish churning beat you’d expect to hear on Lady Gaga’s Born This Way with the ghostly strained vocals that have come to define the female avant garde in the last decade.

Strictly Our Opinion: Feel It Break is a record that succinctly summarizes the pervading themes of the ghostly avante garde, cutting edge pop and burbling electronica. Austra have masterfully crafted a halfway house that brings together sounds with neither the extremities of abstraction nor the transience of pop. Feel It Break is therefore a gateway record into deeper more terse sounds that, despite lacking the striking originality of its peers, is carried by persistent energy and a thoroughly enjoyable sense of accessibility. [3.5/5.0]

Live Reviews:

How To Dress Well @XOYO, Shoreditch

Few genres could claim to be more progressive in 2011 than R’n’B, between Frank Ocean’s magnificent Nostalgia U.L.T.R.A, The Weeknd’s startlingly House Of Balloons and How To Dress Well’s ghostly Love Remains, a new generation of soulful crooners have been experimenting in texture, tone and mood. Even mainstream artists like The-Dream have been pushing the barriers of good taste in the desire to create remarkable and beautifully sung music.

Despite all this progression one question looms large over the new generation of R’n’B superstars; when your audience is a small art house niche and not a arena full of screaming girls, how do you translate in the live arena? How to Dress Well’s Tom Krell seems to side step the question by appearing without a backing band, armed with only a light projection display, he bravely strikes out alone. Relying on his vocal dexterity and the patience of his audience to carry the show.

Debuting great swathes of new material, it’s hard for Krell’s set to hit home as the sterilized pre-recorded backing tracks can’t match the beauty of Krell’s soulful crackling cries. Krell is riffing, interpreting in the live arena, but rather than bouncing off his fellow band mates he works with the mechanical precision of a laptop. It’s an uncomfortable dichotomy, but one which Krell overcomes to create fleeting moments of immersive beauty. “Suicide Dream Part 2” drifted into the ether with wonderful serenity as Krell plaintively cooed “No air, No air”, while the skipping rhythms of Krell’s newer tracks, while hardly danceable, were instantly engrossing.

Strictly Our Opinion: Sadly, How To Dress Well couldn’t put together a consistently satisfying set, and in keeping with Krell’s seductive croon, tonight’s show was highly fractured, quietly, almost meekly beautiful, but disjointed and lacking the organic energy that only a live band can bring. Krell did his best to vibe and interpret in the live arena, but if his show stopping voice is ever going to develop into a must see live attraction, he will require some human counterparts to react to and interact with.