Breathe Carolina - Blackout

The Airborne Toxic Event - All I Ever Wanted

Four Year Strong - Just Drive

Rise Against - Make It Stop (September's Children)

New Single Coldplay - Paradise (video)

Florence + The Machine Ceremonials

Florence Welch’s debut album of 2009, Lungs, lived up to the excessive hype of a music press that had been utterly seduced by her harp plucks and tribal drum riffs, her otherworldly sensibility and her arresting vocals. She pushed us through fairy-tale dreamscapes and catapulted us through life’s dramas with anger and beauty, her voice as strident, sharp and strong as a deftly brandished scimitar. Visceral, raw and passionate, Lungs was aptly named.
And so too is the follow-up, fittingly released on Halloween. The arrangements here are even more richly layered and majestic; they surge with strings and arrive backed by choristers, while the narratives are darker and prioritise the spirit over the corporeal. Lead single What the Water Gave Me, issued as a standalone cut in August, is brooding and windswept, its harp twinkling eerily in the ether. As Welch mournfully sings of being laid down with "pockets full of stones" before the track swells to a choir-bolstered climax of Emily Brontë ’n’ Kate Bush proportions, images of her as John William Waterhouse’s doomed, red-headed Ophelia can’t help but swim before your eyes. It is magnificent – so it’s hardly surprising that, despite not having a physical release, it managed to chart.

The Horrors - Still Life

In his new book, Retromania, the critic Simon Reynolds revisits his damning mid-80s coinage "record collection rock". Inspired by the relentless forward march of post-punk, the young Reynolds was sceptical of bands such as Primal Scream or Spacemen 3, who waved their influences like a flag: "music," as he once defined it, "where the listener's knowledge of prior rock music is integral to the full aesthetic appreciation of the record." It's a nice concept, but one that's in the eye of the beholder. If a band have a broad enough spectrum of influences and adapt or combine them in clever, compelling ways, then an audience not necessarily versed in those influences will take them at face value. In the worst cases, a candidly celebrated record collection feels like a cage; in the best it's a door.
When the Horrors emerged, in a cloud of dry ice, from Southend six years ago, it was difficult to tell which way they were heading. Looking like gravediggers and sounding like cratediggers, they were passionately devoted to Joe Meek, the Birthday Party, the Cramps and outré garage rock (they covered the Sonics and Screaming Lord Sutch), and they didn't mind who knew it. With costumes, pseudonyms and artwork to match the music, their 2007 debut album Strange House felt so conceptually neat that it might have been an airlock. Add to that the mixed blessing of music-press hype and you had a young band with everything to prove.