Tonight We Dance

Rice’s soft Scottish-American voice blends beautifully with Lewis’s powerful, clear one. When they take turns singing, you hang on for them to come back together again. These are love songs with sharp edges that keep the sweetness mysterious.

What elevates Turn Out The Lights is that it’s sensory as well as earnest, personally destabilising while artfully assured; it oscillates in the spilling synaesthesia of panic attacks, the dizzying clarity of epiphany, the paralysing futility of depressive episodes, the unfathomable locus of being okay.

Its charms are subtle, its grip soft and easily shrugged by those who choose to pay it only passing attention. Live with it a while, though, and High Violet rewards patience with songs that colour one’s waking existence, becoming vivid night-time narratives when curtains are drawn.

The result is her first triumph: a collection of literary and emotional songs to have you whooping with joy or fighting off tears, with tunes that deliver new riches with each listen.

Vampire Weekend’s second album, “Contra”, finds the New York-based band pushing its eclectic, intellectual indie rock further using a mash-up of musical genres, clever wordplay and emotional heft.

“My Dinosaur Life” combines the mayhem and melody of “Commit To This Memory”, while maintaining the pop sensibilities they showed on “Even If It Kills Me”. It has the ferocity of a debut album while maintaining the expertise that seasoned bands possess.

What elevates Turn Out The Lights is that it’s sensory as well as earnest, personally destabilising while artfully assured; it oscillates in the spilling synaesthesia of panic attacks, the dizzying clarity of epiphany, the paralysing futility of depressive episodes, the unfathomable locus of being okay.

Overall, Belle and Sebastian Write About Love plays like a greatest hits, though not necessarily of former songs.

What elevates Turn Out The Lights is that it’s sensory as well as earnest, personally destabilising while artfully assured; it oscillates in the spilling synaesthesia of panic attacks, the dizzying clarity of epiphany, the paralysing futility of depressive episodes, the unfathomable locus of being okay.

“American Slang” delivers spectacularly on all expected fronts. Everything that was great about The ”59 Sound is here, but the sound is even bigger, epic without getting blustery.