The debut full-length from this glowering <Los Angeles> act is a focused sonic assault that borrows a great deal from Joy Division, early Interpol, and A Place to Bury Strangers to create just under 35 minutes of tastefully restrained post-punk.

Search any decent record store for any remotely genre-transcending record and it quickly becomes apparent that it’s almost anachronistic that record shops still categorise music so rigidly by genre, a practice that surely should have gone out of the window the moment The Beatles’ Revolver hit the stands.

The New Pornographers’ frontman Carl Newman wrote Shut Down the Streets after his mother’s death and before his son’s birth, and as open and airy as these songs sound, they are also anchored by weighty lyrics about indecision and ambiguity. In other words, the album’s cover, featuring Newman standing in a spacious glade surrounded by fallen trees, is perfect.

New York’s Chrome Canyon is wise to stay away from straight-up pastiche; Elemental Themes borrows sounds and ideas from the sci-fi soundtracks of yesteryear but gives them an organic heart.

Ultraísta could so easily have been yet another post-dubstep decent-but-disposable record. Instead the trio have managed to create something that genuinely impresses and surprises.

From the ashes of post-rock aesthetes Apse comes ERAAS. With frontman Robert Toher and co-songwriter Austin Stawiarz remaining, the act assumes a more silvery, esoteric, and minimalist shape, as ethereal vocals recalling The Knife slither around sinewy bass groves and stray glass synth shards.

Mountain Goats frontman John Darnielle has a new baby, but that hasn’t softened his love for dark subject matter. (“Please,” he wrote on his website in July. “May the baby grow up to spit in my face if I should pose that hard.”) Transcendental Youth, despite its frequent use of a punchy horn section, is bleak, even by Darnielle’s standards. It’s also one of the band’s best.

Warning: Listeners are encouraged to first experience Lonerism with 2010’s Innerspeaker stricken from the mind. Only after 10 listens may the two albums be soberly compared.

With Babel, Mumford & Sons has proven that it can do it again, replicating all that made Sigh No More so successful and well loved. It’s certainly not a departure from the band’s debut, but rather a continuation.