CHIMNEY'S AFIRE

'Chimney's afire' is the cry whalers of yesteryear made when they harpooned a whale and a plume of blood and water spurted out of its blowhole into the air. "It's a horrifying, brutal image, but the actual language is evocative and quite amazing," says Josh Pyke of the title of his new album, the follow-up to his ARIA Award winning debut 'Memories & Dust'.

Watch Me Disappear (Digipak)

On first single and title track: 'Funny track, wholly written with bass and drums not unlike a lot of the Dark Satanic Mills EP. Quite distinct from the rest of the album structurally. Thematically a return to the Eden subject previously explored in the Sunset Studies track 'There Is No Such Place'. - Glenn Richards

EVERYTHING ALL THE TIME

Achieving musical transcendence is a tricky feat, almost definitively. If it happens at all, it happens naturally — and perhaps nobody knows that better than Seattle, Washington’s Band of Horses.

ONLY BY THE NIGHT

'Only By The Night' is a bold and expansive sonic statement that looks set to solidify Kings of Leon's position as one of the most important international acts of 2008 and beyond.

CANSEI DE SER SEXY

Cansei de Ser Sexy, Portuguese for “Tired of Being Sexy,” is improbably, unbelievably and nearly eponymously their debut. It is a thick, pulsating thing full of haphazard synths (“Alala”) and a come-on of call and response that tears down any attempt at posturing

APOLOGIES TO THE QUEEN MARY

“Wolf Parade is like a retarded dog with four heads. At any given time, three of the heads are sleeping.” – Wolf Parade’s Dan Boeckner in the Montreal Mirror.

GIVE UP

The Postal Service is a long-distance collaboration between Ben Gibbard (singer/guitarist from Death Cab for Cutie) and Jimmy Tamborello (Jimmy recorded Beachwood Sparks’ Make the Cowboy Robots Cry and also records under the name DNTEL).

AVATAR

After 2004’s critically acclaimed Blue Cathedral, one might have expected Comets on Fire to blast off into the cosmos in an infinite flurry of lysergic spasmodicism. Surprising, then, that they should turn in an earthy, more accessible and downright beautiful album as their follow-up.