Taking it's name from the outdoor Maryland entertainment venue, Merriweather Post Pavilion is Animal Collective's most spatial effort to date, outlining a sublime, reticulated and, above all, unpredictable sonic topography, veering from glaciers, to shimmering lakes, to rustling leaves, in the space of a single breath. Despite it's heterogeneities, the album plays like a single, extended piece, as Panda Bear's taste for bringing sweetness as close as possible to saccharine without succumbing to it reaches almost unbearable heights, completing the band's movement from freak folk to dream pop, and evoking a world in which the digitisation of sensation has imbued beauty with the responsibility of reclaiming aithesis from aesthetics, and acting directly upon the physiology of the listener, teasing and caressing it into endlessly glistening, shivering palpitations. That said, the album is so enmeshed in digital production that this escape can only be registered as a nostalgia for the period when digitisation seemed like a utopian horizon, rather than a constriction ("If I could just leave my body for a night"), while its sense of communal possibility is deflected into a particularly tribal, industrial extension of Animal Collective's characteristic transplantation of family and tradition onto a more emergent collectivity. The result is an exhilarating, schizoid vision of technology as both determining and liberating, and a vision of 10s music as both inextricably album-bound and spontaneously generating; a kind of aesthetic anamorphism, encapsulated in the optical art rippling across the cover.

The greatest single statement that popular music has not made about homosexuality, the Pet Shop Boys' masterpiece elaborates their mnemosexual apotheosis - the moment after you come out, and realise that you still haven't come out; or, alternatively, the moment at which society's investment in maintaining homosexuality as an open secret, rather than merely oppressing it, becomes most tangible. As Neil Tennant's 'coming out' album, then, it alternates between euphemistic celebrations of heterodoxy and liberation ("Liberation", "I Wouldn't Normally Do This Kind Of Thing"), and suggestions of an unspeakability, a necessity for strategic latency, that has only been concentrated by this apparent liberation ("To Speak Is A Sin", "Dreaming Of The Queen"), and is ultimately equated with the past, whether in a personal ("Can You Forgive Her?"), historical, ("The Theatre"), or communal (again, "Dreaming Of The Queen", possibly the album's finest moment) register. Combined with Trevor Horn's magnificent production, this evokes the archetypal mnemosexual space as a dancefloor on which differences can be (collectively) remembered, but never (individually) articulated - the mere supplement to a society prepared to remember, but not tolerate, homosexuality, thereby keeping it in a state of perpetual infantilisation. This temporal slippage is epitomised by "Young Offender", the other contender for best track, in which Neil addresses a lover both older and younger than himself ("...I've been a teenager since before you were born"), or perhaps his past self, as if to suggest the structural, societal basis of homosexuality's supposed narcissism. However, the album climaxes in the aftermath of "Go West", the final track. Here, the deliberate, melancholy undercutting of the Village People's fairly underwhelming utopia is followed by several minutes of silence, and, finally, a short, eulogy for lost love ("...the times we've had, just you and me") sung, uncharacteristically, by Chris Lowe, as if the most honest mode of coming out were a purely private utterance, or an utter disfigurement and defamiliarisation of it's mouthpiece.

The masterpiece of Dream Pop, Heaven Or Las Vegas perfects the Cocteau Twins' evocation of the moment at which language evaporates, moving beyond the incomprehensibility of Treasure to present a texture that coalesces around words as if by accident; or, rather, characterises them as little more than the accidental by-products of a sonic fractal, whose infinite reiterations are merely opened, rather than contained, by the band. The result is a vision of the world immediately before it is bracketed by language; a sensory bombardment that imbues everything with the everlasting, pyrotechnic sunset of Las Vegas, gesturing towards the sublimity - and ambiguity - of consciousness. Even more beautifully, it is a vision of language just before it is bracketed by language, of words as a sensory, rather than semiotic, phenomenon - the lurid maraschino cherry that vocalist Elizabeth Fraser rolls around her mouth, with insatiable delight. From this perspective, the band's decision to name themselves after the French surrealist may have less to do with his shared taste for dream states than with the irreducible, inexplicable beauty of his name, while their ultimate gesture is to explicate music as the attempt to give colour to the blind.

If The Cure's Gothic trilogy (Seventeen Seconds, Faith, Pornography) enveloped lead singer Robert Smith in murk, then Disintegration sees him breaking the surface, exhilarated by the touch of night air, but oriented for the first time as to the sheer expanse of waste glittering around him. This produces an unusual mixture of euphoria and doom, encapsulated in the opening track ("Plainsong"), whose refrain ("It's so cold, it's so cold") takes on an almost triumphal quality, and sets the stage for one of the most lavish, atmospheric productions of the 1980s. For the most part, Smith favours long, epic arrangements (up to ten minutes on "The Same Deep Water As You"), relegating lyrics and melody to the pulses of energy required for him and his players to continue treading water.

This is a curious album, frequently moving from the sublime to the ridiculous in the space of a single song. At its strongest, it successfully fuses two disparate, even inimical, sensibilities - Liza's overwhelmingly personal register, which transforms any utterance, however ostensibly impersonal, into a confession of divaesque proportions; and the Pet Shop Boys' (who produced the album, and wrote seven of its ten tracks) taste for playful obliquity, which ensures that, even at his most confessional, lead singer Neil Tennant either appears to be singing about someone else, or about a version of himself from which he now enjoys a melancholy detachment. As might be expected, this combination works best on the five songs written specifically for Liza - especially the epic "If There Was Love", in which the intermittent lyrical concessions to this divaesque grandeur ("I've been working for a long time/Scattering smiles/Must I swallow my pride?") are curbed by the wryer, impersonal verses ("Banks have predictions, Policies made/Prophecies broken, violence deranged"), culminating with an unexpected spoken word segment, in which Liza reaches Shakespearean heights, but only to be gradually drowned out by the sublime synth arrangement. Unfortunately, her two covers of Pet Shop Boys songs ("Rent" and "Tonight Is Forever") are more in the way of a transformation than of a compromise between their respective registers, although orchestrator Angelo Badalamenti's flourish at the beginning of the latter provides a momentary promise to draw out the original's melancholy potential.

Despite featuring some of Bush's strongest moments, Hounds Of Love ultimately feels like an apology for the outstanding idiosyncrasies of The Dreaming, and an attempt to renew her standing with a public alienated from its 'weirdness'. To that end, the A-side, Hounds Of Love, features a collection of fairly accessible pop songs, including "Running Up That Hill", "Hounds Of Love" and "Cloudbusting", all of which are lyrically, instrumentally and compositionally impressive, but refrain from the vocal pyrotechnics of the earlier album, with the exception of such isolated moments as the chorus of "The Big Sky" - "You never understood me/ You never really tried" - whose reproach seems as directed at an intolerant audience as a lover. The B-side, The Ninth Wave, is a collection of songs about women drowning, or lost at sea and, at first glance, would seem to represent both an experimental and vocal counterbalance to the A-side, especially since Bush's voice might best be described as a malicious fludity, threatening to overwhelm both her and the listener with its amorphous, affronting metamorphoses. However, the result is too close to an electronic soundscape to take advantage of the extent to which Bush's voice is itself such a soundscape, making her own vocals seem curiously redundant - as if the allegory were in fact of her own commodification, or transformation, into a palatable presence. That said, the horrific distortions of "Waking The Witch" shock the listener out of complacency, while the shorter tracks ("And Dream Of Sheep", "Under Ice" and "The Morning Fog") restore Bush with some qualified agency, as do isolated segments of "Hello Earth" and "Jig Of Life".

Brothers In Arms culminates Dire Straits' uneasy relation to MTV, and the circumscription of arena impulses that it represents. On the one hand, the eight-minute long "Money For Nothing" viciously parodies the television station, and sees Mark Knopfler employ the dirtiest, bluesiest guitar work on the whole album, presumably in contradistinction to the song's lavish, synthesized opening ("I want my MTV..."). Yet this distinction belies the beauty of that opening, as well as its inordinate length, suggesting that the band are as seduced by (and even indebted to) MTV as much as repelled by it. This may inform their recourse to an unusually cheesy, poppy register in "Walk Of Life", but finds its most perfect expression in "Your Latest Trick" - a ballad for saxophone, guitar and keyboard that was made for that quintessentially MTV elaboration of the smoky, dimly-lit, melancholy lounge to which the entire adolescent world just happens to be invited. That said, these two tracks are notable for doing generic things well, and the album's most idiosyncratic moments come with four of the seven remaining cuts: "So Far Away", "Why Worry", "Ride Across The River" and "Brothers In Arms". Using simple, if powerful, melodic hooks as the mere springboard for ambling, lyrical, understated guitar solos, these arguably come closer to a genuine ambient rock than anything to be found in Brian Eno. Moreover, the last two tracks manage to re-extract an arena sensibility from MTV, as Knopfler both literalises and translates its preoccupation with atmosphere into a principle of his distinctive finger-picking, transforming his guitar into a kind of Aeolian harp, the mere receptacle for the brooding, ponderous weather patterns that hang over the landscapes those songs describe.