Washes of keyboards, a thunderous tattooing of drums and great, empty atmospheric spaces make for an inestimable, all-consuming listen, not least in the fragile-sounding Lacuna/Sunrise and the roiling I.M.S.

This album reflects its maker--a restless spirit that now and then stumbles on something special.

Hard truths are faced down and bad voodoo gets annihilated throughout in unflinching, life-affirming, hard-rocking glory.

Their 1997 self-titled release marked their effective rebirth, signalling the end of that period when they used outside writers and became themselves again. But no album since has had quite the consistency and urgency of this, their 17th studio record. Bang Zoom Crazy... Hello.

A gentle fleshing-out of tracks might’ve boosted it, but this is as close as the ever-youthful 74-year-old has yet come to doing an American Recordings. Autumnal, rather than valedictory.

They’re on rollicking form here, mainman Lips playing several face-melting solos (Gun Control being typically OTT) and tackling zombies and runaway trains, alongside the more thoughtful Forgive Don’t Forget and Lemmy tribute It’s Your Move.

Wild, erratic and out for adventure, your mother warned you not to hang out with albums like this.

This album is a vindication of the instinct that less is more. It’s a magnificent testament to a man who has been scarred and damaged by his journey, but whose lust for life remains gloriously intact.

IV takes a more measured pace around bleaker themes.

There are slower, less effectual burners as well, but there’s a raw authority not seen in his last couple of records; something that reinstates him as a gutsy rocker of flesh and bone, not just a virtuoso show pony.

A solid addition to the canon, but not quite a classic.

With a disc including live outtakes and priceless B-sides, this is an essential collection.

You want depth, originality, surprises? Look elsewhere. But as the rock equivalent of comfort food, they don’t disappoint.

Much of We Can Do Anything, their first album since 2000 and following on from last year’s Happy New Year EP, is a breezy return to what they do best: acoustic folk-punk with ragged edges, held together by Gano’s ear for a ringing melody and delivered like a peculiarly skittish Lou Reed.

On the evidence of Painkillers, Fallon doesn’t really need the backup of a regular band. With this debut he’s placed his stake as an American singer-songwriter of style and substance.

Chaosmosis is not an explosive comeback, but it does at least contain flickers of the band’s lysergic disco-punk magic.

While the results haven’t got the near-reckless zeal of the young Yorn’s records, the sense of longing reflects the broken-down feel--strumming acoustic guitars, the light thrum of a snare--of some of the material he was writing back in the early 2000s.

Not everything here grabs the attention first time around: the Anthrax of today often favour a slow burn to a startling slap. But as a cohesive and dynamic whole, For All Kings delivers the goods with swagger and style.

Some of the retro-crooner murder ballads risk straying into cliché, but there are inspired sound-collage experiments here too.

This is beyond immersive; this is music to suffer a cleansing obliteration to.

As the rest of rock scurries to condense its charms into sync-friendly Shazamable nuggets, Britpop pioneers and eternal outsiders Suede slice gloriously against the grain once more with a grandiose semi-concept seventh album that demands to be consumed as a complete piece of art.

It’s Silversun Pickups rolling up their blazer sleeves, plumping their shoulderpads and cruising out of Silver Lake, LA with a fourth album that buzzes like pink neon and rolls like convertible wheels on steaming tarmac.

Sartain ramraids rinky-dink 80s US radio teen romps on the frenetic Black Party. His rare sense of mischief deserves to be encouraged.

On 33 Crows he channels his inner Dylan, giving it lots of nasal drawl. Holy Flame brings things up to date, recalling Dandy Warhols. If you fancy some 60s-centric pop-rock, this might work.

Stockdale’s magpie career continues to show not an inkling of musical mutation. Let’s call it treadmill rock--one man putting a lot of effort into going absolutely nowhere.

X – No Absolutes is the sound of Prong feeling comfortable in 2016; still underground and recognisable as the band who snapped our fingers and necks, but also adding essential modern detail.

Hold On! sounds utterly effortless: an effervescent streak of soul, bossa nova and rumba tunes.

In a different musical climate, the driving No Love Lost, the U2-aping Dance The Night and the beautiful Birds Of Paradise would all be hit singles, but even if The Cult’s commercial heyday is firmly in their rear-view mirror, album number ten is a reminder that they’re gracefully assuming ‘national treasure’ status.

For its place in his canon, the 4 1⁄2 album is a relatively scant 37 minutes of sessions created around the recording of Hand..., and it’s easy to see where the songs might have fitted into the conceptual jigsaw of the original work.

Never mind dig in deep: this is an emotional excavation.

A set of songs whose freshness reflects the spontaneous manner in which they were recorded.

Skunk Anansie find their groove in the album’s latter half with arena-sized anthems like Bullets, a gnarly funk-rock bruiser which erupts into a landslide of guitars and voices.

Not just vast in musical scope, The Astonishing offers an entire Dystopian world of its own, not to mention exhibiting the potential to be an overblown Broadway rock opera, eye-frazzling sci-fi movie and nerd-delighting video game into the bargain.

White Bear, in its expertise and clarity, feels refreshing, like the shock of the new, despite its traditionalism. Better still, you feel they’ve got a lot more in the locker still to come.

Needless to say, this is irresistible stuff that demands to be listened to while twerking in a 70s style (Steve Priest pout on your face; mock-surprise eyes à la the disgraced Gary Glitter).

The fuzzy space rock of Same Hands and Know One Will Ever Know also prick up your ears, bearing testament to a songwriter who never quite fitted in but, for those who took the time to listen, always stood out.

Perhaps The River could have been even better had he used a couple of the outtakes--Restless Nights and Whitetown--in place of fillers such as Sherry Darling and Crush On You. But the two biggest decisions he got absolutely right. In the end, The River was more than big enough.

At three hours-plus, it’s a lot of breadline bluster, but it’s life-affirming nonetheless.

As a trad dad pastiche it isn’t funny enough, and as a parallel career it’s a painful vanity project. Either way, avoid.

These are not so much conventional songs but something much looser and akin to sun-parched jams.

It’s all great if you’re willing to strap on some cowboy boots and hop on the nearest hayride, but hardcore rockers are gonna wanna sit this one out.

Creepy and disturbing, but it’ll still make their mothers proud.

Swampy southern sounds are their stock-in-trade but it’s a soulful brew with all the authentic trappings you’d expect of a recording from Woodland Studios, Nashville.

It’s 1984 forever for the Scorpions, a return to slick, semi-hard rock and power ballads.

Songs From The Black Hole is unlikely to mean much to anyone not already dialled in to Prong’s gnarled, existentialist world view, but it’s difficult to begrudge them this indulgence. [Jun 2015, p.92]

There’s plenty here to keep their hard-core fans transfixed until the Jonestowners return with the next full albumy walbum.

Some imaginative arrangements--notably on a brass-heavy Ghost Of Santa Fe--can’t disguise the fact that the transcendent qualities this music demands are too often absent.

Despite the inclusion of unreleased material and early versions of Crime In The City and Ordinary People, there’s little here to entice anyone but the hardcore fan.

Add one of 2015’s swooniest ballads in Trouble and you’ve got an album that’s not exactly pretty, but is definitely a keeper.

Diehards will thrill to the inclusion of hitherto unreleased versions of Some Kinda Love, Sweet Jane and After Hours, though perhaps baulk at having to shell out for material they already own. Still, this is historical, compelling fare.

Even more than The Next Day, these seven tracks suggest the sounds inside his head are in sync with his long-time soul brother Scott Walker, though thankfully he remains on warmer terms with old-fashioned melody and emotion.

Purple simultaneously builds on what its predecessor achieved and reins in its sometimes overwhelming sprawl.

The DIY arrangements--treated guitars, keyboards, the odd banjo--sometimes sound like they’ve been fixed up with gaffer tape, adding to the immediacy of songs like Boy Band, a comedic tale about has-beens on a dodgy comeback trail, and the autobiographical, genuinely affecting Property Shows.

For the most part, Def Leppard is the sound of a band who have rediscovered their sense of purposes after a wobbly 25 years.

This is a record to sink into, not to shock you into action. The Rev’s best.

A haunted, husky-voiced cover of the Lennon/McCartney classic And I Love Her is another highlight, invoking the naked beauty of Nirvana’s 1993 Unplugged session. But these are rare meaty morsels in a musical slop bucket of scraps. At best, Montage Of Heck is an ideal Christmas present for the most undemanding of Cobain completists. At worst, a barrel-scraping cash-in that demeans his legacy.

Recorded with Thomas’s snarl up front and the band on screeching overload, they pile through new titles such as Welcome To The New Dark Ages and revisit Sonic Reducer and Final Solution, plus the Sonics’ garage classic Strychnine.

Vocals are minimal, though less processed and more prominent than usual.

We get charismatic wagon wheels of delta stomp’n’roll, conjuring images of high-class horror scenes in rugged Westerns.

Admittedly, it still shines and chimes, the charming Yesterday Was Just A Dream is a highlight, as is the swaying Brand New Day, but the opening skiffle of You Belong To Me and the indifferent Go Down Rockin’ (as inspired as its title might imply), are Bryan Adams by numbers.

It’s bashed out in an exuberant blast of piano-stonkin’ late-60s rock’n’soul that occasionally wanders into poppy, kitschy Elton John territory, but owes most of its groove to the lean, mean, stray-cat blues of Beggars Banquet.

Marr’s first solo live collection is full of jingle-jangle virtuosity and timeless new wave zing. But it doesn’t take long before he bumps up against his limitations as a lead singer, and his over-fondness for straight, shouty, Noel Gallagher-endorsed bloke-rock.

They may have a more muscular setting, but there’s no denying the appeal of Argent’s ornate piano and Blunstone’s breathy warble.

Lovely flamenco guitars, the slightest rhythms and subtle splashes of steel guitar and accordion are the backdrop for a voice that remains as pristine as when he made his mark in Blighty touring with The Clash.

His [Brian Henneman's] Tom Petty-tinged voice and bursts of Rickenbacker guitar reinforce the familiar sound. Unfortunately he doesn’t always move with the times.

Dream-folkies will be transported back to the gauzy early days of Genesis or the Byrds, indie heads will be transported back to the most powerful skunk spliff they ever smoked along to Pond, Grandaddy or Neutral Milk Hotel.

Alone In The Universe is a triumph of songcraft and studio invention, one that trounces notions of soft rock and guilty pleasures. He might be a man alone, but he’s got the whole world, potentially, in his hands. Again.

Cheatahs create melodic miasmas of space marimba, psych pop and crystalline drones, while lyrically teleporting around the globe.

The ballad Love Grow Cold has a hazy, 80s sheen and the rest of the album has its feet planted firmly in the 70s, but this is nevertheless a slick and timeless collection of songs.

It may all be a little too polished and tasteful for some palates, but for others this is 15 togs of pure aural comfort to wrap yourself in.

The songs are wrought elaborately enough.... Yet this album seems carefully calibrated not to disappoint the conservative fan.

His new album is also self-penned, with mixed results.

A droll, tender-hearted and richly rewarding album.

Plodding, overwrought gospel epics like Shine and Tempted are the order of the day, pale passionless shadows of the Mode’s mighty, desperate Condemnation.... Things improve on the starker latter half.

Aside from this one minor flaw [rapping in the title track], Gibbons has totally nailed it with Perfectamundo. It’s what a solo project should be: a new adventure.

There’s much to enjoy about Pylon, not least on the punitive, jet-black musical side of things.

It cuts and blazes and works well live in all its kinetic abandon but, if Shining really want to lay claim to a new genre, they need to integrate their progressive elements into the mix rather than add them as a side option.

Everybody Come To Church is designed to be repellant to the bovine majority, but if the world’s going to burn, it comes as a perfect soundtrack.

After initial queasiness at a moment of amorousness in Eraser (‘I’m just a toy waiting for you to play me’), it quickly becomes business as usual in terms of their shamelessly enormous pop-rock music.

Psychic Warfare remains in the same succinct and bullish territory that made Earth Rocker such a straightforward joy.

This follow-up is, if anything, even more exquisite.

From tension-riddled songs like Two Places to the instrumental Outromistra (EM Forster with guitars), this is a confident and exciting high for the band, at a time when most bands of their era are looking for their reading glasses.

Silence In The Snow is not a classic album, but this puts Trivium firmly back on course.

Somehow, his voice remains--a ghostly, spellbinding croon that swims through wastelands of strings and synths, making Noctunes unfold like an alternative soundtrack to Twin Peaks.

With That’s The Spirit, they’ve hit a new direction and a creative peak that finally matches their thirst for fame and fortune.

Hansard says of his emotional, spiritual and musical journey to complete this record. He’s succeeded. Ramble on, indeed.

The cover of Tift Merritt’s Bramble Rose is affecting too, a stately country shuffle that finds Henley trading verses with Lambert over pedal steel and mandolin, while Jagger blows harmonica and sings like a cat pleading to be let in from the rain. At other times, the album is less successful, particularly when it falls back on weepy honky-tonk tropes.

The band focus on capturing moments rather than arranging songs, interspersing tracks with tone poems including Millenial Prayer.

Nine albums and 12 years into their journey, Hey Colossus have never sounded better.

Highlights are the punchy pop-metal of Got The Power and the greasy glamorama of The Reverend, replete with satisfyingly fuzzy guitar, but Zipper Down misses as much as it hits.

This album takes Graveyard into a new realm, marking them as modern blues-rock craftsmen par excellence.

An assured piece of reach-for-the-stars hard rock, sure to thrive live.

With shades of Tool and Aereogramme, but mainly its own beast, Polaris is pure confidence converted into sound.

With intelligently handled subject matter to stand alongside the likes of Bikini Kill, and sparkling but off-kilter melodic skills that allow comparisons to Yeah Yeah Yeah’s Karen O, Gender Bender has empathy to spare, and is a punk rock poet to believe in.

With all profits going to MusiCares, it’s a worthy effort--if not an entirely worthwhile one.

It’s all a bit glazed over, grungeless, too well finished, lacking the sense of suppurating wounds.

A gentle watercolour portrait of the artist as a young man.

Picking up from last year’s Big Bill Broonzy tribute Common Ground, here the Alvins run riot on another covers set.