Get Gone is a tumble dryer full of retro ideas given a contemporary currency by their restless drive, which evades categorisation.

The guitar tones and drum sounds are worthy of a review in themselves, micro-nuanced even within a track, and set in a 3D space that both breathes and is right up in your face at the same time.

Cutting their teeth in New York’s surviving venues, the quintet (first signings to Daptone’s new Wick offshoot) arrive like a most welcome anachronism.

A major work of stunning breadth and originality, heralding a talent who shines a blinding white light in the post-Prince darkness.

At first it’s disorientating, but gradually--it’s 90 minutes long--it becomes mesmeric, relaxing and not unlike a Laurie Anderson or Brian Eno ‘sound installation’.

More of the same, then, but for bleak Scandinavian beauty, Katatonia are still hard to beat.

Thanks to the band’s own accumulated expertise and the masterly stitching qualities of Danger Mouse, it’s a tightly woven affair, never messy or maudlin or self-indulgent; a dreamcoat of many colours, a marble rye of genres.

While it can’t match the last, extremely impressive Heartbreakers set, Hypnotic Eye, it’s a strong country-rock presentation from what’s not quite the sultan of side projects but rather more than Petty’s return-to-roots Tin Machine.

It works, thanks in this case to an engagingly loopy clutch of lysergic psych-pop oddities created with Primus frontman Les Claypool.

Sporadically great but decidedly patchy, A Moon Shaped Pool is not the sound of a great band dying, more a great band spreading themselves too thinly.

It’s well-meant but well-trodden, rarely exciting ground.

On third album Double Vanity it seems the wide-open spaces of their Oklahoma home have inspired something rather beautiful to zone out to.

There’s much that rocks here, and rocks deep on this four-string feast with multiple dishes.

The funk is solid in this one.

The results are mostly magical, largely because these songs still sound like Simon at his wry and melodic best.

A mixed bag of variable results, then, though Reid’s voice remains consistently magnificent throughout.

Strip away all the sumptuous studio texture and these lyrics--about savage love, violence and revolution--are sodden with adolescent gothpunk cliché. But this scarcely matters when the future arena anthems Magnetized and We Never Tell hit their stride: lusty, energised and refreshingly shallow.

Devotees of blues-rock and the trio’s past glories will relish taking a spin in their new model.

Cockily adventurous, By Default is a plasma grenade lobbed out of the blues rock trenches.

It sounds more like a collection of polished home recordings than a truly coherent band album, but when the harmonies fly and the melodies tumble--as they do on the genuinely lovely Titanic or on the soaring Squirrel vs Snake--The Posies can still reach those old highs.

With the heft of rock and fat bottom of funk, Heavy neatly summarises the sound achieved by guitarist Dan Taylor, bassist Spencer Page and drummer Chris Ellul, while singer Kelvin Swaby adds the requisite guts and grit.

At its best, the results of this level of craftsmanship are thrilling.

The result is masterful: unsettling, retro-futuristic, beautiful and intense, but deeply immersive and listenable.

This album finds them surrounded by squelching basslines, scattershott guitars and pop-eyed vocals, and it's brilliant.

While frontwoman Ritzy Bryan remains a force of nature, there’s a lack of eureka moments this time, leaving us with a slow-burner rather than an inferno.

With their warm, evocative, hot fuzz production, muted vocals and keening atmospherics that set them down somewhere between Slowdive, Mew and early Radiohead (see the surely deliberate echo of Creep in Eaten By Worms for evidence of the latter), they sigh their way through a set of tracks that are simply billowing with maudlin beauty.

Bob Dylan regulars Larry Campbell and Tony Garnier pop up but this isn’t a star-studded exercise, more of a stylish platter aimed at grown-ups.

It’s the pastoral style of Pentangle overlaid with crazed early-70s wah-wah duelling--think a pistols-at-dawn affaire d’honneur between Larry Wallis and Mick Bolton--and it’s very good indeed.