The long view is serene, but it boils with nattering subtext. Robert Forster makes lean, minimal, elliptical songs about the struggle against time and self. He makes it look easy, but buried contradictions suggest that it’s not.

Rave ‘Til You Cry is a welcome reminder of Raczynski’s skill, his lightness of touch and the sheer exuberance of his music. If it’s exhausting to dance to it’s great to hear and to reminisce about the Battles of Beatdom.

The players worked remotely, sent in files and Johnson and Kaufman fit them together. All of which makes it even more remarkable how effortless and streamlined this album sounds, how its sounds swirl around the listener like warm currents, and how carefully Johnson kept the balance between letting the songs speak for themselves and enveloping them in luminous arrangements.

Dreaming in the Non-Dream is different. To the best that mostly instrumental music can articulate non-musical experience, it sonically renders the business of hunkering down and figuring out who has your back.

There is no ideal on-ramp for the Sparks canon, but Exotic Creatures of the Deep once again re-energizes this weird little alternate universe.

In the end, it's the restraint, control, and unlikely expansiveness that make The Best of Gloucester County a strong and surreal step forward for Smith and his band.

It’s the first solo Sprout album that doesn’t seem to lack from Pollard’s input.

Eiko Ishibashi’s soundtrack skilfully and subtly complements the film’s themes, capturing stillness, beauty, sorrow and uncertainty in such a way that the album succeeds on its own terms as a nuanced listening experience.

Foothills further distills this soft-focus, rueful vision, purifies it and delivers exactly what you expect from this band, only a little prettier and more touching than the last time.

Here his final collection of songs is both grand and ghostly, sweeping and solitary, and you do not have to know how the story ends to sense a profound melancholy.

While the key tracks here could all hold up as singles, they're joined with interludes that make Ghost People an uninterrupted flow.

Holtkamp finds a beatific atmosphere somewhere between the first BEAST recordings and his earlier work.

Feelings does no damage, it exists to target pleasure centers and does so. The influences are the point and yes there’s the Gilberto voice, the Mendes smoothness, the Getz sophisticate sheen but also a lack of Stereolab’s knottiness and the kind of knowingness and look-at-me cleverness of some of the practitioners and fans of whatever round of lounge revivalism is going on now. There is nothing here to take offence at unless you want to split the hairs between anodyne and placebo.

It’s a richly rewarding album that offers a valuable snapshot of an evolving artist.

While everything is kept at a smoulder--the words unclear, the tempos slow--this new Om album is anything but boring.

A monolith and a kaleidoscope of detail, Der Lange Marsch is a hypnotic adventure in which to lose oneself.

Maybe it takes a band of Hot Chip’s experience and sonic skill to have both pain and love that are as hard-won and effecting as it is on A Bath Full of Ecstasy; expanding their palette or not, big stars or not, it’s a joy to have them back.

Rather than back down from the precipice of decline and confusion, Protomartyr has reported the situation as they see it in The Agent Intellect, an uncomfortable, honest and ultimately excellent record.

Rose Golden Doorways is an astonishing experience, uncompromising in its willingness to map extremes of ethereal quiet and the physicality of sound, played without fear by musicians drilling deep into an ugly core to extract beauty and return to share their findings with those who would care to listen.

Nothing overtakes Williamson’s singing and the basic keyboard and guitar accompanying elements. The songs themselves are artful creations.

The band is very good, good enough to pull off this edge-of-your-seat flirtation with breakdown.

The songs may not fit into pre-existing boxes, but they work very well on their own terms, whether in the pounding, galloping “Crying Game” (a Laughing Clowns tune), the loose-jointed but lyrical “Ruins” (which hails from Kuepper’s 2015 solo album Lost Cities) or the off-kilter anthemry of “Demolition” (from the 2013 solo record Jean Lee and the Yellow Dog).

Play What They Want is his densest, most elaborately arranged Man Forever album yet. But even so, the rhythm forms a spine, winding and punching and scatter-shooting in continuous, fascinating Rube Goldberg-machine motion, as meditative layers of vocals, keyboards, harps, brass and guitar billow fog over the intricate, interlocking works.

Polymer is a summation of everything that puts Plaid rightfully on the same level of their innovative peers like Autechre, Boards of Canada and Two Lone Swordsmen. Creating worlds at once hermetic and immersive, Plaid’s music ticks along at a human level and envelops you in a protective, provocative cocoon.

It’s lovely, in an effortless, frictionless way that wafts on warm currents and soothes as it passes.

Ufomammut has a compositional focus and restraint that frames the sonic elements well. An excellent continuation of their recent work.

The songs are good, full of fetching turns of melody and surrealist images, but they sound especially excellent bashed out with clanging chords and pounding rhythms and intuitive rock-and-roll energy.

That such disparate musicians with such massive amounts of tape from the field could put something together this tastefully gives hope that whatever and wherever Albarn decides to operate next, he conducts proceedings in the same considered fashion as he has here.