First single Town And Country is a band-backed hymn to city-loving Wainwright’s current lifestyle that adds a touch of rock’n’roll pizzazz to proceedings.

It is a warm and free record, benefitting from the improvised jam sessions that took place on both US coasts in Brooklyn and Burbank. You can feel the sense of openness at either end of Heartmind’s musical spectrum.

Reset takes shape as a tribute to the consolatory powers of music and companionship, brimming with convivial charm and inner-voyage invention.

Sound Of The Morning displays an irrepressible knack for songwriting. There’s a nimbleness, too. ... A real treat.

It adds up to White’s most relatable – and accessible – record in some time.

Daniel Kessler’s guitar lines remain inventively distinctive, but a gentleness now exudes from Paul Banks’ voice, and his pseudo-absurdist lyrics consider that things might not be so bad after all.

A layered, atmospheric, darkly playful headrush of a first offering.

The result perhaps misses the conceptual cogency of earlier Tree peaks. But it doesn’t want for controlled reach. Over a tight 48 minutes, C/C weds a reinvigorated affirmation of band identity to expansive energies, all to confident effect: “The sum of all, of new and old,” as Wilson’s lyrics put it.

Far more than an indulgent side project, A Light For Attracting Attention deserves to be taken on its own merits as a daring, invigorating and often very moving piece of work in its own right.

The hardcore will need these and it’s hard to argue with the performances and the sound quality. Both shows find Young introducing new material from Harvest, released later that year, and beyond.

With themes of adult responsibility and parenthood bearing heavily on his mind, it might sound solemn in places, but it’s a hugely rewarding listen, a baroque-folk companion to the gorgeous undulating mysteries of Rock Bottom.

If Everything Now’s readings of media-age malaise leant towards the grindingly obvious, WE is a partial improvement, give or take singer Win Butler’s occasional clunking takes on modern-life exhaustion.

In attempting to circumvent the human mind, Everything Everything have found their heart, and made their finest album yet.

An unmitigated joy.

Previous looks to companionship and melody as bulwarks, from Talk To Me Talk To Me’s “ecstasy of company” to Come On Home’s buoyant spritz and A World Without You’s show of constancy.

On (watch my moves), sticking to what he knows is all the fuel Vile needs for lift-off.

Skinty Fia is another triumph for this era’s most vital group.

Wet Leg’s debut album is simultaneously of its time, ahead of its time, and evokes past times.

Pop music at its very brightest.

Earthling gives an uplifting sense of the creative energy shared between Eddie Vedder and his keenly empathetic collaborators, distilled into striking, memorable songs, and unified by a fresh, cohesive sound. On this evidence, it’s to be hoped the partnership forges ahead as the day jobs allow.

They build their own world. Eventually you grasp its shrewdly filtered emotion and want to live there, too.

It finds House on spine-chilling form with clear vocals and stunning slide guitar on tracks such as Pony Blues, Preachin’ Blues and Death Letter. The re-mastering, courtesy of The Black Keys frontman Dan Auerbach, is also superb.

Fever Dreams Pts 1-4 is some great reward for the Marr faithful, a hope-fuelled 16-song set mounted on a generous, expansive balance of scope and detail.

It’s an album blazing with a refulgent light that illuminates the darkness. Ultimately, it’s a cathartic celebration of life co-created by someone who’s survived a traumatic experience. More importantly, it shows how heartbreak, suffering and tragedy can be refashioned into transcendent art.

[Eddie Piller] doesn’t sequence chronologically; his approach is more scattershot, with the emphasis on listening experience rather than presenting a history lesson. But 60s mod in all its rainbow colours is represented.

As well as drawing more liberally from the likes of My Bloody Valentine and the Cocteau Twins, this time they’ve woven into the mix some 80s synth-pop motifs (Masquerade could be Duran Duran circa 1982), but the overall effect remains as bewitching as ever.

The Overload is quite the debut.

Between the weather-worn blues reflections of Hard Times and the euphoric lift of closer Coalinga, the sense emerges of a band rediscovering their footing, a little saddle-sore but riding tall once more.

Sublimely crafted, incredibly well-played, there are all the reference points, yet it never sounds like a composite of old glories. The intelligence, urgency and immediacy of his 32nd album are a most welcome surprise.

Stylistically, Marshall’s “less is more” minimalism ensures Covers sounds remarkably cohesive, making it, as ever, a totally immersive listen.

From its bossa nova kick to its slabs of heavy organ, Kofi Psych sounds like an attempt to conjure The Doors’ Break On Through (To The Other Side) from a half-remembered conversation, while Say The Truth bears unlikely fruit from its cross-pollination of highlife rhythms, celestial early prog and The Strawberry Alarm Clock. Sadly, Essilfie-Bondzie died as this compilation was in the works but, as this set often shows, his legacy is assured.

Maybe after the stresses and strains of the past couple of years we need a familiar embrace to soothe away our pain. Raise The Roof fits the bill, even if it might win fewer prizes for originality than its predecessor.

An album of adroitly chosen covers and something more. Poke around in its shadows and the songs often investigate the idea of putting on a front as a kind of catharsis, their ravaged depths trawled for high drama.

Her artistry had never been so robust. As the earlier, more mournful In Concert version of Carey shows, Mitchell would dig deep in the studio to find a euphoric vocal that causes the song to soar. ... For Mitchell at this stage, then, nothing was ever truly a failure, but more an opportunity to take her art to new heights.

Founder guitarist Pye Hastings and long-serving multi-instrumentalist Geoff Richardson lead a new line-up through 10 tracks that tick many boxes without threatening the iconic status of 70s classics such as In The Land Of Grey And Pink.

While the Toy highlight Shadow Man introduces “… a man back a-ways/Who believes at where he is”, at this stage of his career, David Bowie could reflect on where he’d been with pride – including, as Brilliant Adventures shows, another decade of committing to himself.

It’s one of those evocative retrospectives whose true worth exceeds monetary value. ... American Dreamer spotlights an uncompromising visionary who created music on her own terms and paved the way for Joni Mitchell, Kate Bush and Tori Amos and many more of today’s female singer-songwriters.

It reveals The War On Drugs at their most song-conscious and streamlined. The epic, immersive, unfurling tracks that have become a Granduciel trademark are notably absent (Granduciel says he abandoned a 32-minute jam track). Psychedelic flourishes are few and far between. Many tracks boast a hitherto unheard immediacy: prominent synths, unabashed choruses, and big-sounding songs.

The Specials, once more, fashioning a compelling soundtrack to troubled times past and present.

Buckingham has crafted a solid rather than seismic affair.

Crosby’s voice takes you flying back down the decades yet without ever longing for past glories.

Their 14th album rakes over the wreckage and emerges as a generous, deeply humane mission statement: it’s an album of profound melancholy, of course, but also one lit up with heroic, big-pop colour. Ultra-vivid indeed.

Songs such as the joyous To Be Loved (classic couplet, “Each day feels like a weekend when you’re around”) shows that, in her eighth decade, Joan Armatrading CBE is far from resting on past achievements.

A fine testament to one of soul’s major labels, and a must-have.

Despite the general autumnal mood, the easy-going charm of Oval is worlds away from Almond’s rumbling menace. It’s all compelling enough to keep drawing listeners back for the next 14 years. Magnificent.

The rockier songs have a vague whiff of Faith No More’s deepest cuts, or even the lurching noir-rock of Tomahawk. ... On the poppier moments he flaunts his range more confidently than ever. There’s a lot to take in. ... Few bands remain so interesting for so long. The adventure continues.

Between its playful, retro-electro settings and the murky presentiments of Marling’s allusive lyrics, Animal paints outside the lines of LUMP’s debut carefully, never suffocating the intuitive strangeness at its heart.

As ever, Browne leavens his harder-edged songs with gentler fare. The Caribbean-flavoured, Haiti-inspired Love Is Love has a distinct hint of Paul Simon to it, while My Cleveland Heart attempts to build a whole song around the premise of being given an artificial ticker.

Anger suits Garbage’s most recognisable mode, often on forceful display here: dense, layered noise, all buzzsaw guitars, harsh electronics and industrial clatter. Yet there’s sonic variety.

Finn senior’s prescient lyrics, sugarcoated with melody for ease of delivery, help make Dreamers Are Waiting both tart and timeless.

Their political agenda from this distance is not quaint, it remains entirely relevant.

Blue Elephant is like a soundtrack to a classic ITC TV programme, with lots of jumping into sleek jaguars and speeding along Chelsea Embankment. If that ticks your boxes, this is one of the best albums you’ll hear all year.

The poignant This Nearly Was Mine from South Pacific (“now, I’m alone, still dreaming of paradise”) and I Who Have Nothing, are both imbued with equal measures of yearning and malice. It’s almost as if In Translation has tied up all the strange, raw emotions of the past year and made some sense of them.

The signs were all there, even though Bowie briefly ignored them as he recorded the landmark Hunky Dory. But as The Width Of A Circle shows, everything he’d put in place would soon come around.

Sabbath leant towards greater sophistication without losing their elemental bent. The super deluxe treatment introduces plenty of live material from the same year’s North American tour.

Blue Weekend isn’t a perfect record, with the folky No Hard Feelings and Safe From Heartbreak (If You’ve Never Been In Love) a little whimsical next to everything else going on. It matters little, though. Rowsell’s rallying cry in Smile that “I ain’t afraid of the fact that I’m sensitive” is borne out in a wild and tender third album.

Overall, Source is a thing of wondrous beauty, revealing that the hyperbole accompanying Garcia patently isn't out of proportion to her talent. [Sep 2020, p.101]

(The CSNY versions of Young’s Sea Of Madness and Everybody’s Alone would’ve been nice for starters), but there’s still a huge amount here for fans. The demos include some absolute stunners: Young and Nash’s wonderfully languid take on the former’s Birds; a delicate and heady solo version of Crosby’s Laughing; and Nash’s reflective solo rendition of Sleep Song. The outtakes, meanwhile, reveal just how much control Stills took in the studio, with enough material here for a fine standalone solo album of gutsy, soul-steeped jams.

Mind-blowing on any level. Colossally vital.

Lean, precise and purposeful, its 12 tracks whistle by in little more than 35 minutes; its production, in keeping with the limitations of lockdown, is deliberately pared down. There are other flutters of experimentation – the title track is an unfastened groove that struts like Ian Dury on a mystical funk trip – but it’s the simple melodic strength that binds the songs together.

Historically The Who Sell Out hasn’t always been given the serious critical attention afforded its successors Tommy, Who’s Next and Quadrophenia. Yet, it’s just as significant a touchstone in the Who canon, a pointer to, in particular, Townshend’s desire for the band to test both themselves and their audience. It makes this extensive and richly textured ultimate edition a “ragbag” worth rooting through.

It’s a record that increasingly rewards with each play, the subtleties and subtext revealed slowly, teased into view by deceptively unobtrusive musical accompaniment. Ellis’ punctuations of the words serve a similar purpose to melodic hooks in traditional pop songs, setting the groundwork for the lyrical beauty of the source material to haunt our thoughts long after the album’s over.

At times they overstretch – the tail-end of Part One drifts like fish and chip wrapper in the breeze – but a visit to Coral Island elicits the intangible pull of a place in time etched forever in the mind. Roll up, roll up.

Endless Arcade represents the biggest demand on their followers the band have made for some time, with pensive contemplation underpinning an eclectic, experimental set of songs. But they have long earned the right to venture off in whichever direction takes their fancy. They are still growing, still evolving and still learning. Endless Arcade is a brave record by a brave band. There are few of Teenage Fanclub’s ilk.

It is an album, certainly, that carries the magic and surprise that belongs only to strange times, that belongs to this moment completely: a record of the way we saw the world, once, the way it sounded, the way it felt, as we all stood still and watched.

This most genuine version of herself is more than good enough to stand on its own.

Filthy, funny, affecting, Arab Strap sound like a band with a future again.

The Super Deluxe edition of Vol 4 supplements a crisp remaster of the original album with extra discs containing alternative takes and revelatory studio outtakes (“What’s it called?” “Bollocks”), plus an entire set’s worth of live tracks from their March 1973 UK tour, a poster and a booklet so hefty you could tether a bull to it.

As The Love Continues inevitably finds purchase on our tumultuous moment in its deftly summoned suggestions of sorrow and fear, resilience, and close-guarded hope.

This set, which has been remastered from the original analogue tapes, features sleevenotes by the unmatched Amanda Petrusich, as well as an interview with Sinatra and unseen photos from her personal collection. It’s nothing less than her supreme career warrants. Here’s to the queen of danger-pop, and to Light In The Attic for getting the belated celebrations started.

It’s hard to imagine a more prescient-sounding record than one that explores how nascent technologies affect our motivations as modern consumers at a time when we’re all frantically buying online to stave off the effects of lockdown. The songs dealing directly with this are The Future Bites’ most captivating. ... There’s no need for the buyer to be wary here. The Future Bites is guaranteed to weather the ravages of time.

For all its musical sophistication and all its lyrical heart, Ignorance is a confident, almost bolshy statement of intent.

Wainwright has returned with a generous and positive record that suggests a more mature, philosophical perspective, thankfully without losing his impish sense of humour and taste for lavish arrangements.

Earth To Dora re-establishes Everett as one of the finest and most distinctive songwriters today – one who can make sorrow sound joyful, but who also knows that, without sadness, happiness wouldn’t be the same experience.

Those wanting a more authentic experience (whatever that means) will be glad to know the band’s psychedelic groove is still very much present (see the swirling Gabi or Assadja) while those wanting less retroisms should head to Pour Toi with its insane disco trucker’s shift. But at its heart, Optimisme deals in the same joyous protest music Songhoy Blues are known for, only now bolstered with a grit that matches the multi-lingual lyrics.

It’s a stunning record – from the album artwork down to the perfectly-weighted running order, nothing is out of place and nothing jars. Matt Berninger didn’t want to write a solo record. But thank god he did.

More rewarding re-evaluation than celebration for long-termers, it all provides a mightily attractive artefact for Stones diehards.

What remains is a tightly-focused snapshot of an intensely creative period in Prince’s career: perhaps the most generous single-album box set of all time, for an album that itself just keeps giving.

Across six albums in less than a decade, Richard and Linda Thompson may not have entirely rewritten the folk handbook but they left some intriguing scrawls in the margins. There’s even more to study in this long-in-the-making, elegantly packaged set, with the inclusion of 31 tracks never before offered up for public consumption.

It’s the longer pieces that really glisten, and they come in several forms. ... Moore’s band, it should be noted, sound increasingly powerful, growing ever groovier and more confident with each release. Their guitars may have unusual tunings, but the players are certainly in-tune with one another, mentally and musically speaking. In summary, cacophonies ahoy!

A joyous blend of dumb fun and sonic smarts with the talent that Stevens has been peddling for nearly 20 years to glue them together, this feels a fresh start in a career that didn’t exactly need one. Somehow, a wonderful surprise. Wow.

More than the sum of its parts. ... In returning to half-finished songs of the past with the renewed verve of the present, Callahan is constructing a future that looks likely to provide some of his best work.

From the off, Flaming Pie sounds like the work of a man comfortable with his past. ... The 2CD and 3LP sets will appeal to those not willing to shell out hundreds – they cherry-pick the best of the home demos, outtakes and B-sides.

Heart’s Ease is ample evidence that Shirley Collins still has the ambition, passion and guts to not only document where folk has come from but where it’s going. A lodestar, indeed.

It pulses with synths and electronic soundscapes overlaid by harp and violin, as if the early, experimental Pulp re-emerged as an electro Velvet Underground.

You can almost smell Power’s building confidence throughout. Melodies boast a previously little-seen directness, while somehow retaining their delicacy.

As with any Car Seat Headrest record, there’s always a whisper of a phrase, or an unusual lyric that passes you by and later stops you in your tracks. Likewise, there are plenty of musical layers and varied instrumentation that draw your ears one way and another.

What continues to both disarm and comfort about Williams as she glides into her late 60s on the crest of an extraordinary career now entering its fourth decade, is how adept she remains at shifting mood, tone, emotion and musical palette at the drop of a plectrum

Among the burning forests and boiling oceans, it's reassuring to know that raw beauty can still be found within the groove of vinyl, of which this--the Newcastle band's fourth long-player--provides rich evidence. [Mar 2020, p.110]

Over the course of an hour, Straight Songs unloads a lifetime of pain. But there is a happy ending to this story. Whereas much of the album has him merely “hanging on”, by Eden Lost And Found – a track built from a mobile phone recording of his wife messing around with an old Casio keyboard – he has embraced survival and moves towards his new dawn with, if not quite piranha teeth, then a mischievous, Cheshire cat grin.

Song For Our Daughter is, well, so uncannily, unreasonably and astutely beautiful that it meticulously sets aside every last one of your emotional checks and balances to wrap your core in a firm embrace.

Suddenly is at its best when blending head, heart and feet to make another smart party album – among Caribou’s best yet.

Expands Pigs’ palette further.

His knack for alchemising an engrossing trip hasn’t deserted him yet.

The Night Chancers tackles big themes within tight restrictions – namely, masculinity at the start of the 2020s. But though filmic in its scope, these 10 vignettes are economically plotted (the album is just 30 minutes long), with a through-line that takes you just far enough before leaving you to your own conclusions about these characters’ motives.

This marvellous set captures every funky, florid facet of their initial golden run in the spirit in which it was created.

Even if Clapton is the only member surviving to see it, at last they get to say goodbye on a suitably representative monument.

Mavis Staples is an international musical treasure, and here you’ll find the recordings that cemented her standing as a living legend.