Imagine: The Ultimate Collection is a fascinating snapshot of an artist if not quite in his imperial phase, then certainly at his most searching. From the new stereo remix down to the outtakes and an audio documentary pieced together from candid interviews with friend and DJ Elliot Mintz, we’re offered an exhaustive look at Imagine from all angles.

A mischievous balladeer with a spicier bag of ingredients than most folk heroes, Joe Strummer was a one-off. There’s little doubt he left his mark, but his more personal work is perhaps still overlooked in favour of his iconic punk fare. This intriguing set will go some way towards correcting that.

If the thrill of the fight is one answer, The Blue Hour is up to it. Re-energised on all fronts, Suede are in the shape of their lives.

True Meanings is, on the surface, a traditionally introspective singer-songwriter record, but such a reductive description runs the risk of underselling a package that contains some of the most accessible, thought-provoking and downright enjoyable music of his lengthy career. The vibes are resolutely bucolic, embellished just the right amount by a chamber orchestra.

Simon’s song choices weave together to form a narrative on intolerance, the dangers of divisive thinking, impending mortality, the ebb and flow of love, ecological troubles and faith. Where less nimble-minded songwriters might flounder, his literary eye for the minutiae of life stands him in good stead.

Not since Bon Iver’s aforementioned reinvention or even Radiohead’s Kid A have a relatively mainstream band made such an assured volte-face, wilfully pushing their audience away while they revisit, remake and remodel the tension that made them so very precious in the first place. Fierce and beautiful. Low are back.

So, yes, good album, with some obligatory pratfalls, very few longeurs and several quality flashes of the innate melodic gift that, after all, put him precisely where he is. During those best bits, the “he’s 76, after all” qualifier becomes utterly redundant.

They’ve created an album that manages to combine grief, self-loathing and a realisation that life’s better played honest, with a fine-tuned, brutal sound: something like bent sheet metal being hammered straight. Yet it remains listenable, so very listenable.

It took several listens for the potions on Move Through The Dawn to take effect. ... Sometimes, slow burners provide the best flames.

There’s enough going on in the grooves of Smote Reverser to satisfy your psych and/or prog urges for the foreseeable future, let alone in the few months it’ll take Dwyer to follow it up.

A behemoth of a box, The Public Image Is Rotten offers over six hours of PiL brilliance.

It’s both beefier--practically punching you in the face in places--and more nuanced, the vocal harmonies, for instance (in many ways, GNR’s secret weapon--you don’t notice they’re there, until you do), coming into their own. Amping up its already formidable power, the new mix never loses the sense that this was the work of a bunch of scrappy upstarts, while reminding you just how well-constructed Appetite really was. That’s underscored by the bonus material.

Despite the sheer weight of material on offer you’ll struggle to find an inch of fat. With its forward-thinking, deep-searching nature counterbalanced by a natural warmth and populist, groove-heavy approach, it’s another hugely accomplished work by a man whose prolific run of form shows no signs of abating.

Though it’s essentially a finely-crafted guitar pop record, Arthur Buck also finds room for enough angles, quirks and adroitly-employed electronica to keep it interesting and it rarely puts a foot wrong as a result.

In short, it’s another essential compilation of vintage music from the peerless Analog Africa, whose contents should further strengthen Benin’s reputation as one of the African continent’s most important musical centres.

God’s Favourite Customer leaves the over-wrought and possibly over-thought days of Pure Comedy in its slipstream in return for something just that bit purer. True, the fun days of I Love You, Honeybear et al may be gone, but what a sacrifice if this is what we get in return.

It’s bold stuff, but if you were taking any solace that the Trump catastrophe would at least inspire some great art, The Future And The Past serves as Exhibit A.

Babelsberg is ultimately a sorely-needed tonic. Mellow-sounding, but hefting weighty humanitarian concerns on its back, it boasts a you-are-here focus normally only accorded to those who are about to peg it.

The live In Concert/MTV Plugged may lack the obvious, rambunctious energy of Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band Live/1975-85 and only (subdued) E Street favourites Darkness On The Edge Of Town and Thunder Road feature in the set, but the cheeky obscurity Red Headed Woman and an electric Atlantic City (from Nebraska) still capture Bruce’s magnetism as a performer. ... The remastered LPs sound pristine. ... It makes for a pretty boss bundle.

Lamdin and Fatty have created sympathetic backdrops for the Poets to declaim over: lightly jazz-tinged reggae grooves, dubby production flourishes, spacious arrangements that allow for the Poets’ words to take centre-stage.

Golden Hour is a bedazzled, wide-eyed rush.

It’s clear that Watson has studied the classics, but rather than repeat the past, he’s created something modern, fresh, exciting and potentially classic.

A preoccupied and deeply immersed heart-art journal, graced with discreetly nailed-on band performances while simultaneously worrying away at its own edges.

The Prodigal Son is easily one of the most satisfyingly focused, complete records he’s ever made.

Standards Vol IV will get deserved airplay thanks to its electronic take on classic pop (from Bacharach and The Beach Boys to early Harry Nilsson) but hidden in all that sunshine and heartache is a progression from a sound that once so defined them. Standard? Above standard, more like.

Overall, it’s less of a curiosity than it might look on paper; not so much a departure as it is a confidently mapped-out alternative route.

Only on the opening cut do they attempt anything that could be construed as radical, marrying The Two Sisters, a child ballad with roots stretching back to the 16th century, to a Scottish jig, A Fisherman’s Song For Attracting Seals. It works beautifully, as do all of the following eight tracks, delivered with reverence and entirely free of pretension.

The best moments recall Dan Sartain, a man whose moustachioed fashion victim look Pearson seems to have lifted, but whose freewheeling punk rockacountrybilly essence he hasn’t quite distilled.