If her more country rock-slanted work for Mount Moriah could be read as a measure of that distance from her roots, Lionheart closes the gap. By trawling her Appalachian background’s feelings, beliefs, experiences and details, McEntire has reclaimed country music for her own personality.

Depending on whether or not you’ve encountered him before, this is either an infectious comeback or one seriously charming introduction.

Tracey Thorn is a singular talent, and in a career that spans over four decades she’s achieved much. Record though has set a new benchmark.

With its garage production job, loud tinny drum tracks and an overriding sparseness hanging between each instrument, Drift resembles a very promising demo tape for an album yet to come to proper fruition.

To paraphrase just a touch, post-crash, necessity is very much the mother of inventiveness here. But out of that echoing vastness comes a gentle sense of melody that reveals itself, bit by bit, through repeated visits.

They took their sweet time, but that Breeders line-up is back, and has just nonchalantly knocked it out of the park.

Passionate, eccentric and unafraid of speaking out or baring his ever-beleaguered soul, Moby remains a welcome presence in modern times and certainly does himself no harm with this highly personal statement.

The biggest triumphs lie in the quietly assured orchestration of Body To Flame (a matching mole for Jeff Buckley’s Grace) and the title track, which calls to mind Yankee Hotel Foxtrot-era Wilco).

Landfall is a humourous, magnetic, and heart-breaking album, and paved with the kind of pathos that could make even TV’s Mr Tumble feel a little flat.

The erstwhile Felt and Denim frontman, the innately enigmatic Lawrence, is doing his best work right here and right now.

American Utopia is not quite as good as we’d all really love it to be. However, its quality of thought, emotional intelligence and sense of fun is remarkable.

Bereft of freestyle ivory plonks, You’re Not Alone captures WK doing what he does best: that utterly distinctive fusion of metal riffs, Springsteen bombast, pristine ABBA hooks and choruses bigger than Hercules’ biceps.

The King Crimson archive is a thing of genuine wonder: it feels as though there isn’t a single picosecond of their career that hasn’t been somehow preserved, and the meticulous largesse with which this archival cache is curated and packaged sets an intimidating benchmark.

In short, if you collect Jansch you won’t regret investing in these for a second. If you’re new to him, you’ll find a musical universe opening before you.

On her follow-up Cornish dominates and the results are smoother round the edges, more considered, heck, even mature.

Additional keyboards and synths fatten the sound in places without swamping the innate simplicity of the melodies, while guest singer Sarah Jessop brings an ethereal twist to High The Hemlock Grows. Likewise, Janovitz’s daughter Lucy weighs in with a delicious harmony on the reserved cover of Paul Simon’s The Only Living Boy In New York.

Even kids who don’t like rock’n’roll might find this infectious invitation hard to resist.

Not since Space Ritual-era Hawkwind has anyone so successfully combined workboot riffing with the swirling bleeps of the unexplored cosmos. Honestly.

That this is a subtle and seamless love note to music, rather than a case of too many cooks speaks volumes for the man at the helm.

In short, if you collect Jansch you won’t regret investing in these for a second. If you’re new to him, you’ll find a musical universe opening before you.

His band’s music has a stylistic affinity with Glasper’s Black Radio albums, melding jazz, R&B, funk, hip-hop, and neo soul into an unclassifiable hybrid that dissolves musical barriers.

Chris Illingworth’s glistening piano is glacial yet strong and majestic, elegantly floating above the turbulence created by Nick Blacka’s throbbing bass and Rob Turner’s kinetic, febrile drums.

The phenomenal Revolutionary Spirit reveals that while Manchester copped the lion’s share of the critical plaudits during this epochal post-punk period, the quality of Mersey was also second to none.

The result sometimes trips messily over its eagerness, but it’s also a sharp and bright, clever and fresh debut, with good ideas usually on-hand for whenever the intended effect isn’t fully banked.

Comparisons to Cream and early Black Sabbath are not ill-founded, but perhaps a little misleading. The trio’s “rock” aesthetic is made satisfyingly supple by the deft, jazz-borne drumming of Andreas Werliin, and bassist Johan Berthling spins some quite doomy webs, but the overall impression is of something quite apart from these two sets of forebears.

Home-recorded between 1989-90 at Jowe Head’s Stoke Newington flat, Beautiful Despair finds Head and TVPs mainstay Dan Treacy gamely working through a clutch of the latter’s prickly and pallid compositions.

All told, this engaging project shows how a geographical move can inspire a fascinating musical style, and an unexpected one to boot.

The wry, Chris Difford-esque football analogies in the ailing relationship-related ‘Injury Time’ (“they think it’s all over, it is now”) show Astor has retained a keen sense of humour, yet Dead Fred and the mortality-facing titular track are befitting of a record stuffed with songs intended to both “celebrate and grieve”.