Love is the soundtrack to a short film by Jesse Nieminen (also titled A Walk With Love And Death), and is essentially a series of bugged-out sound collages. Though intriguing on first listen, it’s Death which is the real draw here.

An album aglow with a clear-eyed confidence in hushed, honeyed quietude.

The affirmative, feel-good tone is set with the mid-tempo opener, Don’t Leave Me Here, the first of two tunes the blues men co-wrote together.

Much more than The War Of The Worlds for indie kids, thoroughly recommended.

This is more the work of a road-hardened posse, as opposed to the more introspective troubadour of more recent times, the frontman’s now spitting out odes to blue collar pride (The Firebreak Line, If Mama Coulda Seen Me).

Is This The Life We Really Want? is a stunning accomplishment, as rich as anything Waters has ever managed.

There are gloriously sunny melodies (Cali is a breezy masterpiece), near ambient drones (Integration Tape) and even a touch of politics on Home Is A Feeling. But it’s 100% a Ride record, and neither time nor current fashions can alter that. And nor should it.

The main draw here is the first release of three songs with myth-like status among the infatuated. ... There are a series of rough demos and what sounds like soundboard recordings of various sections of Paranoid Android in the first flushes of development (magnificently wigged-out, whirling dervish-style organ solo, come on down!) and a bare-bones take on Airbag, again featuring embryonic lyrics.

Borrowing the album’s title from WH Auden’s 1947 musings on how the modern age fosters alienation and isolation, Rodgers has created a fragmented piece of pure 21st century pop.

You unpeel this 12-song collection’s layers track by track, with repeat listens yielding new surprises as rifts and melodies that you missed first time around float to the fore.

At its best this album is innocuous. Don’t focus on the lyrics and it is palatable and will be Fleetwood enough to please some. At its worst it is the musical equivalent of trying to squeeze yourself into your favourite clothes of yesteryear: uncomfortable, unflattering and not worth the struggle.

Sad Clowns & Hillbillies is another sturdy set of bittersweet portraits viewed through melancholic eyes.

A thoughtfully compiled career-spanning collection, performed solo on acoustic guitar.

The pressures of everyday living crop up again on the confessional Anxiety and Something To Love, while White Man’s World serves up a thick slice of barbed social commentary. He’s at his most heartbreaking, however, on Chaos And Clothes, chronicling the aftermath of a doomed romance.

Unable to hold a guitar for the majority of the sessions, his progressing dementia making it difficult to remember lyrics, it is nonetheless a celebratory affair laced with surprisingly black humour.

Compassion is a major grower, but this is because its fusions don’t all immediately translate. Barnes profits from holding onto some of the answers.

There’s a sweet familial feel to the opening Wonderful Woman, Berry leading the line of guitars that also features contributions from his son and grandson, but its generic chug disguises a typically leering lyric that, frankly, sounds sinister coming out of the mouth of a man pushing 90.

Can – The Singles is laid out logically and chronologically, and makes a convincing, consistent case for the accessibility of enigmatic, semi-abstract art rock when delivered in concise and chewable chunks.

Bloodlust is close to being a political metal manifesto of sorts, and a convincing one too--but the gangsta tropes have long outstayed their welcome.

Witness is the work of a singer equipping himself for the long haul.

It is not that The Optimist is awful, exactly--just uninspiring.

Alt-J’s retelling of this age-old tale of ill repute has less edge than a mesh sack of Babybel cheeses.

The 80s traditionalists will delight in the euphoric synth-pop of Happy Giddy, but this is a far more ambitious delight than that. Her voice might have got her noticed, but her songwriting’s proving the most extraordinary thing about her these days.

Harding’s delivery is unique, her range from the deepest velvet to the most discordant cry; her enunciation infusing every syllable with her tortured soul. ... Simply stunning.

The Tale Of The Altered Beast: Part 1. A New World could have easily sat on Blake’s New Jerusalem before the guys drag it into highspeed psychedelic punk insanity.

Slick yet lively, powerful yet clear. Samba (“second-born” in Songhai) showcases Touré’s step up towards the mastery of his famous father; he is now an accomplished bandleader, singer and songwriter, to go alongside his obvious talents with the six-string.

If you’re looking for glacial Nordic chills, Arve Henriksen’s hauntingly beautiful Towards Language will do the trick.

This blasé bunch of post-modern Gen-X alt-rockers still sound more ramshackle than playing rough demos of Pavement’s earliest material through a faulty boombox while being shoved down a cobbled hill in a wonky-wheeled shopping trolley by the late Oliver Reed. Some might find such slapdashery charming or even exciting. Others, I fear, will be rolling their eyes and reaching for Live On Two Legs by Eddie & The Pearl Jams.