Another minor issue is the non-appearance of key outfits The Danse Society, Sex Gang Children and X-Mal Deutschland, though the welcome inclusion of hard-to-source rarities from underrated, short-lived acts Rema Rema, Modern Eon and Dublin experimentalists The Threat ensures that Silhouettes And Statues ultimately makes for a surprisingly joyous celebration of all things dark and deathly.

While the concept may be suitably unhinged and the music boundary pushing, little of it ultimately sticks in the mind.

While the concept may be suitably unhinged and the music boundary pushing, little of it ultimately sticks in the mind.

Out In The Storm bares out the wound-baring pitch. The injuries remain, but its crunchy riffs, sharp melodies and forthright vocals comprise Crutchfield’s deepest, most direct emotional diagnoses yet.

This is their finest work to date.

The cumulative impact on Mother Of The Village and Take Me Home (featuring the Beaufort Male Choir) is potent: packing robust poignancy, these lullabies for working-class pride deep-mine history with great storytelling skill, sensitivity--and, pointedly, a kick of sustained political relevance.

Anyone who likes instrumental prog will be pretty at home with this, which might just also turn a new generation onto the genre’s noodly stylings. Waverers may be persuaded by the four star film, making the CD package the best purchase.

Occasionally the record can lose focus, without a standalone frontman/woman--and while that doesn’t make Hug Of Thunder bad, it can feel disjointed, like listening to a decade-spanning compilation, moving through genres and line-ups with discombobulating results. Still, better to have too much than not enough.

Funk is the dominant addition to the music presented here, with Mystic Djim & The Free Spirits utilising Latin rhythms on the punchy Yaoundé Girls and Bill Loko’s addictive Nen Lambo – apparently so popular it caused its creator to flee the country – adding liquid jabs of synth. On Sanaga Calypso meanwhile, Pasteur Lappe harnesses disco’s ubiquitous grooves. The best stuff here keeps the additions subtle however.

Perrett’s mordant wit and laconic vocal delivery are happily intact and his current band (which includes sons Jamie and Peter Jr) sympathetically top and tail these 10 memorably idiosyncratic odes to love and despair. Highlights are heady and plentiful.

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.