Pylon is propulsive, girder-heavy and demands to be played loud. But like the best of their oeuvre, from early single Requiem to last album MMXII, it features chord progressions of intense melodic beauty like glimmers of the divine shining through the depths of hell.

Like all Los Lobos albums this owes little to anything else, the band single-mindedly going their own way--and getting away with an extraordinary collection.

Across nine one-word titled songs, Barlow finds a kind of peace while dabbling in self-loathing, alongside domesticity and redemption.

Happily, it’s been worth the wait as Silver Bullets is fresh, exhilarating and the most essential Chills LP since the critically acclaimed Submarine Bells.

The predictability of Alone In The Universe is its strongest suit, these are all cast-iron songs that will sit on an ELO retrospective beamed down from that spaceship in 10538 and nobody would imagine they were released 40 years after their golden age.

It is a salve, and a beautiful, mysterious thing, which doesn’t necesarily need to be anything more than a beautiful, mysterious thing, however many hours of labour and technical nous have been spent crafting it.

Hayman’s lyrics, vocals and musicianship add up to a frequently touching whole. One wonders though if the presence of others has previously helped smooth out any little wrinkles.

Respectful, then, but not set in aspic.

EL VY provide a more synthetic, but strangely more earworm-riddled, sound that’s great for casual fans, but less emotionally demanding for hardcore Nationalists.

Make no mistake, this is a chilling album, but one with just enough of Haines’ own addictive madness to charm. Best take cover.

This material represents the label’s least easily translatable zone, startling to--and still held dear by--an 80s audience only just adjusting to drum machine funk, but now dated in a way that Adrian Sherwood’s more earthy reggae recordings and totemic pieces with name acts are not. That is not to say that it is unworthy of investigation, though.

There are touches of Warren Zevon in the title track and a smidgen of Squeeze in string-laden first single A Little Smile (from the Amsterdam session, which elsewhere features guest vocalist Mitchell Sink), but the lyrics are typically wordy Jackson fare and ensure continuity.

Punchy, purposeful and convincingly contemporary, it’s frequently spiced-up with exhilarating examples of the band’s trademark, Television-esque guitar duels.

Fading Frontier seems to be Deerhunter’s most crystal-clear record to date. Nine times out of 10, it’s precisely this clarity that allows their miasma of messages to hit home the hardest.

Bob Ezrin’s production is solid throughout, but the whole thing basically sounds like rock stars having fun on their day off.

Good Sad Happy Bad feels like a curio: a work-in-progress raw recording that hints at better things to come rather than the real deal.

Despite some dubious song titles, that horrible “supergroup” tag and annoying residual longing from White purists, Dodge And Burn is a sweet pill to swallow.

Too many of the witty lines feel forced to scan, and the electronics, once subtle and suggestive, are heavy-handed. There are charms though. Down Here is lusciously Eels-like, and Tracey Thorn’s star role on Disappointing vamps with a definite strut. It’s just, after PGG’s fabulous right turn, for this album to plough forwards in the same direction seems a wasted opportunity.

It isn’t completely nonny-less, but it’s folk more in the tradition of Topic’s Voice Of The People series of pub-sourced field recordings than in the tradition of Orwell’s sandal-wearing, fruit-drinking nudists.

With its best songs vividly referencing the 70s South London landscape of Difford and Tilbrook’s youth, FTCTTG is frequently nostalgic, yet it’s largely upbeat and mostly eminently radio-friendly.

You will hear her work ethic throughout, positively Spartan, and tinged with rueful truth. A courtly service for all to attend.

The faster, rhythmic tracks are less convincing, though they can excite on occasion, but it’s this mish-mash of successes that make the album jar, and not in the way HeCTA would have desired.

McDowall is very much in charge of proceedings, even if her confidence in the recordings has had to be bolstered by fans in the intervening years.

What Mind Over Matter does exceptionally well is meld the playful and the cynical while always bringing it back to the songs--in both a lyrical and musical sense.

Rawlings emerges from his usual behind-the-scenes role with considerable originality and quiet authority on an album of entirely original songs.

The overall mood is, ironically, not dissimilar to drifting in and out of consciousness while the TV murmurs in the background, occasionally jolting you awake with a ringing phone or a spray of gunfire.

The bonus disc corrals the single Pool Hall Richard and the jokey trumpet version of I Wish It Would Rain. Faces didn’t outstay their welcome and never took themselves that seriously.

Yours, Dreamily is tight without purpose, bordered where it should be wild, and only occasionally feels alive at all.