Guitarist Carmen Vandenberg and singer Rosie Bones are on hand to bring focus to Beck’s vocabulary of guitar sounds.

“Cold Little Heart” builds from piano and the merest shiver of strings to a Morricone-esque pitch of intensity, before Kiwanuka himself arrives five minutes in. It’s a big, powerful statement of intent that the rest of the album doesn’t quite live up to.

Ellipsis finds Biffy Clyro reverting for the most part to the core blend of melody and heaviness that draws comparisons with Muse.

It’s all delivered with welcoming warmth and humility, over impeccably buttoned-down soul-funk grooves.

The 10 songs of this debut album are all about character, change and companionship, from various angles.

Her debt to Grace Jones is evident in the elegant melodrama of “Ten Miles High”, but her application ranges much further on an album of intriguing strategies.

The wonderful Wildflower is cause for celebration, its Zappa/Beasties-style collage of voices, samples, beats, sounds, and especially laughter offering a joyous affirmation of life.

The production/remix duo of Richard Norris and Erol Alkan here offer a retro-psychedelic throwback to a more imaginative time, one where the Krautrock grooves of Neu! and Can collide with spacey Ibizan house synth washes and the whimsical acid fairytales of classic ‘60s Brit psychedelia.

It’s a weird one, mysterious and mildly menacing, but eerily engaging nonetheless.

Devonté Hynes’ latest outing as Blood Orange takes the soft-soul stylings of 2013’s Cupid Deluxe and mashes them together with African voices and percussion, saxophones and vox populi samples to create a sonic collage that seeks to marry the vision of Marvin Gaye with the methods of Frank Zappa. That’s a considerable ambition, and unsurprisingly it falls well short much of the time.

The result emulates, and equals, Joanna Newsom’s Divers, another ambitious album about the inescapable inter-connectedness of love and death.

The blues and soul power are real, even as racial lines are leered and sneered at, the sort of ballsiness that could make rock breathe freely again.

The brittle garage-punk of this debut positively seethes with trebly guitars, reedy organs, waspish fuzzboxes and urgent drums, with singer Mike Brandon exploring the ramifications of titles like “What Happens When You Turn The Devil Down” and “Flowers In My Hair, Demons In My Head” in tortuous, passionate manner.

Interspersed with vox-pop musings on matters like police shootings, The Last Days Of Oakland is a state-of-the-nation address akin to Sky Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On.

An enjoyable diversion.

Working with a lo-fi palette of mostly acoustic instruments, they’ve conjured a weird wonderland in which Angela Carter meets Bjork round at Robert Wyatt’s.

There’s a dispiriting aridity about The Mountain Will Fall, which lacks the joyous eclecticism of DJ Shadow’s earlier albums.

Erykah Badu lends a childlike charm to the sunburnt fizz of Glasper’s bossa nova version of “Maiysha (So Long)”, with Miles’s trumpet shining through towards the end.

Though not quite as potent as Shangri La, but it constitutes a confident negotiation of the “difficult third album” hurdle.

It’s musically ambitious, if over-stuffed at times, but unashamedly impenetrable lyrically, even with the “help” of the accompanying gobbledegook short-story and supposed Map of Eyeland.

The result is an album of rare beauty and intelligence, rendered in imaginative arrangements containing sometimes startling harmonies.

As ever, California gets plenty of mentions, though there’s less filler than usual, the album reaching a yearning epiphany in the string-draped song for a son, “The Hunter”.

Skin is brilliant across the board.

Why Are You OK finds dad-of-four Bridwell reflecting honestly on the ennui of everyday, surburban life. Unfortunately, the result is largely forgettable.

It’s relentlessly dull, the sort of feyly English, unfunctional dance music Hot Chip pioneered to declining effect. Okumu’s airy voice barely brushes the listener’s sleeve, never mind mending their soul.

This second album since returning from an absence caused by lack of interest offers nothing new musically, but Manson at full-strength.

A country-gospel stab at Ellington’s “Come Sunday” badly misses the mark, and Toussaint’s innate funkiness is only lightly felt, sometimes sacrificed for too much tastefulness. There are still many American treasures here.

Few songwriters can juggle seriousness and whimsy as adeptly as Paul Simon on Stranger To Stranger, his best album in several years.