Self-assured and comfortable in his skin, Lee Ranaldo is properly striking out on his own and sounding all the better for it.

Musically, this is Anderson at her most assured: she has synthesised her various musical interests and influences--noise music, metal, grunge, folk and country--into an entirely idiosyncratic musical lexicon.

While perhaps coming up slightly short on the nuanced splendor of Shields and the instantaneous élan of its Veckatimest, Painted Ruins is a special kind of conquest. Be it via the unseen sparks that spring forth from heartbreak or the dizzying urges that stem from one too many late-night wrangling with one’s place in the world, this is music stemming from a place that few artists can access.

She turns experience into art with a painter’s eye and a warrior’s heart, and Music For People In Trouble is a profoundly humanist work: her finest by some distance.

This refinement in Mogwai’s modus operandi suits them well. Where once their revolutionary sound startled, their evolutionary execution now beguiles--and keeps them several steps ahead of the pack.

There’s a passionate, earnest vibe that spills out to fill any cracks in quality, a window into Lavelle’s soul that somehow opens wider whenever someone else takes the microphone.

Circle have reached many great heights over the last two decades, but this new album again attains a new zenith.

While they’re [Genuine American Girl and You And All Of Your Friends] two of the album's best songs, they, like the previous ten tracks, suffer from not just overproduction and out-of-date musical aesthetics, but also a half-hearted attempt to assert something pure about the rock of yore.

To The Bone exposes and splinters insular communities and their ideas of elitism. But by observing the album through this prism alone, its real nature is obscured--that of a flawed and powerless homage.

Across spheres of contemporary art, experimental music, noise and techno, Pan’s twisting trajectory as an artist is rousing to witness; Lack惊蛰 serves as yet another reminder of her thrill.

There is a shadowy enigma within Esker that verges on the blissful, thanks to its peculiar melodic turns and idiosyncratic use of sonic effects.

Not everything is suddenly revelatory in a positive sense--indeed, often the selections confirm exactly what you might expect, and sometimes songs start to blend into one another, which is inevitable over the course of such an extensive set.

The best part about it is the Oh Sees manages to make this shift while still sounding like themselves, holding true with some killer bursts of distorted guitar and psychedelic reverb throughout.

TFCF is undoubtedly a record for recalibrating Andrew's personal and sonic compass but, rather thrillingly, suggests that despite the realignment, great things lie in the future.

This is perhaps Faust's most solid and coherent body of work since their 1990s resurrection. It roars with sadness and anger at a world's squandered opportunities.

This record is snug, unthreatening and comforting, which means anyone looking for rage and catharsis ought to give it a wide berth. But for many of those preoccupied by the kind of concerns that trouble Sam Beam--chiefly thoughts of mortality and fallibility--Beast Epic will be a long, warm, healing embrace.

Sangare sounds energised by the new production context: the new sound becomes her, and as one would expect it is her power, verve and versatility that truly carry the album. [Jun 2017, p.70]

A superb record--sharp and absolutely dangerous.

While not an unqualified success, particularly in its sequencing, the overwhelming majority of Bright Phoebus warrants every ounce of the reputation the record has spawned during its absence from the world at large. Where it sags, it recovers quickly, and where it rises, it rides upon thermal after thermal, scornful of gravity.

The majority of the tracks on the album are put together in such a way as to make you want to dance as well as take you on a journey, and by the third listen in you really begin to find yourself immersed.

The Underside of Power is both the latest chapter in a long-running and universal story that seems to be nearing climax, and solid, sonic proof that Algiers are capable of not just acting with their hearts, but ripping them out and offering them up on record.

His finest work since the first two Suicide LPs.

There is joy here, beyond the pleasure of wallowing so elegantly and tunefully in ennui.

Laibach seize every opportunity on Also Sprach Zarathustra to bring out the grandiose psychodrama and tension inherent in a founding tract of modern philosophy, rendering what could have been merely bombastic and brutal as spectacular and even sublime. It might not be greatest present that has ever been made to humanity, but it is a resoundingly impressive feat.

Dear could have been the end of the trip. But a quarter of a century in, Boris remain alert at the controls as they pilot their craft into uncharted galaxies, boldly going where no group has gone before.

A Short History Of Decay is raw, honest and painful: listening to its 10 songs feels like intruding on someone’s personal grief.

It is a record that inverts and internalises its inspirations rather than externalising and projecting them. It's delicious. Try it.

The album is by no means horrible, just disappointing and repetitive, chock full of revamped old school rhythms that don’t have the gratifying content to match. A good handful of songs--‘When Cats Claw’, ‘Since C.A.Y.A’, ‘Fine Ass Hairdresser’, ‘Julian’s Dream’, ‘Moon Whip Quäz’ and ’30 Clip Extension’--deserve to be judged independently.

The album is by no means horrible, just disappointing and repetitive, chock full of revamped old school rhythms that don’t have the gratifying content to match. A good handful of songs--‘When Cats Claw’, ‘Since C.A.Y.A’, ‘Fine Ass Hairdresser’, ‘Julian’s Dream’, ‘Moon Whip Quäz’ and ’30 Clip Extension’--deserve to be judged independently.

Due to Snaith’s decision to make music in situ, FabricLive 93 tends to veer and swerve all over the place in terms of a 'narrative'. ... You can hear that Snaith is clearly having fun letting his instincts take him where he feels the music needs to go. This rubs off on the mix--you do find yourself propelled by the energy, despite the missteps made on the way.

Lifetime of Love is a strange album, where songs with differing emotional foundations, sonic palettes, aural pace and textural aesthetics mesh into a cohesive whole. As Moon Diagrams, Archuleta has created a world where introspection, catharsis and redemption can envelop you and become something porous, to be inhaled and lived in.

The tenacity and productivity of the Melvins is admirable, as is their ability to continue to push music into some of its darkest and most intriguing corners. What would be really interesting, though, is if the Melvins made fewer Melvins records and tried more projects like the one on the second half of A Walk With Love & Death. After 34 years, their output is at times just a little too breathless.

They’re not just a crack musical unit--Kyle Seely and Matt Palmer, especially, have developed into a guitar duo to rival prime Thin Lizzy--the quintet feel like a great band-as-gang for our times. Morally upstanding without being dour or didactic, in control of their own image and destiny and capable of tuning to the key of life.

Japanese Breakfast is turning into an artist with much to adore, unabashedly authentic but creating music that we can still all see a little bit of ourselves in.

This album, then, is a gleeful surprise, and though it is debatable whether it would make the same sense for a listener coming to Perrett cold, for those who already know what to look for it is as gently persuasive as it is shyly moving.

These 12 tracks serve as a bombastic backdrop for Svenonius’ treatises on living the life of an anti-capitalist svengali; they're a guerrilla garage rock manifesto imbued with fever, fervour and soul.

While its episodic narrative veers off into realms of absurdity akin to standalone send-ups, it proves--especially after a repeated listen--a fun, texturally dense celebration of the possible, a showcase of real daring that has been the payoff of countless prog odysseys of yore, the perfectly bonkers lineage of which it so clearly stems.

Ultimately, though, as a collection that welcomes the near misses and the questionable latter-era caricaturing, The Singles is real and admirable testament to the full Can story.

Compassion is slightly less impenetrable and esoteric than Barnes' other albums, its emotions slightly more telegraphed. But it loses none of his power to enthral, disturb and enthuse.

What has emerged is Broken Social Scene’s best album.

So, this is not an incredible album. But in the context TLC’s legacy- as a goodbye tour to end one of the biggest girl groups of our time--there is still something touching here.

It’s an album that abounds with details but feels perfectly homogenous, and one can only wonder where Laurel Halo goes from here. It could be very interesting indeed.

The whole album is a cabinet of curiosities to discover and decipher.

Vince Staples doesn’t care for being labelled a rapper, perhaps, but in just "being himself” he has created one of the finest exponents of the genre this year. Hip hop is punk, it’s poetry, but also it’s party music--Big Fish Theory is an outstanding album that potently shows all of these exquisite possibilities. What’s more is, Staples makes it seem like the easiest thing in the world.

What this amounts to is a collection that’s a good way in to the work of a songwriter whose output is three decades strong and a welcome addition to Tweedy’s discography in its own right.

On Samba he has returned to uphold the majestic grace that made his father’s music so compelling. Within the traditions of the music he is playing Touré continues to develop his own sound world.

Nadav Eisenman of Herrema’s post-Trux bands RTX and Black Bananas does a commendable job without distilling any of the band’s indomitable spirit or underlying power. ... The careful sequencing of the album, with the vinyl pressing clearly in mind, reminds me of the potent placing of tracks on Raw Power by Iggy & The Stooges.

Going Blank Again was the sound of Ride discovering the sort of band they wanted to be, turning on the afterburners and leaving their contemporaries behind. Weather Diaries picks up the story from there. The forecast is bright--expect sunshine and the odd hurricane.

By rights no group should be peaking after 30 years of making music together, yet that is the situation in which Oxbow find themselves. Will they ever transcend Thin Black Duke? Such are the ideas and attention to detail on this record, only a fool would bet against them.

There is nothing new here, nothing especially innovative either. It’s just an album that consistently hits its target in a magnetic, mesmerizing way, and one that if you let it will swallow you whole.

A musically diverse affair yet still coherently Saint Etienne.

Perhaps his most assured and confident album.

Demen's debut album is worth listening to in its own right, regardless of any nostalgia for the 4AD sound. She takes a studied-sounding array of influences from contemporary ambient and drone, infusing them with a more operatic, vocalised melancholy.

While there is the odd lapse into grisly power-riffing, the overall mood is sedate if haunted. It has the same effect as dormant memories or lingering dreams, seemingly placid and harmless but then suddenly coiling itself around you.

What makes Jane Weaver and Modern Kosmology such a joy is that it comes as sharp and welcome relief to so many of the serious and po-faced purveyors of cynically cosmic vibes. This is music that simultaneously celebrates and explores, that takes pop as its foundation and then builds a multi-layered space on it that welcomes one and all.

The raw and at times, ferocious navigation of the album soars in its earnest delivery and marks a career-defining release for (Sandy) Alex G.

The 24-piece choir which accompanies most of the pieces here are a lightwave beam keeping the listener afloat, yet it's Coltrane's own vocals which resonate the most deeply.

With Play What They Like Colpitts and Man Forever have crafted something truly unique: a spiritual jazz album for agnostics.

It’s wonderful stuff, centred on Ayisoba’s signature instrument, a two-stringed lute-type contraption called a kologo. Obviously limited in its sonic scope, our dude provides rhythm and melody lines alike to hypnotic and strangely groovy effect.

So while the production isn’t as in-your-face as before, the flourishes that characterised those releases are here deployed to subtle effect on an album that’s only too happy to explore a variety of stylistic routes including blues, jazz, deep house and dub elements to make a surprisingly coherent and cohesive statement.

Dark Energy was already a significant left turn for footwork and Black Origami is a leap into the future from that, with probably only ‘1%’ (featuring Holly Herndon) from Black Origami sounding like anything on her first album.

A mélange of harum scarum garage-psych, unabashed homage and carefully-crafted pop reprieve, it finds Black Lips at their most daring, exploratory and downright vital.

It is not even sprawling and directionless but just painstakingly mediocre throughout.

Jim Jones And The Righteous Mind play it straight and with a total conviction from a lineage that includes The Bad Seeds, Tom Waits, The Stooges and all the way back to those primal urges that fuelled that first generation of rock & rollers as much as they did the seekers of hidden knowledge.

Inter Alia is a disappointing return to the saddle, expressed with awkward confidence and bravado by the band seemingly misremembering itself.

IV, doesn't really vary the template. They have nothing to prove; from the onset the record is a guided tour into the myriad depths of aural destruction. ... As always it’s the plodders, the pounders, the punishers that stand head and shoulders above the rest.

Devout is bold, fascinating and sweet, then, with moments of melodic brilliance and sonic mastery. But taken as a whole, the result is slightly unpalatable. As a good father Mr Mitch undoubtedly knows that too many sweets can upset the stomach. And the same logic applies to Devout: you need some some roughage to balance out the sugary treats.

The church's natural reverb provides a chilling reverse-incubation to her trembling vibrato, and at times, her breath too itself is transformed into a fluttering instrument, frantically encompassing all angles of the space.

The album rolls at a constant low boil, the agitation poking and prodding under the skin, not unlike the lingering, uncertain love. The Far Field isn’t explosive in its emotion, nor is it wallowing; it’s just constantly rolling forward, the wheels propelling Future Islands onward to the horizon.

It's so lean and spare sonically that it feels like a dash of cold water to the face after the cacophonous, dense To Pimp A Butterfly; it's so light on its feet that it makes Good Kid, M.A.A.D City feel ponderous in comparison. It does this while also staking its claim to being Kendrick's most philosophically profound album to date.

Keenly political, anti-fascist, and pro-immigrant, British Sea Power mine the past to give us what we need now.

The daring, innovative breadth of his artistic imagination is given full licence in the sense of expansive space each track so effortlessly conjures--no doubt helped by his previous soundtrack work.

Pure Comedy (or, I would say, Tillman in general) doesn’t suffer for its big ideas, it thrives on them; the real problem is the constant circling and underlining and pointing out those big ideas when just letting them sit and mystify in their black hole weightiness would do.

The challenge of making something so immediate and inviting is obviously one everyone involved has taken to with gusto, and as both a musical work and their most daring experiment to date, the record is a resounding success.

In The Same Room gives us more intimately friendly insight into the beguiling world of Julia Holter, seen here as thoughtfully poised and careful not to intimidate the listener, making this breezy recording a good entry point for novices in Holter's catalogue.

Silver/Lead is an exhibition in restraint whose brilliant corners and burrowing phrases reward both the keen ear and repeated listen.

All The Way is particularly strong, however, for both the production of Galás' piano and its melodies--there is an added, foreboding subtlety which comes through with more clarity here.

Pangs is full of warmth and charm, one that is welcoming instead of being difficult.

On Undertow there’s less of the upfront ferocity of previous years but it’s not as if they’re toning anything down, just prolonging the hallucinatory qualities and the twisted, anomalous ardency of their vision.

The songs feel bigger, better, more expansive and fresher, while their collective deportment has something of a swagger about it.

This is a cautious yet dignified return that allows the Reids and their associates to spend even more time together than they’d have expected to create something positive rather than engaging in an orgy of self-destruction.

WHY?’s brand of excess ought to be not abandoned, but embraced.

Their cover of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s ‘Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence’ feels superfluous and unnecessary. But that aside, this album sees Sherwood and Pinch take a big evolutionary step in their partnership in terms of keeping their inventiveness and the slabs of bass fresh while managing to ditching much of stodge.

Rarely have a band so perfectly captured the nonchalant thrill of being beautifully stuck in their groove.

Where some calls for more variety amongst the virtuosity here aren’t entirely without merit, the finesse of Dutch Uncles uniquely emboldened pop craft is arguably without comparison at present.

Sleeping Through The War is a slow burning experience but once that fire is lit then there’s no putting it out.

This is no retro throwback, Power Trip have poured their genuine, obsessive love of early thrash, but also Cro-Mags, Prong and Black Flag to create a boiling pot of modern metal mastery.

A physical and spiritual journey unravels in the 37 minutes of the record.

It's the slickest, spaciest project he's released since Honest (which was always underrated), and sits far left of the trap rigor mortis of the self-titled record.

More of the same, then, but a productive kind of dead-end, clichés run hard into the ground.

Some of the tracks in the album are some of the best that Moiré has made to date.

It takes a while for these disparate facets to show themselves fully, but the resultant experience is a trawl into an underworld totally removed from collective consciousness views of tradition, fate and religiosity. It’s a dark path, but one well worth taking, provided you have something to ease the headache when you come back.

It may be too early for most to declare it a classic, but only a few hours after its launch, it seems fair to describe Gang Signs & Prayer as a towering triumph.

On Drunk, Thundercat aggressively grafts said humour onto his spacy throwback fusion r&b, and the results are mixed.

Dirty Projectors is not quite that good [Primal Scream’s Screamadelica]--few records are--but it certainly drives a stake into the ground as to what guitar bands could deliver in 2017 if they would only open their ears and minds up a little.

Why Love Now may be their second album on Sub Pop, but there has been no cleaning up or pulling punches. Pissed Jeans are as soiled, sordid and scintillating as ever.

It has been worth the wait. It’s not as if music’s timeline moves in anything but circles today, so the delay doesn’t present an issue. This is the music of yesternow.

As well as command of the overall mood, Lipstate always demonstrates a steely command of her influences. But these mini homages don't swamp her sound--quite the reverse.