There’s a few too many repeated melodies, and too few differing musical moods. Still, this is a reliably impressive package from a man who knows his business, and crucially still has something to say. It’s Prime Numan in his prime.

It is electronic music unencumbered by genre rules and the specificity of signification. It is at once completely familiar and pleasingly fresh.

Bright Sunny South is Amidon's sixth solo effort and like previous releases, the key to the album's potency lies in how the Brattleboro, Vermont, native creates emotional dichotomies and then bridges the expansive gulfs in between.

It’s music to seek out when some respite from all the blurred lines in this very busy world is desperately sought. In taking our hand but never gripping too tight, Holmes taps into something that even the best Late Night Tales compilations sometimes neglect: the pure self-therapy of total escapism.

Ghost On Ghost might not be definitive--Beam gives off the impression that a genuine modern classic is not yet beyond him, something a tightening of focus might help him achieve--but this is big, beautiful music all the same. That he makes it sound so effortless is all the more impressive.

Despite the apparent lack of new ideas here, the undeniable success of this work lies in Goat's deepening and development of the musical and spiritual themes presented on in World Music.

The whole record feels hauled from a dream space where you’re laid on your back letting the sky sink down to you. It’s ‘Shadow of a Doubt’ the album.

In their pursuit of experimentation, Decisive Pink have accomplished a great deal with this expansive body of work.

The density of soil has been scraped back, giving each song a lightness and an ability to breathe.

I’m all set to say that Good Mood Fool is my favourite Temple-related record since the HWGM debut.

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.

Old Ideas is the most musically considered Leonard Cohen album yet, and perhaps the first that sounds like the kind of thing you'd expect from an old master of the 1960s and 70s.

In The Shape Of Things Foxx, ably assisted by his new lieutenants and always with one eye on dreams of an imagined future, continues to make his most startlingly contemporary sounding music in years.

Chills On Glass has been sequenced, so that there are gaps between the songs big enough to drive a huge tour bus through, but each nugget is such an alien blast that you need a break to re-evaluate what just lubed past your lobes

It's as intoxicating a listen as anything we've heard from the duo to date, drawing its power from the combination of Blunt's ideas, fluid and often semi-literate musicality, and world-weary persona.

II mostly succeeds on its own terms, rather than as a refined package of each act's moodier moments, precisely because it does keep you guessing.

A Firmer Hand is such a thrilling listen because it eschews the platitudes of empowerment for something far more gritty, tough, self-critical – yet also unafraid to dish it out.

It doesn't have the polish of 2015’s La Vie Est Belle, but is more daring in its exploration of its diasporic soundscapes.

Across 24 tracks, he meditates on the journey that has got him to where he is now, but also succeeds in looking ahead to a hopeful future, pointing to various chapters of his creative development along the way.

This album is a career highpoint for Sweden’s Skull Defekts.

With ‘Dirt’ and ‘Funhouse’, we find a similarly expressive Pop in action, wrenching every ounce of feeling from the words. Iggy as a seer not a sucker. It’s refreshing to hear. The only sad thing about the whole experience is not really registering the rumble of Dave Alexander.

More Light stands as one of Primal Scream's finest, most honest records, even if the ravens remain soundly roosting within the Tower's walls.

This is a lovely record. The motion of ‘Circle Line’, the charm of ‘Summer Places’. Comma is an exercise in taste, expertise and skill as much as anything else, and it’s evidence (if it were ever in doubt) that contemporary modular synths can be used to highly emotive and beautiful effect.

One immediately clear difference between Two Way Mirror and previous Crystal Antlers work is the fact the band, led by vocalist and bass player Jonny Bell, have improved immeasurably as musicians.

It’s an album made for obsessives to dissect, component by component. But independent from the technical obsession, Ishibashi creates a clear narrative through the album.

Densely packed, I Guess U Had To Be There contains nothing superfluous and no lines wasted – just impactful verses set against Bash’s cacophonous yet cinematic compositions.

Something political and socially aware, but rather than aid it stands adrift, documenting the prostrate torment that tears through most bereft of power and consumes by the traumatic fallout, all delivered in a sensory wave, something that absorbs and immerses, envelops, is inescapable, yet never lectures.

Dutch Tvashar Plumes is dominated by exquisitely expressive forms of abstract techno.

Da Mind Of Traxman, rarely overly solemn and ever-playful, is still far from a middlebrow defanging.

Miss Grit’s debut full-length dials down the dimmer switch for a more intimate entry into their songs. ... It is Miss Grit’s lovely voice that captivates – simultaneously strong and breathy, the way she effortlessly jumps between the notes of these interesting melodies really standing out.

Through electro beats, samples and soaring choruses, Lynch's voice is consistent, strong and always beautiful.

By conveying the masculine and feminine duality inherent in old musical traditions and modern musical developments, Bruun has composed a truly rewarding record that defies direct categorisation.

Machine is an album of military rhythms, deep sub pressure, rasping bass synths heavy enough to take chunks out of the earth, and massive, driving, low-end drones that occasionally sound like weeping hairdryers. Yet, through all of that, there are glimpses of a melodic melancholia.

Despite this slightly bathetic penultimate track, however, Whatever The Weather is an excellent, and at times thrilling, exposition of a particular side of James’ music-making, a strange and alien concoction that reels you into its jellied depths.

David Bowie hasn't sounded this relevant in an age. [Blackstar] marks the bold and rejuvenated beginnings of a second or maybe third wind.

In Search Of The Miraculous is a new way of being for Desperate Journalist: a rangy and colourful artwork, less insular than what has come before, and testament to its creators' increasingly fearless outlook.

This isn't Minneapolis blowing mind after mind in the mad rush, this is the groundwork, the early experiments, the demos en route to the full on experience. Drums sometimes barely sound there, mixes are merely what can be done with the tools to hand, it's not slapdash but it's not slick either.

It feels more that Earth have given us time to absorb what may come to be seen, in retrospect, as something of a magnum opus.

Beautiful eulogies, luscious instrumentation and the occasional funk freakout, Shaman! is up there with the best of all of Ackamoor’s works.

Their tracks rarely exceed the three-and-a-half minute mark and each indulgent no-wave-y/early Sonic Youth noise section is over before you can even begin to get bored by it, making way for the next freshly thrilling fragment of din.

Wild God is exactly what you’d expect a Bad Seeds record made by church-going Nick Cave at the age of 66 to sound like – vocally, that wobble and rasp now is what you’re going to get from decades spent smoking snouts and everything else besides. Musically, it is a slow and elegantly-arranged record, which also seems fitting for where Cave is in life.

Whereas their previous album, WINK, had some laidback grooves and opportunities to properly croon, CHAI bounces along at a high energy clip, honing a polished and effervescent pop record.

He’s come up with ten numbers that linger plenty enough for earwormery to set in.

A respect for the original material is clear throughout, and the emotional power of Badalamenti's tunes is identified and played up wonderfully.

By tackling the mediocrity of a chart-topping genre head-on and infusing every track with genuine polemical anger, Miss Red and The Bug have created a record that is as thrilling as it is timely.

SickElixir is the sound of technology having long widened the disparity between the ruthlessly wealthy and those clinging on by the half moons of their brittle fingernails. .... Blawan has provided the perfect soundtrack for us to writhe about to, like maggots in the dark.

In Silver Ladders, Mary Lattimore brings the harp back down to earth still covered in clouds, but also threaded with veins of gloom that marble its silvery glow.

As an album that can trace its lineage to tripped out rock & roll of The Cramps' classic Psychedelic Jungle, this is a record that will delight the type of antisocial delinquent given to dabbing, dropping and freaking out.

Life's Rich Pageant rather sweetly gathers the emotions and carries them back to the time.

This kaleidoscopic mix emphasises the Black Jazz catalogue's consistently searching brand of music, and both complements and abridges one of jazz's most undersung and thrilling musical footnotes.


In short, Watching Dead Empires In Decay is a wonderful enigma of an album.

This is a record which exerts a demand upon everyone who listens to it, not simply in its abrasive textures but in the fundamental questions it raises about the worthwhileness of persevering.

Mclusky are here with us now and guess what? They’ve grown up. Don’t panic: they’re as daft and irreverent as ever but there’s a newfound inventiveness to their songwriting that’s clearly the result of experience. With Falco and drummer Jack Egglestone perennially busy with projects like Future of the Left and Christian Fitness, the past twenty years haven’t been spent idly, and it shows.

Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass is one of the most fully formed albums she has put out. Yes, some of the rhymes are clunky and a tad juvenile, but there is a sort of elegance to them. Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass is the album I’ve always wanted Del Rey to make. It’s brave, in a naïve way, and filled with some of glorious subtle backing tracks.

Order Of Noise shows off Gainsborough's more accessible side--a good thing--but it's also a signpost marking a good place to start digging a little deeper, both into his own music and that surrounding him.

Other than 'Been Away Too Long' there are no obvious singles here. Rather, each track takes on a propulsive and seductive weight far greater than the sum of its parts when listened to in succession.

While not quite the gang of four of old, they are all pulling in the same direction and, even for the most casual Blur fan, that is a glorious thing.

While I can’t help missing the volatile momentum of previous records, Listening to Pictures still animates its sonic space with the kind of detail few musicians have the vision or audacity to achieve.

All things considered, this is a brilliant record from Metz, and perhaps the closest they’ve yet come to capturing their incredible live performance on record.

An intimate collection of fireside confessionals which weave their spell on you with a slow-burning intensity, seducing the listener by stealth.

In general, the album's tracks take more risks, and surprise in a way that we've not quite heard from Hebden before.

Built around harmonies that only siblings seem to muster, there is a neat balance struck between angry noise from self-enforced isolation and a pastoral quality that strikes into the heart of America in a direct bloodline from CSNY and The Band.

Conquistador is recognisably cut from the same artistic mindset as Earth 2 or Primitive And Deadly but is as different from them as they are from each other. Each record Carlson releases, as Earth or under his own name, seems to both evolve from and react to the previous one.

Chapel Perilous ranks easily as one of the best things they’ve produced to date.

Smoke Fairies is full of great songs and shimmers with little details--a bit of spooky guitar here, an unexpected vocal swoon there.

Allbarone, then, is arguably the rawest and truest manifestation of Baxter Dury yet.

After giving The Book Of Souls another few spins, the record revealed its many qualities in measured doses over time.

What they're doing with their new wave affectations and post-punk sheen is absolutely creative and often subversive.

By shedding much of his fantastical baggage but none of his charm, he has created a nimble, playful little album that ranks among his very best.

[A] wonderful record.

For an album that is extremely paired down, it is complete in all its meditative richness and erudite honey light. Gold Record presents itself as an album of quiet epiphanies - reaching into the interior space of the quotidien and feeling around for something that is tempting to romanticise, but instead, producing it before an audience with a frankness that trumps a flourish.

If Nada! was the sound of punk rock overcoming itself, passing into its opposite, Love Will Prevail is the sound of it re-emerging once more, irrevocably altered by the journey.

With Mind Hive, the band continue to evolve, surprise and quietly inspire.

The reach of these records [Loveless and Isn't Anything] makes bands yet to form sound hopelessly out-of-date.

A rich, complex album that, similarly, rewards both the grand overview and close attention, and offers up fresh details, insights and emotions with each listen.

This is a far more reflective affair, with the lyrical gymnasium packed away

Though falling short of revelatory, a few rotations of A Hero’s Death brings some good news. Outgrowing Joy Division and overblown inverted paddywhackery, it’s a largely nuanced and, most blessedly of all, believable affair.

As is often the case with PC Music-affiliated works, this is an album which displays, and not infrequently, extraordinary flashes of inspired production work, but can descend into tedium with as much suddenness. ... And when the whole affair does eventually draw to a close with the hum of an air conditioner and the sound of the flying Jony Ive heroine thing from Wall-E, you will probably give an audible sigh of relief. And then spin the whole album again.

The overall mood then is distinctly chill and pleasingly psychedelic. There’s enough space echo going on here to tranquillise a horse. Like cLOUDDEAD or Donuts, Few Good Things is one of the great bedroom hip hop records.

Where Visions looked inward--sounding like the echo of your voice inside your skull--Art Angels blasts relentlessly outward; an unabashed pleasure seeking missile that blurs the lines between euphoria and the nauseating sickness of excess.

Each of these tracks effortlessly conjures the swirling feeling of needing to make a decision – and questioning your own being – never quite settling, always moving.

If you want to think about grubby late mid-century New York, go and read Just Kids or something. If you want a high-production, catchy album that’s cheesy, fun, and occasionally a bit naff, buy Daddy’s Home.

The purely aural aspects of his intimacy remain completely intact, another perfected headphone aesthetic, but when it comes to the rather more difficult task of conveying human content, Carey has rolled his trouser legs up and waded out to knee-height. Label it wimpy escapism at your peril: he knows exactly what he's doing.

Svengali is a seductive and playful accumulation of influences, interspersed with short interludes or skits that Cakes has said are real messages from lovers.

North London girl gang Girl Ray’s surprisingly pop-minded second album has more in common with the bard’s saucy woodland comedy than at first you might suspect: quips, troublesome romances, and pleasing rhymes abound against the backdrop of a hazy LA summer.

The group offers a dose of nostalgia for an era that never quite existed in this form previously in any case. Either way, this is medicine that you can imagine lighting up the most varied of settings. Yol is a transportive listen, offering portals to environments few could have ever envisaged.

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.

An admirable and invigorating work, Scramblers casts its eyes to the future of machine music and does not flinch in its steely gaze.

Upbeat, curious, and inquisitive, Cloudward makes for a great city walking album. It strikes the perfect balance between being jazz that’s not too impenetrable, while also being full of interesting surprises (primarily in terms of the language of Halvorson’s own playing).

It joins the annals of desolate and broken works, like Skeleton Tree and Purple Mountains. It’s also an album whose rewards have to be worked for, and that makes it a challenging listen.

Each track is inevitably a wild combination of memories, ideas, and influences – midi-fied sacred harp singers clash with squiggly synthesis, fiddle collides with the most absurd funk bass. Meanwhile, the spectre of prog is everywhere and the club is never far away. Amazingly, it all works.

Virgins is Tim Hecker at his most thought-provoking and enigmatic.

It's difficult to say Humor Risk is better than WIT'S END, but it is certainly its perfect counterpart.

With Musick, Laibach makes something so numbing, so invasive, so sickly sweet that Odysseus wouldn’t need tying to the mast, so banal, so awful to contemplate (if you could be bothered to drag yourself away from your screen), that you surrender to its surface glitter and uneasy depths over and over again.

Still Slipping Vol. 1 bounces effortlessly from one style to another, from the intricate 2-step of 'swag' to the melancholic house of 'better'. There's a nod to '80s post-punk on 'playground', and gloriously throaty verses from James Messiah and Goya Gumbani on 'swag' and 'playground' respectively. Rather than a bold new direction, the mixtape feels like a peek behind the curtain, turning the dancefloor monolith into somebody we can all relate to, with Mum calling up to be sweet about something she doesn't quite understand.

Gonzalez's intricate, mellifluous guitar playing is not front and center, but committed followers of this side of his artistry will certainly be satisfied.

Chain & The Gang are a band riven with appetites and desires--and, boy, do they let you know that--but on this record they vaunt a particular kind of self-discipline, and choices made with great care. Austerity can be hot.