Hard Rain is not a bad album. It will very amiably sit, out of focus, in your field of vision as you do other things. It doesn’t, however, have whatever special something it needs to transcend the sense of a backwards referent.

The minutiae of each song’s sonic environment reveals far more than a casual listen, making this an album best experienced through headphones.

Sonically, Purple Mountains embraces and accentuates Berman’s taste for cushion-edged, almost AOR country-rock, with none of the powerchords or uptempo jigs that peppered late-period SJs LPs Tanglewood Numbers and Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea.

Most importantly, as the band builds momentum on track after track, they never miss an opportunity to draw unexpected emotion from their grooves. Time and time again, they excel at finding and seizing every opportunity to fully capitalise on the underlying beauty of these compositions. Likewise, they never undervalue or underestimate the sheer power of gentleness.

This is a complete change of mood to everything they've produced previously, for the better; here they sound alive and excited to be playing. It's encouraging to note that everything hangs together very well, strung together by the imperious guitars.

Whilst Bandana doesn’t have Piñata’s same effortless sense of an instant classic, it has considerably more urgency and contemporary punch, also reflected in the once-again immaculate choice of collaborators, Killer Mike and Pusha T in particular contributing a devastating sucker-punch to ‘Palmolive’.

Small wonders are waiting to be uncovered here, though they take considerable searching. While there’s limited novelty these days in live performances, given their ubiquity online, there are a few stunning examples scattered in the tapes. ... Reviewing these recordings may be superfluous. The songs were not designed to be heard but to be worked through and altered so it’s akin to reviewing storyboards or rushes.

On the surface, Garson’s album (not least the directive that it was to be played to help plants grow) seemed typical of that drift. Beneath the heavy topsoil of kneejerk A&R, however, a deceptively nuanced and downright irresistible feat of pure electronic minimalism lay in wait.

Ultimately, Beast is smart and cohesive but still joyous and daft.

The sonic backdrop is richer, more luscious and colourful, whilst rhythms that once would twitch are now more confident and loose.

Both a graceful tribute and a testament to these musicians’ questing vision.

These re-conceptualised variations still stick to her greatest strengths: pure musicality, melodic (re-)invention, and artistic lucidity.

Overall, Madonna’s fourteenth album Madame X feels as if Mirwais had mostly completed a decent run-of-the-mill modern pop record, albeit with a cool hotch-potch global feel; hip nods in place to fado, dub and other micro-genres dunked amongst the trap and retro disco. But then just before sign-off, Herself went through the top-lines with a sharpie. ... None of these carefully curated flourishes feel as if they truly live inside the ‘whole’ of this music. Instead it all feels plonked on top of a template.

Reward is Cate Le Bon’s most emotionally astute record to date, and her melodic prowess is the strongest it’s ever been. With that, Reward sounds like a modern classic, because it has a longevity that very few records possess.

The Age of Immunology finds the group tightening some bolts and adding depth to their mythology, and it’s really quite a treat.

Simple orchestral riffs and warm west coast production are thickly glooped onto a collection of songs that otherwise may have been too mellow for his rock canon, yet too nice for a stripped-down solo Bruce record.

If Konnichiwa was Skepta’s coming of age, then Ignorance is Bliss is a comfortable consolidation, one that hints at the changes in the artist’s life without ever delving deep in. Nonetheless, the project comfortably asserts his place in the current moment as a unique figurehead of UK culture, possessing artistic ability in bags and a persona that suggests far more to come.

It’s a relief to state that their new album Polymer is very much Plaid’s best album this decade, and at least their best since 2008’s Heaven’s Door.

In Pale Bloom, Davachi reconnects to the piano on a spiritual level, releasing whispers and wishes of delicacy and delight into the ether.

This is a record which deserves your time and effort; it is not an easy listen and nor should it be. It is a dense and weighty work of art which examines the areas between life and death in which we shall all find ourselves. Kevin Richard Martin is making music about subject matters almost wilfully unconsidered by many due to the sheer terrors represented within their everyday realities. If you're human, then Sirens will resonate with you.

It’s not always effective – there are moments of meandering, repetition and filler, points at which the band seem to reach their textural limits, and the occasional re-hashing of an idea they’ve already explored – but what’s most striking about Guadalupe Plata is that even these missteps gel perfectly with the ritualistic atmosphere they’ve whipped up. This is a brisk record, but one that leaves a marvellously macabre impression.

Everything on Flamagra sounds amazing. The beats are crisp and crunchy, the synths and loops are tight and catchy, the basslines are deep and wobbly and the vocals floating above it all take centre stage, but because everything sounds so perfectly measured it’s hard to get excited about the next song, as it all merges into one long sixty-two minute listening experience.

There's no centerpiece and no massive reinvention. Much of the songs place on the drone-noise-ambient continuum. But the sheer scale of Chemical Flowers feels bigger than what came before. Recorded in solitude in the Essex countryside, Chemical Flowers is charmingly ambiguous, floating around in some galaxy between labelmates Lee Gamble and Yves Tumour.

This is music for interplanetary airports and as much as it soothes, it sonically unsettles. But that said--when the project is taken holistically--the listener also risks being unsettled by the contexts that lie in its peripheries.

Despite the strength of the track list, there’s little doubt that Groggs, Parker and Ritchie are the stars of the show. The trio’s chemistry infects every track on Injury Reserve.

It retains energy, but has enough twists and turns to still provide a consistently interesting landscape. They have made a beautiful confectionary, but one made with rigour, skill, and care. A joyful album, leaving me aching for a live performance.

Nothing Great About Britain, a measured yet viciously ribald meditation on the contradictions at the heart of Britishness in 2019.

For a band whose titling and artwork is so important for the images they conjure, reverting to a tighter focus works for them. Carlson's guitars, clearly the focus, get to step back from the angular and the lugubrious. Instead, red-lipped riffs flutter over careful and precise percussion, evoking crimson dresses striding down gold corridors. And underneath it all--the star player--Adrienne Davis’s steady, world-eating thud has never sounded better.