All in all, Sun Coming Down is a valuable step forward from its already very good predecessor. Despite all the past influences and references, the band succeed in not making the album sound derivative or shallow, rather adding an acquainted contemporary feel to the likely retromaniac taste of their music.

Pain: the quintessential Deaf Wish family album.

Although it doesn't quite live up to the greatness of Smoke Ring, it is a beautiful progression and subtle change in style and subject matter.

Their sound now possesses a withering, caustic wit instead of a joyous, ostentatious cackle, and the suspicion is that it's only the start of an enticing middle chapter. We'll see better still from them as they develop.

With their uncanny knack of still sounding like very few other bands before or since their early stirrings, faith in letting the "moment" loose has once more revealed Levi, Pell and Khan to be a strange and sorcerous triptych unto themselves.



From the base material of improvised music made in a situation of flux, his arrangements are incredibly dense and layered, linking intricate snippets and components together perfectly.

With relative ease, What The World Needs Now... can be placed aside the likes of the 80s influenced 2012 release This Is PiL. The second half of the album is the most interesting musically; it displays a set of songs built around cluttered instruments, rhythms and animalistic noises, but cluttered only to the conditioned ears of the modern listener.

Ones And Sixes is an album brimming with ideas, but with such a varied batch of songs, some work better than others.

While Sleep can be regarded as eight plus hours of ambient drift, it also grows into a piece of considerable emotional weight.

Poison Season is a luxurious creation, dappled in sunlight, and summoning all the redemptive power of pop.

Metal is a cradle-to-grave church of the outsider; birth occurring when you first heard Black Sabbath, Slayer or Metallica. On Abyss, however, Los Angeles' Chelsea Wolfe dabbles in it, owns it, then walks away.

What it also has is songs. Cracking ones.

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

Mudflowers sees him reincarnating and embodying his city's passion for a soulful Americana that flourished half a century ago.

Their world might be lined by wrack and ruin, but it's a world that fits them like a studded glove.

If you've grown tired of the retro-metal sound of recent years, The Night Creeper is a good place to re-engage. Uncle Acid might not be sonic visionaries, but they're masters of their craft.

Its use of frayed tones and frequencies as the organising basis for movement and propulsion allows the music to seep into the cracks and pores of the space around you, extracting the anxiety and dread inherent hidden in our world around us. Embrace the abyss and enjoy.

As illustrated by Kunk, the band is a breath of originality in the often-hackneyed worlds of punk and hardcore. Play this album the next time you want your dance party to devolve into a cannibalistic orgy.

Noctunes repeatedly feels like a homecoming of sorts. It isn't, however, without its shortcomings: it's a tad prolonged (three tracks here could easily go) and there's a tendency for Beal to get comfortable in his compositions.

With only ten tracks, half of which are under three minutes long, Personal Computer feels just a few bits short of a byte and you may well find yourself moving straight onto Unknown Mortal Orchestra's back catalogue just to get some closure.

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.

Under and alongside the invective, Key Markets has some newly complex and skilful beats.

Given the rigid stylistic direction of Meliora overall, Ghost seem to be writing for the expectations of the general metal community with songs like the stock metallic chugging of 'Absolution' and the AC/DC-baiting 'Majesty'. Such safe playing prevents Meliora from being something truly special.

Only the live recording, Manhattan is not essential here, given that, as is often the case with much archival material from the period, the sound quality is uneven, but it at least gives a glimpse of what the band was like onstage. Elitism For The People confirms two things, essentially: that Pere Ubu were possibly the most original band to emerge from the embers of America's punk scene and, more importantly, one of the best rock & roll bands to have ever spat out riffs, lyrics and noise.

Hidden Fields presents a binary world of pure noise set against the briefest interludes of silence between the tracks. It's only during the quiet moments that you can comprehend just how vast this album is.

From the unidentifiable and minimalist object on the cover to the track titles referencing interior design and architecture, via the very makeup of each track, Body Complex feels like a journey through a space both public and internalised.

As Compton progresses, it rarely seems to shift out of second gear, evidently favouring laid back grooves and sparse production over aggressive break beats and G-Funk swagger. All the while an almost listless lyrical style on occasion provides a narrative, or lack thereof.... Cynicism aside, there are moments of brilliance here.

The one-paced nature of the album ensures that it fails to hold the attention throughout, with the mind frequently dipping in and out of the record, and the suspicion lingers that I Declare Nothing would work better as a pair of EPs and some judicious pruning.