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.