It's a sunny, sweet, excitable record, but it doesn't forget a couple of moments of contrast.

Not that The Messenger solely ransacks the past, though: conversely, it's the clunkier, more ham-fisted retro fodder that constitute the main misfires, especially lyrically.... But when he pushes things forward, everything begins to glitter.

Konono No. 1 Meets Batida isn't quite the sustained and magical dialogue it might have been, but it's an intriguing cultural experiment with moments of real alchemy.

At times the album becomes a little difficult to follow, with the momentum failing during the twists and turns of songs such as the slightly ponderous 'Vile Hell'. However Chasny often manages to claw back interest by adding slight colouring to the stark instrumental palette.

Of course such is the collage gonzoid splatter-gun style of the Blues Explosion and their huge canon of songs its almost inevitable that they might inadvertently chance on something shiny from their own back catalogue and contort it.

Warm and inviting, produced with precision and a glossy, futurist sheen. Largely written on the road before lockdown, it winds between moods, never settling on a single tone or genre. For the most part, it's joyful stuff. ... A couple of moments don't quite stick.

At under forty minutes, an album of groove-based music in a foreign language doesn't have much time to make an impact, but it certainly does leave you wanting more.

Side one exemplifies 2020 in that it’s not entirely successful. While there are great ideas bursting to get out, it also lurches mechanically and is difficult to love. It often feels laboured, like Kirk is giving himself a migraine trying to reinvent something because you suspect he feels that’s his job. Flip the record over and the outlook changes. Once he submits to the pulsating rhythms and allows himself to be free then there’s a gold rush.

There’s just enough time to get lost in thought before you’re jolted back to the beginning again. Only ‘Long Assemblage’ has any ambitions to break out from the sketches, a five-minute exposition that dares to create anything like a narrative arc, carried along by some intrepid hi-hats. Otherwise it’s soft and languorous and thoughtful, and occasionally a little bit sinister.

It takes a couple of plays for the songs to individually stand out. Simon le Bon’s still remarkably youthful voice remains the most recognisable element but John Taylor’s bass and Nick Rhodes’s ear for keyboard shade come into their own, while Roger Taylor retains his steady presence on drums.

The instrumentation is often so clean and clinical it can almost feel like stock sounds, but coupled with the eerie atonal textures it feels very odd. Like a Bosch painting, where the lines are smooth, colours are clean and saturated, and even figures in darkness shine in the gleam of some unseen light, the arrangements feel alarmingly smooth and uncomfortably well-rendered.

Everything Ever Written is a welcome return for a band that's long been held in high regard.

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 still a Grizzly Bear record, but thanks to a spin through the grinder of maturity, it's also now a Grizzly Bear that know when to hold back or let things flow in order to create an LP that connects emotionally. This was the one thing that its impressive but more technically minded predecessors often lacked.

When it's good it's great, and it's never bad; Gruff Rhys' lyrics are mostly thoughtful and tastefully poetic throughout, but Feltrinelli's complex tale perhaps needed to be fleshed out further, with more twists and turns and the peaks more evenly placed.

It's not a perfect record, but then you wouldn't want it to be--the charm is the energy and room to grow here.

At 11 tracks, Turn Blue doesn't quite fall prey to the late-album bloat of Brothers, but it is still one song too long.

Though constantly teetering on a knife's edge--to be expected in such mental syncopated mashups--this is wildly colourful and knowingly absurd music. With a little trust from the listener, though, it works.

Sometimes their simple guitar riffs can feel too plain and familiar, and mingled with the consistently doomy atmosphere, it can at times feel relentless, but equally, they take their hard-wrought innovative DIY aesthetic and refine it.

In Instrumental Tourist, Hecker and Lopatin have struck upon a secret chord, traced sacred geometries, and laid a foundation sturdy enough to build upon. It's sound as structure, structurally sound.

Not a bad album at all. In fact, at points it's really rather wonderful; it's just not quite the wall-to-wall fruity bangers one probably expected, but by no means as skip-heavy as the likes of Random Access Memories.

Rather than concentrating on a single, memorable event, it takes the best bits to offer an idealised representation of the Howlin Rain live experience that's very much the aural equivalent of a Cameron Crowe movie.

While Beauty & Ruin contains some of the most vital music of Mould's solo career, it'd be great to see him properly stretched again as an artist and player. And maybe that requires an even bigger rapprochement with the past.

Cellophane Memories is harder to get a grip on. Chrystabell’s vocals, previously the unambiguous focus of every song, are here layered, cut-up, and reversed, often to the point where they become indecipherable. That’s in part due to the nature of its creation.

It is a peculiar little record, but it hangs together very well, and makes a reasonable case for his ability to wring something worthy out of whatever art form he chooses to tackle.

It’s a boundary-pushing work that, depending on the listener, could be considered either powerfully engrossing or deeply alienating.

Chances are that after the initial thrill has gone, you'll be reaching for Indie Cindy less frequently than Surfer Rosa and Doolittle, more than Trompe Le Monde and about the same as Bossanova and that's not a bad return to the fray by any measure.

With The Gradual Progression, one definitely gets the sense that Fox is making an unselfconscious attempt to forge forward with music, an unabashed statement for progression. Though it’s not entirely successful, one has to admire this kind of ambition. He’s made an album that’s hard to describe in both generic and theoretical terms.