Cave is always the first to give fulsome credit to his band, and they aim true here in the most explorative, coherent and well-realised Bad Seeds album in years.

Anything In Return feels again like the work of an artist still exploring his sound and yet to pin it down to something concrete.

From the glissandos and vertigo of 'Milk & Black Spiders' to the jounce and yawn of 'Providence', in every note and noteless space you can feel it: the physical unburdening, the personal reckoning, the fatigue and reprieve of letting go.

It strikes a perfect balance between the emotional rack-drawing that's made them beloved to many an indie misanthrope and the warmth and hope that makes them better than mere scab-pickers, just as it offsets their talent for unashamed anthems with dark and gnarly little details. It's a beautifully layered construction.

These compositions are haunting because Grouper gives them space to breathe.

What all the songs on News From Nowhere have in common is a baffling, mystical elegance, both independently and, to an even greater extent, within the flow of the record.

Centralia is an album of surprising, subtle depths, a spacious, psychedelic landscape where the traditional meets the modern in a dreamlike combination of familiarity and strangeness.

One play is enough to confirm that defining moments refuse to peak through the murk.

The Flower Lane is far from a failed endeavour, but something special has been lost in the graduation from bedroom to studio.

Voivod have a hardcore following and for most, this much anticipated album will be received with adoration. For the rest of us, it's to be hoped that with relatively new bandmate in Mongrain, this is a transient moment before they head off to fight new battles.

Frightening though some of these passages are, the effect is not all hard going. The power of space is writ large everywhere on Burnt Up On Re-Entry, the giddy weight of infinity, the feeling of soaring transcendent journey and ego death--it's all rather exhilarating stuff, especially on a cold January evening.

Ultimately it's the breaking of a cycle that leads to change and, on this record of both progression and recollection, Esben And The Witch suggest that they haven't yet quite achieved that.

A Wonder Working Stone is the work of a songwriter at the top of his game; inspired by tradition but equally inspired to break from it, fired by collaboration and freed to follow his muse wherever it may soar, like the ptarmigans that spread their wings through several of these songs.

At the moment, the diversity on display here feels like something to be treasured rather than wished into oblivion.

There's certainly scant magic here.

Lady From Shanghai is another excellent addition to the Pere Ubu discography, the sound of a band using comparatively limited means to explore a deceptively broad spectrum of sound, confusing the boundaries between pop and the avant-garde.

Coming Out Of The Fog is an album of light and shade and one that benefits more from what's not in it than is.

An absorbing, immersive listening experience, Long.Live.A$AP outshines the recent full-lengths of technically more proficient rappers as well as those of strikingly safer hip-hop hitmakers.

Recorded in Berlin, the eight tracks here pay easy homage to their European forebears, but are unmistakably British in their overall sound and feel, nodding melodically to the traditional folk music of these isles, and existing at a slower pace, on a smaller scale, than the cross-continental constructions of Kraftwerk and company.

Solid and dependable, Fade is another album in a long line of impressive works that, whilst never setting a cultural agenda, is always returned to for satisfying rewards

To say this is a 'fans only' set is something of an understatement, but if you do have an interest and indeed if you can actually afford it, this is a lovingly put together and ridiculously detailed exploration of a record that has aged very well. For those whose interest is more casual the two-disc edition is well worth revisiting.

{Awayland} is a treasure trove of an album, brimming with ideas, most of which work and all of which, at the very least, prove that O'Brien is not simply another little-boy-lost lamenting the fact his parents wouldn't pass him the salt, but a songwriter of real note.

In another rapper's hands the concepts might have been overcooked or the messages too self-righteous, but Kendrick manages to achieve scale while remaining firmly grounded on two feet.

Without a single in sight, even by Outkast's loosey-goosey standards, Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors feels like three or four different records surgically stitched together illicitly by some cross-eyed back alley quack.

Part of the potency in this music comes from the confusion it induces, the fascination only intensified by bewilderment. But it's extraordinarily elegant, too.

Tenology itself, to recap, is not perfect, or even close. But half of it is a lucky-dip of madcap ingenuity and variation from one of the few pop bands to render cleverness a virtue rather than an irritation.

No amount of street cred can make up for this mostly middling, only intermittently marvellous record.

The charm of Growing Seeds is, in part, to be found in its naïvety. Norrvide approaches synth pop not as something that should be subverted or detourned, but wide-eyed and unjaded