A winning melange of tinny disco beats, retro-futuristic textures and layers of synth, it’s by far their most cohesive work to date; in its less inspired moments it feels literally (and presumably intentionally) monotonous, but at its best it’s an immersive, absorbing listen.

It’s all fine enough, but doesn’t leave much of a lasting impression.

The supergroup does actually sound like something from the late 60s Swedish “progg” scene complete with flute toots and floaty vocals.

Without straying too far from the patented funk, soul and jazz peppered with enlightened, literate lyrical bars that have marked his previous four albums, A Work Of Heart seems thoroughly of the moment. There are dexterous rapping performances aplenty, often marked by enlightened sexual politics.

Given the source material, There’s A Riot Going On was never going to be the sonic revolution that Sly & The Family Stone-referencing title might suggest, but it is an invitingly disparate sound collage that will seduce fanboys and newbies alike.

Completing a trilogy alongside 2010’s Valleys Of Neptune and 2013’s People, Hell And Angels (both of which went Top 5 in the US), it’s clear there’s still a hunger for Hendrix’s unheard back pages. Both Sides Of The Sky is arguably the most satisfying meal of the three.

The level of consistency remains high throughout a 14-track running order encompassing the belligerence of Evil Never Dies, and the title track, mid-tempo maulers (Lone Wolf) and epic closer Sea Of Red.

It’s in the contrasts between the overtly camp, the most extreme squelch, and the space afforded to the smoother jams that Mr Dynamite really excels. It’s a success because the vocals, possibly the most blatant things here, are not what remain buzzing in your head after repeated listens. More indelible is the mood, the ambience even.

It’s a real coming of age for them as their songs, emerging from woodshedding sessions with producer Richard Swift in a studio in Rodeo, New Mexico, are spontaneous, immediate and really hit home.

His distinctive approach, with its palpable rock and country elements is indebted more to Bill Frisell than Wes Montgomery.

A mature and complex collection.

Thankfully, while pouring out his soul into three or four-minute measures he never loses sight of his attractive Americana-goes-pop sensibilities, most perfectly realised on Over The Midnight and the title track.

Brigid Mae Power’s 2016 debut was a beautiful, dreamy affair. So is The Two Worlds--but so much better.

If her more country rock-slanted work for Mount Moriah could be read as a measure of that distance from her roots, Lionheart closes the gap. By trawling her Appalachian background’s feelings, beliefs, experiences and details, McEntire has reclaimed country music for her own personality.

Depending on whether or not you’ve encountered him before, this is either an infectious comeback or one seriously charming introduction.

Tracey Thorn is a singular talent, and in a career that spans over four decades she’s achieved much. Record though has set a new benchmark.

With its garage production job, loud tinny drum tracks and an overriding sparseness hanging between each instrument, Drift resembles a very promising demo tape for an album yet to come to proper fruition.

To paraphrase just a touch, post-crash, necessity is very much the mother of inventiveness here. But out of that echoing vastness comes a gentle sense of melody that reveals itself, bit by bit, through repeated visits.

They took their sweet time, but that Breeders line-up is back, and has just nonchalantly knocked it out of the park.

Passionate, eccentric and unafraid of speaking out or baring his ever-beleaguered soul, Moby remains a welcome presence in modern times and certainly does himself no harm with this highly personal statement.

The biggest triumphs lie in the quietly assured orchestration of Body To Flame (a matching mole for Jeff Buckley’s Grace) and the title track, which calls to mind Yankee Hotel Foxtrot-era Wilco).

Landfall is a humourous, magnetic, and heart-breaking album, and paved with the kind of pathos that could make even TV’s Mr Tumble feel a little flat.

The erstwhile Felt and Denim frontman, the innately enigmatic Lawrence, is doing his best work right here and right now.

American Utopia is not quite as good as we’d all really love it to be. However, its quality of thought, emotional intelligence and sense of fun is remarkable.

Bereft of freestyle ivory plonks, You’re Not Alone captures WK doing what he does best: that utterly distinctive fusion of metal riffs, Springsteen bombast, pristine ABBA hooks and choruses bigger than Hercules’ biceps.

The King Crimson archive is a thing of genuine wonder: it feels as though there isn’t a single picosecond of their career that hasn’t been somehow preserved, and the meticulous largesse with which this archival cache is curated and packaged sets an intimidating benchmark.

In short, if you collect Jansch you won’t regret investing in these for a second. If you’re new to him, you’ll find a musical universe opening before you.

On her follow-up Cornish dominates and the results are smoother round the edges, more considered, heck, even mature.

Additional keyboards and synths fatten the sound in places without swamping the innate simplicity of the melodies, while guest singer Sarah Jessop brings an ethereal twist to High The Hemlock Grows. Likewise, Janovitz’s daughter Lucy weighs in with a delicious harmony on the reserved cover of Paul Simon’s The Only Living Boy In New York.

Even kids who don’t like rock’n’roll might find this infectious invitation hard to resist.

Not since Space Ritual-era Hawkwind has anyone so successfully combined workboot riffing with the swirling bleeps of the unexplored cosmos. Honestly.

That this is a subtle and seamless love note to music, rather than a case of too many cooks speaks volumes for the man at the helm.

In short, if you collect Jansch you won’t regret investing in these for a second. If you’re new to him, you’ll find a musical universe opening before you.

His band’s music has a stylistic affinity with Glasper’s Black Radio albums, melding jazz, R&B, funk, hip-hop, and neo soul into an unclassifiable hybrid that dissolves musical barriers.

Chris Illingworth’s glistening piano is glacial yet strong and majestic, elegantly floating above the turbulence created by Nick Blacka’s throbbing bass and Rob Turner’s kinetic, febrile drums.

The phenomenal Revolutionary Spirit reveals that while Manchester copped the lion’s share of the critical plaudits during this epochal post-punk period, the quality of Mersey was also second to none.

The result sometimes trips messily over its eagerness, but it’s also a sharp and bright, clever and fresh debut, with good ideas usually on-hand for whenever the intended effect isn’t fully banked.

Comparisons to Cream and early Black Sabbath are not ill-founded, but perhaps a little misleading. The trio’s “rock” aesthetic is made satisfyingly supple by the deft, jazz-borne drumming of Andreas Werliin, and bassist Johan Berthling spins some quite doomy webs, but the overall impression is of something quite apart from these two sets of forebears.

Home-recorded between 1989-90 at Jowe Head’s Stoke Newington flat, Beautiful Despair finds Head and TVPs mainstay Dan Treacy gamely working through a clutch of the latter’s prickly and pallid compositions.

All told, this engaging project shows how a geographical move can inspire a fascinating musical style, and an unexpected one to boot.

The wry, Chris Difford-esque football analogies in the ailing relationship-related ‘Injury Time’ (“they think it’s all over, it is now”) show Astor has retained a keen sense of humour, yet Dead Fred and the mortality-facing titular track are befitting of a record stuffed with songs intended to both “celebrate and grieve”.

Son Lux haven’t quite lost it to trying, but the album does feel like it’s being pulled in two different directions--one far more interesting than the other.

This album bristles with anger, desperation and disbelief. Hopeful resilience is occasionally brought to the fore as well, and guest backing vocalists from acts including The Magnetic Fields are on hand to help Superchunk feel less adrift and alone.

A thoughtful and subtle gem.

Though Messes is a record full of heart, it doesn’t always hit there as powerfully as it could.

As comeback records go, then, Burning Cities isn’t a bad album, but neither is it a particularly great one.

Not since The Smiths or Pulp had an indie band so keenly evoked and vivisected the spectacle of lubricious, learned masculinity at large. On this final hurrah, they sound like the last of a dying breed.

It all adds up to a bold celebration of difference that feels like an album made for these times of divisive unease.

Segall is all over the place across these 19 tracks which are too much to absorb in one sitting, if ever. Most of his carefree pastiches, bonhomie homages and sloppy costume-party shenanigans merely induce a craving for the long-awaited studio comeback of the mighty Ween.

The leaping chorus of Exile Rag’s hysterical country-rock, Jon Spencer-ish juke-joint holler of Belmont (One Trick Pony), the Dylan-indebted Slice & Delta Queen and fell-off-a-barstool theatre of Fake Magic Angel are vivacious vagabond story-songs with vim and character to spare. A colourful cast of wayward angels and thrill-seeking beatniks populates their fringes vividly.

Wherever you listen, Ruins pairs tough truths and tender melodies with tremendous expressive punch, from the piercing self-investigations of the title-track to Hem Of Her Dress, where heartache and rage merge with raucous honesty. Meanwhile, Nothing Has To Be True hews beauty from transformative circumstance.

So there’s verve, vigour, and more energy from the slightly revised line-up too, but it isn’t groundbreaking.

Opener Let’s Make Out begins with 60s-style, chorused “whooos” before Mjöll (imagine Karen O with Björk vowels) urges us to have a snog, embracing you in a hook so strong you may well find strangers puckering up. That of the blissful, blistering Fire is even harder to escape, while Love Without Passion is a sweet hymn to a pure, non-sexual deep connection. Whatever their mood, Dream Wife are a band to fall for.

What they do well, they do here in spades, and the new experiments come off as more than memorable.

This is no stop-gap, contract filler of a record but rather a perfectionist giving a great album the full workout it deserved.

The musical equivalent of a super-caffeinated espresso laced with Jack Daniels.

Phillips’ melodies are solid and simplistically accessible, never swamping the lyric’s articulate message; protest songs have rarely been so polite in their persuasiveness.

An album precision-pitched between angst and optimism, tension and release.

Her sixth solo set steers her back to what she’s best at: exquisite, tenderly fraught torch-soul songs of compulsion and regret, where the lights are dimmed, the feelings run deep and the hushed elasticity of her voice commands close attention.

Furman’s stories erupt in sunbursts of detail, lived-in and lividly imagined.

Bardo Pond often shine brightest at their most long-form and Volume 8’s closing track is a case in point. The only conceivable criticism that could aimed at And I Will is that it winds down after just 17 short minutes.

It’s still undeniably cinematic and heartfelt, but clearly the work of mature heads reflecting on excesses of their past.

[An] emotionally open and exploratory shapeshift.

The first thing that strikes you is an apposite openness of sound, achieved not just via thoughtful, spacious arrangements and due diligence at the mixing desk, but built into the compositions themselves, from the ground up. ... Is it too early to call 2018’s album of the year?

Purgatory is a formidable equal to the Southern states snapshots Steve Earle took on Copperhead Road, and the largely acoustic melodies and arrangements will have some listeners checking the sleeve to make sure they’re not playing a long lost record by The Band. Yes, the likes of Price and Simpson have returned country to impressive heights, and Childers has the weaponry in his arsenal to take it even higher.

From the heartfelt rhumba of I Don’t Wanna Be Without You and the title track – the perfect showstopper for the Harlem Square Club crowd--to Blisters, a captivating shuffle, and How Long, a going back to church blues, every song’s a winner.

Most of the stuff is catchy, with full-fat choruses on the excellent Dropping The Needle and Get On Your Knees, and while the rest of the album doesn’t push out any envelopes it offers up an energy-packed good time.

Produced by Edwyn Collins, it’s full of immediately infectious tracks that burrow deep into your head before working their way down to your limbs.

Insular, yes, but in being laid bare it speaks with a strong purpose.

Sonically, it boasts richer textures than recent albums, thanks largely to the pair’s expanded touring line-up playing a greater role in the studio; a more fleshed-out sound than the occasionally irritating minimalism of yore. Arguably, the decision to beef up the instrumentation is designed to bring heft to the lyrics’ serious topics, even though the band are, as ever, likely to be preaching to the choir.

While Calexico have been bridging their influences and styles for long enough to be able to take risks, never letting an overriding mission statement cloud an album’s quality, here the foot is ever so slightly let off the gas, and the breathing space allows gems to be uncovered.

A third of the way in, there’s a sequence of up-tempo dreampunk numbers harbouring brattier attitudes and melodies of a more generically slapdash nature, at which point this reviewer’s notebook became overly burdened with ditto marks. The quality picks up later with a couple of shimmering near-ballads. As far as power duos go, that’s not a bad ratio and it certainly beats those impotent hacks known as The Black Stripes or The White Keys or whatever they were called.

Urgent, uncompromising, intelligent--Stick In The Wheel are the bristles on the clean broom the UK folk scene badly needs.

While its beauty may be a bit abstract for some, Mother is intense without being dark or oppressive; timeless, a windswept, life-affirming work that makes more conventional music seem stale and staid by comparison.

Tight drums that bring The Smiths to mind hold the whole thing down, as guitars and bass sparkle, their counterpoint (not to mention reverb applied with a trowel) creating a comic-book cool atmosphere throughout. Throw a few saxes into the mix and you’ve got yourself a vintage-yet-modern rock’n’roll classic.

While many elements of the 10 “love songs” on Mount Qaf are competent, deftly crafted efforts betraying a lifetime of attention paid to such things, any Walkmen magic is rarely present.

If you sometimes miss Tigers’ unruly improv-tumult, the pay-off is an album of poised beauty with its own pocket-universe logic, exemplified by the softly searching communion of synthetic/organic sounds on Marsh Chorus.

The emotional climax of The Little Things That Give You Away is one of several moments that promise more than the album as a whole can deliver.

As anyone cognisant with the likes of Tuff Life Boogie, Putta Block and Butterflies 4 Brains already knows, these discs aren’t without their misfires, but when doubled with their respective A-side partners, the likes of No Bulbs, Wings, Lucifer Over Lancashire and Brix’s majestic LA all lend their weight to the argument that--regardless of their chart positions--The Fall are long overdue recognition as one of the great British singles bands of the past 40 years.

These eight experimental tunes combine the old and the new, but funnel the former through the latter to such an extent there’s very little distinction between them. It’s an approach that’s much more successful on the shorter tracks here.

While there isn’t anything here that leaps out with quite the immediacy of Dunn slam-dunks such as Face The Nation, everything has the assured touch of a master, and will undoubtedly re-establish Dunn among the sea of young pretenders currently working in this zone.

He breathily conjures up memories of the excellent recent Anohni album, and drops an ominous-sounding male voice choir into the mix for good measure. The industrial vibes are there in the rhythms, but softened immensely by clean Scandi strings. One to keep an eye on.

From Wanna Sip’s opening videogame blitzkrieg to the Blade Runner drones of Mustn’t Hurry, Plunge is a complete thrill.

While there’s plenty of thrilling rock’n’roll here, his faith also gives us some flat-out gorgeous moments.

Wherever you turn, exuberance and invention are generously served.

Pinballing between modern fright and fervent fight, I Can Feel You... exults in the thrill of self-determined discovery.

Tthis dark horse of a debut isn’t just vastly superior to most of the recycled indie landfill swilling around--it’s one of the most emotionally-charged guitar-based debuts to be unleashed over the past 12 months.

Four Stones is not quite as immediate as his previous collection, but McPhee’s work is remarkably underrated and all well worth hearing.

By its very nature, RTVD is eclectic, and there is an obvious element of hit or miss to contend with. The sequencing isn’t fantastic, and the compilation does lose focus at times. It does however do what it sets out to do; it explores, and gives a good sense of the ways in which African-American music of the late 60s and 70s splintered off in different directions and absorbed outside influences.

At their best, Garrie’s songs are tender, well-observed vignettes of a life well travelled, mostly on dusty French roads with a bar at the end. At their not-so-best, Garrie’s lyrics are more than a touch hokey (the quite frankly awful Boy Soldier) while the jauntier back bar numbers (Bacardi Samuel) are for Francophiles only. The Moon & The Village is destined to again divide punters and purists. One for fans new and old it is.

This is a great place to start--and possibly to end.

What strikes you as the cast of thousands run through the Guthrie repertoire on these three discs is just how singable they were--Woody played fast and loose with his melodies, but his words still score and sear.

All Together Again proves to be a warm and diverse collection of mostly unreleased pieces for a series of commissions over the last 10 years.

There are a few misses here but Unleash The Love is a fun upbeat song that bounces along with the help of a choir, and both Pisces Brother and Cool Head, Warm Heart are strong ballads that sit comfortably in the live set of the touring Beach Boys. ... Disc Two is a head scratcher.

If maturity is on the Bad Boys’ lyrical agenda on the sardonically titled Rot, letting up the pace is not.

It’s a refined downer, enriched by self-lacerating wit (I Only Smoke When I Drink), indie-boy piss-takes (Sleeperbloke), story-song skills (unwanted-pregnancy tale Johnny (Have You Come Lately)) and briefly off-guard touches of synth-pop wistfulness (Big Blue Moon).

Goin’ Platinum, meanwhile, places him in Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound studio with his house band--comprising guitarist Duane Eddy (yes, that one) plus Memphis Boys Gene Chrisman and Bobby Woods--and the results elevate his work even higher.

Perhaps a little inconsistent, Habibi Funk packs a lot of charisma, and on balance delivers the goods.