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.