On his long-awaited debut full-length as oOoOO, Christopher Dexter Greenspan manages to curtail witch house’s inherent gimmickry and cartoonish parodies. Instead, Without Your Love finds the San Francisco-based producer successfully forging a refined suite that, while certainly unsettling at times, never loses its focused application of melody or fastidious approach to texture in the pursuit of cheap thrills.

When witch house first came to widespread attention at the tail-end of the noughties via a wave of acts (Salem, White Ring, Ritualz) peddling woozy atmospherics, after-hours malice and an overzealous use of religious iconography, it often felt a tad too concerned with pastiche and melodrama to be taken seriously. The sonic equivalent, if you will, of watching a poorly considered Nightmare on Elm St. sequel or reading a Goosebumps novel under the sheets as a kid, with only a flashlight for illumination. While Greenspan’s early EPs as oOoOO on Tri Angle and Disaro – remixes of Lady Gaga aside – always felt reasonably removed from the genre’s campier tendencies, Without Your Love marks his first true foray into murkier, more ambiguous waters as a songwriter and a producer.

Sure, it’s still not likely to rank alongside The Haxan Cloak’s cathartic Excavation or Pharmakon’s outwardly confrontational Abandon as one of 2013’s most unnerving releases, but its meticulous organisation and carefully cultivated aura make for a gripping record nonetheless. You only have to listen for how melodies and beats are dexterously mutated into one another to see the craftsman’s sheen on Without Your Love. Be that the way in which ‘3:51AM’’s swathes of sonar synths percolate through to the wayward southern hip-hop vibes of ‘Without Your Love’, or how ‘5:51AM’’s somnambulist chords are stretched into ‘Moonlight Sonata’-esque arpeggios on the album’s finale, ‘Across a Sea’: a track that evokes a similarly mournful disposition to the snail’s pace vocals and field-recorded guitar of 2010’s ‘No Shore’.

That’s not to say that Without Your Love is a record built solely around little moments of headphone joy, however. Whether it’s the boisterous, gothic midi organs of ‘The South’ filling out cathedrals with 8-bit choirs, or the infectious palm-muted guitar riffs that emerge late on in ‘Sirens//Stay Here’ – an allusion to the days Greenspan spent playing in all manner of bands as a teenager – much of it is greatly capable of worming through eardrums and setting up residence in the subconscious’s most cobwebbed recesses.

While there are certainly times on Without Your Love where Greenspan’s over-application of eerie temperaments and lofty layers of sampling can start to drag – the found sound, musique concrète of ‘Misunderstood’ or ‘Crossed Wires’’ uninteresting non-sequitur coming immediately to mind – these rarely detract from what is, at its core, a fascinating, contemplative and forward-thinking collection. One that not only rises beyond witch house’s – perhaps deserving – death knells, but greatly surpasses its limiting boundaries. It’s the mark of a producer breaking free from categorisation, pursuing a plethora of different sounds and ambiances, unrestrained but for the imagination that gives them grainy, nocturnal life.

John Barrett – who, for all intents and purposes, is Bass Drum of Death – has come an awful long way these past couple of years – not that you’d know it. Having toured extensively in support of debut full-length GB City, he’s effectively turned what was a bedroom project in rural Mississippi into an international concern, with the band becoming notorious for riotous garage-rock sets that were high on energy and low on duration. Heightened profile and momentum meant little, though, when it came to recording a follow-up; Bass Drum of Death was produced in as markedly lo-fi a fashion as its predecessor.

USB microphones and limited resources were again the order of the day, just as had been the case on GB City - with that record, Barrett laid down a fierce mission statement, with barked, distorted vocals and racing drums drowned in feedback-laden guitars. On this self-titled sophomore LP, there’s no major changes to that modus operandi. Blistering opener ‘I Wanna Be Forgotten’ could’ve been plucked straight from the archives, but it’s followed by ‘Fines Lines’, which sees a drop in tempo that sets the pace for the rest of the record.

Bass Drum of Death effectively serves as a slightly more refined re-tread of GB City; Barrett’s vocals, usually undecipherable last time around, are now a little easier to discern without quite so much distortion, and there’s a little more tonal expansion in the guitar sound, especially on the likes of ‘Faces of the Wind’. There’s little evidence, though, to suggest that Barrett has attempted to experiment beyond the two existing Bass Drum of Death settings, which are furious garage (‘Crawling After You’, ‘(You’ll Never Be) So Wrong’) and sassy, groove-driven blues rock (‘No Demons’, ‘White Fright’).

On the rare forays outside of those two tried and true formulae, results are decidedly mixed; the constant shifting through the tempo gears on ‘Such a Bore’ is pretty jarring, but the inclusion of some pleasing harmonies on ‘Fines Lines’ is a clear step in a more interesting, pop-oriented direction. Lead single ‘Shattered Me’ is a wise choice for that role; clocking in at a little over two minutes and featuring some lovely melodic guitar work, it’d prove a perfect introductory blast for anybody who missed out last time around.

With a more stable live lineup finally in place, Barrett intends to go into a studio and make a rock record in the more traditional manner when  the time comes for Bass Drum of Death to lay down their third full-length. Until then, this self-titled effort amounts to little more than the sound of him treading water; it’s every bit as fun and energetic as GB City, and the chaotic live shows aren’t likely to see a change of pace any time soon, but there’s practically nothing in the way of progression here, either; it’s probably best, then, to reserve judgement on the band’s future until after we hear what they’re capable of with greater resources at their disposal.

If at times on their first two albums, Lightning Dust (2007) and Infinite Light (2009), Amber Webber and Joshua Wells allowed the distinctiveness of their sound to predominate over their original and rarely less than interesting musical ideas, here on Fantasy they demonstrate a more assured set of songwriting skills. The tentative nature of some tracks from the earlier albums (‘Days Go By’ hesitantly concluding Lightning Dust, for example) here gives way to more defined structural considerations, although anyone looking for 2013 versions of the sub-Sabbathisms from Black Mountain’s In the Future will look in vain here. The increased confidence the duo have as an intrinsic unit, rather than as simply an offshoot of Black Mountain, is clear on Fantasy.

At times, on the earlier Lightning Dust records, the over-use of vibrato verged on the lachrymose, in ‘When You Go’ from 2007 and ‘Dreamer’ (2009), reminding one of David Surkamp from 1970s Missouri band Pavlov’s Dog. Now, though, there is an impressive range of sounds. Particularly effective, for instance, is the echo of the Fender Rhodes piano sound Jack White created on ‘Missing Pieces’ on his Blunderbuss album. Intelligent and economical. All the more so for not drifting into the over-emphatic – an occasional worry on Lightning Dust.

Now, the sentiments remain just this side of earnest (‘Diamond’: “You hollowed me out into a love-lost frame”) with only an occasional straying into the overtly pleading (‘Reckless and Wild’: “So kiss me, you’re gone, and I will miss you like when our love first began”) that suggests Amber Webber has not yet fully put away childish things. Indeed, the good disparate ideas that didn’t always cohere in earlier songs that seemed worthy of further development (‘The Times’ on Infinite Light, for example) are here more effectively integrally fashioned in the style of the very best of those earlier compositions.

The thoughtful restraint of ‘Moon’ is thoroughly convincing, with the stripped-down arrangement carrying credibility, and conveying a sense that Lightning Dust recognise that keening vocals used sparingly produce disproportionately positive effects. At its best, Fantasy shows that Webber and Wells know well how to imply rather than state. This allows the forceful rhythms of ‘Loaded Gun’ to be particularly successful. The staccato “Fell drunk, loaded gun, swing it up high” is especially arresting. When the pair display their talents in apparently unselfconscious ways, such as on the lovely ‘In the City Tonight’, lines like “I stood by your bloody knife; / what ran through you, I felt it too” are genuinely affecting rather than gauche. They show they have an awareness of cadence as well as of rhythm on the spectral ‘Agatha’, allowing the song to rise above the everyday and the derivative.

Lightning Dust’s giving close attention to details of composition, resisting the temptation to stretch material or ideas too thinly, has brought about an album of ambition and maturity, of subtle shades of darkness and light, of promise fulfilled.

Young Fathers are primed for something big. Hints of it have been percolating for a few years now, but the re-release of Tape One back in January saw all their early promise come to fruition and forced anyone in its path to acknowledge that this Edinburgh based trio might just have something very special. Tape Two really hammers that home.

What sets Young Fathers apart from the throngs of other hip-hop groups is their sense of sonic adventure, because even to label this as ‘alternative’ or ‘experimental’ hip-hop would seem too reductive. An overflowing melting pot of African rhythms; r&b; grime; pop; ambient noise and, of course, hip-hop all inform the their wildly unique sound. Not content with that experimentation it’s then paired with a default production aesthetic which is bleak and muddied, buzzing feedback ricochets off every instrument as they rabidly mine the cracks between for morsels of beauty.

They find plenty of it as well, avoiding getting mired in a grim atmosphere by virtue of a real soul and craft to the songwriting. Such duality is immediately notable on opening track ‘I Heard’ with its creeping chorus refrain of “Inside I’m feelin dirty\it’s only cause I’m hurtin” showing that there’s little space for cliched bravado here. Their soulful side is pushed front and centre on the gorgeously specked ballad ‘Freefalling’ before it dovetails into abstract pulsating numerical electronica by the end. Their unpredictable nature is their ace card though, with their twisted dexterous verses invariably wrapped round oddly memorable little pop choruses blasted with abrasive volume.

Their tracks are short and sharp bursts for the most part, rarely cracking three minutes and crammed with ideas (sometimes to the point of disorientation) but it does mean nothing stagnates and keeping up with the stylistic shifts is an exhilarating task. ‘Queen Is Dead’ exemplifies that as arguably the most daunting track here, it speaks to a fairly oppressive atmosphere of urban decay with spat lines about “money cash for gold” over buzzing siren-like synths and thumping pan drums as eerie evocations of city nightscapes are ringing in the background. Alarm like sounds are a recurring theme throughout actually, and they build this subliminal tension in the songs really well, a creeping feeling of anxiety which wells up before being punctured by moments of melodic euphoria.

Closing track ‘Ebony Sky’ is the most accessible encapsulation of the various threads they dangle here; a luscious neo-soul anthem with crooning heart, pumping fists and a hell of a drop, it’s a triumphant closing statement. It also serves to underline how perfect their inter-breeding of styles is presented, so as to intertwine so perfectly they seem to belong together and the range of sub-cultures they draw from creates this sort of slippery unclassifiable, diasporic art which feels excitedly very much of its time (in a way that a lot of contemporary music doesn’t).

Tape Two is an almost excessively lithe shapeshifting little collection but I could not mistake a single song here as anyone other than Young Fathers, and how many bands can you say that about. Speaking to Best Fit earlier this year the band said that they already have a ton of material all but ready to release, and if the progression between Tape One and Tape Two is anything to go by then their full length could hold some real crossover appeal. Hopefully they won’t hold it back for too long now.

Throughout his career, Kanye West has proven himself to be perpetually paradoxical. True to form, Yeezus is one of the most brilliant and vulgar albums of recent times, as its ten tracks perfectly sum up the baffling dualities of the man.

On 18 May, Kanye performed two new songs on Saturday Night Live, two tunes which stopped the internet dead in its tracks. ’Black Skinheads’ and ‘New Slaves’ showcased a leaner, more aggressive and militant side to West’s music; the caustic beats and stark minimalism of the melodies offered a perfect canvas for him to make a big statement. The lyrical content seemed to match as well, most notably his widely de-constructed calling out of the privatised prison system, and in recent interviews he has spoken of starting movements and placed himself in the tradition of politically motivated artists like Gil Scott-Heron. It seemed he was tapping into something big, and like many others, I was ready to be blown away by the brazen, primal voice of disenfranchised black America (as we all know, he has previous).  This should be where it all falls into place.  The potential has always been there – his dissatisfaction with materialism, disavowal of hip-hop’s culture of violence, and wry observations of institutionalised racism have long been tomes of his verses. Sadly, this is not quite that record. Despite being an impressively abrasive album for a multi-million selling rap artist, it also feeds back into many of the frustratingly puerile aspects of the genre which he has always seemed keen to distance himself from. Almost too much so, but I’ll get to that.

The big talking point for most people is the blunt stylistic shift from his previous material. Sonically speaking it is very loud, abrasive and confrontational, but it’s important to keep that in perspective of the record’s stature. If this had been released by a band on a label like Anticon or TriAngle, I’m not sure anyone would be talking it up as ground-breaking music. It’s not, really. Sure, it makes good use of its many influences but his combination of throbbing industrialism, minimal Chicagoan acid-house and political fury is not completely fresh ground, frequently calling to mind Saul Williams’ Niggy Tardust album for one. That said, it is highly addictive and energising stuff, the screeching keyboards and skittering beats frequently clash against oddly placed samples, and the whole thing flirts with an exciting kind of atonality. It’s visceral and angry and begs to be blasted at ungodly volume.

The assault of pure unchecked testosterone makes for a jarring opener in ‘On Sight’, where after the initial shock fades we’re left with a thumping industrial synth looping over purposeful verses (“a monster about to come alive again”) before an abrupt drop into a lifted choral sample sums up his aims – “He’ll give us what we need/It may not be what we want”. It’s made to seem a fairly meek opener as the wide-eyed tribal menace of ‘Black Skinheads’ bears down quickly.  Though you’ve all heard it, notable here though is how the disembodied vocals echoing around the beginning act as a brilliantly subtle pre-cursor, along with his less subtle chants of “God”, for what’s to come from one of the stand-out tracks and genuinely rousing, establishment fucking moments in ‘I Am A God’. As if it’s title wasn’t provocative enough, the track breaking down to nothing but blood curdling screams isolated in stark silence and heartbeats are a true indication that he doesn’t really care any more – it’s spine chilling, and pushes hip-hop in a brave primal direction. What it lacks in bold messages to go with that is more than compensated by ‘New Slaves’, which is loaded with some of the album’s most brilliant socially-conscious lines, and now comes complete with a wonderful chipmunk soul outro from Frank Ocean.

The press release accompanying James Holden’s long-waited sophomore record, The Inheritors, is hyperbolic to say the least. It proclaims the 34-year old Devon born man as an “unparalleled” producer who has “woven a rich aural tapestry” with this album and that “nobody is making electronic music as explorative” as Holden – and that’s just the opening paragraph. Get past the PR machine, and you find that while The Inheritors isn’t the pinnacle avant-garde electronic music it’s hailed as, it’s a damn fine collection of songs.

Interestingly, the word that best describes what Holden does – transforms – only appears at the end of the release, as a last-minute thought: “striking a delicate balance between weighty tome and transformative trip.” That said, it probably explains why Holden named his record after the William Golding novel. The Inheritors find Holden attempting to make an electronic record as far removed from popular music circa 2013 as possible – in other words, an honest electronic record. Much like the book, Holden’s songs are, on the surface, simple and sparse in nature, but creep up on you before you take notice. ‘Delabole,’ for example, finds him blotting various sonic elements over a melody established early on that’s reminiscent of the Zelda dungeon music. Slowly, it gets buried under the increasingly overcrowded production. Before you realize it, the hypnotizing melody has blended into the restless haze you’re encircled by.

This is a trick that Holden plays on the listener throughout the album; it’s quite an effective one, at that. ‘Seven Stars’ lulls you in with a pair of lazily stumbling synths while a storm of fizzling white noise sneaks up from the sides and engulfs the listener. Then it snatches the song – and you – away into the night as it ends abruptly. All of this in under two minutes, to boot. He reverses this formula for ‘The Illuminations’ and ‘Rannoch Dawn.’ The former starts out with bright-sky synths bubbling about, then mid-way through, the song’s glow wanders into an aural fog before emerging brighter than before. It isn’t that luminous at the outset, but it feels like it was. The latter begins paranoid and eerie, slowly morphing into industrial EDM as minimalist percussion slithers over the horizon. The rave-built second half of the track compels your brain into double-think. The deception, though, lies not in juxtaposition, but in slight-of-hand – the slow build of Holden’s production is at times so subtle that he can bend reality to his will.

Yet, knowing the trick doesn’t diminish the enjoyment of the initial listen. Instead, repeated spins allow you to focus on the mature songwriting on display. It may appear that Holden uses a tactic akin to a cheap twist ending in order to keep your attention, but that misses the point. A great mid-song transformation, like a plot twist properly employed, forces the listener to reevaluate a song from a different perspective. You’re essentially asking, “Is this worth hearing if I know what’s coming?” For The Inheritors, the answer is “Yes.” You see, the key isn’t that he twisted the plot, but how he did it.

Tongues are often fairly loose with words like ‘otherworldly’ and ‘ethereal’ when discussing the more unusual side of independent music. Of course, when steeped in the pop-heavy alternative Western music scene it’s easy to think of less familiar artists as the above, but overuse of these words means that when something truly, otherwise-indescribably ethereal drops into our laps we’re left mouthing comically to find words that reflect just how so it is in comparison to what we’ve previously branded with said words. So it has been with a few particular Nordic artists of the last few years that veer away from that unique brand of pop, and so it is with amiina – once-string quartet that backed Sigur Rós turned unique, multi-instrumentalist six-piece, creating sounds so supernatural it is challenging, within the confines of the standard critical format, to fully convey their intimate beauty.

So often we hear albums that are meant to fulfill some pre-thought-out concept or professed writing device, but the fact that amiina’s The Lighthouse Project was written for ‘small spaces and intimate crowds’ resonates in every bar of this cosy mini-album. We’re told that the project was born of something said to the band by an audience member following the first time the group performed in a lighthouse; the man in question explained that he had felt the music the group played ‘traveling up through the lighthouse structure, and outwards across the ocean, as if the lighthouse were now projecting music instead of light’. Spurred on, understandably, by this heart-melting image, the band set out to explore Iceland’s lighthouses – newborn and soon-to-be-born babies in tow – and over time created arrangements that they felt encapsulated the intimate spirit of their original performances. The result is altogether reminiscent of so many things and somehow, at the same time, quite unlike anything before it.

Most impressively, the  haunting centric melodies on the record are played with jaw-dropping range and prowess on the saw, which, theremin-like, gives the whole experience an air of the alien – in a similar strain Portishead‘s Dummy. ‘Leather and Lace’, recorded by Jónsi and Kjartan Sveinsson (Sigur Rós bandmates until recently) at their Sundlaugin studio outside Reykjavík, captures the beauty of its birthplace with gentle babbling of woody harp, lapping back and forth between just such singing sawed melodies, and the murmurings of softly-spun solo strings.

There isn’t a great deal of variation in the six tracks, though – so little, in fact, that it feels like it could be one very long instrumental movement. This record certainly hasn’t got mass-appeal; that much is as immediately apparent as it is integral. This isn’t to say its melodies are complex or atonal, or that it’s rich in outlandish time signatures, but The Lighthouse Project simply isn’t music that is written to ‘grab’ anybody. No, instead, it’s music written simply to be; music so quietly unselfish and organic that it feels that, if no ears besides those of the composers ever heard it, it would still exist in some beautiful corner of the world – as sweet and incorrupt as a newborn and yet as full of weathered wisdom as some immortal inhabitant of the heavens.

For all the uniqueness in its components, there are things of similar thoughtful beauty one can compare The Lighthouse Project to; on the off-chance you were the type of kid who would leave your Legend of Zelda cartridge playing its title screen on loop, for example, just to bask in the heavenly lullaby of the Great Fairy Fountain theme, then this album is about as close as you’ll get to an adult version of that experience. To use a slightly less type-specific example, however, it’s emotionally akin to the swell in your chest as you hear throaty violin soar over the fields of Rohan, the shivers spreading to your fingertips when the towers collapse at the end of Fight Club, and the gasp of relief you let out as you gratefully gulp the water you’ve been longing so desperately for. The Lighthouse Project is an incredible escape from your surroundings, and beyond that, it’s the most magically subtle, sweet, and seductive collection of compositions we’ve heard for a long time.

Like pollen drifting through warm air and weighting your eyelids on summer afternoons, the supreme delicacy of the music throughout is entrancing. With the clinking of muffled xylophone and shimmering of angelic voices that fills it from start to finish – although perhaps most enchantingly on ‘Kola (Lighthouse version)’ – The Lighthouse Project is a stunning representation of the Iceland so many of us have fallen for through the blossoming of its music scene over our lifetimes.

Still Corners clue their listeners in that they’re set to take them on an escapade straight away on Strange Pleasures by naming its lead-off track ‘The Trip.’ Combine that with the hallucinogenic, desert-splashed cover art that looks like the surface of a colorful, undiscovered moon, and you have the blueprint for a record whose primary mission is to take you somewhere new.

And yet, this gorgeously diaphanous album plays out more like an ethereal dream sequence rather than any tangible, globe-trotting odyssey, with the exploration coming as more of a heady inward excursion rather than anything corporeal. Greg Hughes and Tessa Murray have crafted an exquisite collection of hushed pop lullabies on their second record, with the London duo giving the UK an elegant creative compliment to Baltimore’s Beach House in the process.

The expansive, hypnotic opening track truly sets the proper tone for the record, with the soaring synths washing stylishly over the Smiths-like electric guitar strain, as Murray’s breathy, wistful vocals sets the controls for the heart of their own distinctive sun. The poppy bliss of ‘Beginning To Blue’ suggests that even though the fire has perhaps gone out of a relationship, some inspiration still can be found in that fractured dissolution. Or it could just be a sly statement that the drugs have started to kick in — either way, there’s artistry to be found within both of those mercurial clouds.

The somber, languid pace of both ‘I Can’t Sleep’ and ‘All I Know’ temporarily derail the strong start to the record, but the massive, summery swing of ‘Fireflies’ launches the album’s strong middle section brilliantly. The track’s dynamic, textured beats prove to be irresistible, while the shimmering synth flourishes actually conjure glowing fireflies themselves, floating along upon the endless potential of a warm night in the country. But it’s the insistent motorik churn of ‘Berlin Lovers’ which really anchors the album, and also provides it with its bold, indelible fuse. The mesmerizing chorus, with its repetitive call of ‘So Young,’ is both a unifying rallying cry for the youth of today, as well as a musical time machine for those who want to remember their carefree adolescence.

‘Future Days’ builds on that inventive momentum, but sounds the most Beach House-y off all the tracks on the record. The delicate, acoustic guitar-laden ‘Going Back To Strange’ slows things down a bit needlessly, with the track perhaps being better served as a restful coda to the album rather than coming towards the start of the record’s second half. But the M83-like disco swing of ‘Beatcity’ rights things in a hurry, as does the moody textures of ‘Midnight Drive,’ with Murray’s haunting vocals floating atop the track, with the buoyant, staccato guitar riffs containing capricious echoes of The xx, as does the doleful ‘We Killed The Moonlight’ with far less success, as the morose penultimate number fails to alight.

Still Corners perhaps ends the journey where it began by offering up the title-track as the closing number, reminding listeners of the odd sights and sounds we’ve encountered along the way, while also suggesting that we all keep our eyes wide open going forward lest we miss visions and experiences that are never to pass our way again. There are sonic elements of a reawakening layered with the track’s evocative arrangement, with the musical equivalent of a sunrise emerging as the end of the album begins to glow. Strange Pleasures can indeed take you anywhere if you let it, with a journey of discovery awaiting you anytime you cue it up.

Part of the emotional appeal with electronic music is the expectation that certain checkpoints are achieved or perhaps teased out during a recognisable process. Electronica is adorned with stock musical patterns that evoke a predictable set of emotions aimed at intensifying a particular mood and the classic build up of sound and rhythm coupled with a cut away and subsequent  return to the main motif with glorious assertion continues to raise dance floors and neck hairs alike.

On Gold Panda‘s sophomore full length, moments of predictability are rare. On the aptly titled ‘We Work Nights’, there certainly are instances indicative of the sounds heard spilling out of night spots all over the world with easy, accessible beats and musical language that everyone understands. Consider the rest of the song, and album, a well narrated story.

On Half Of Where You Live, Gold Panda runs the entire spectrum of electronic music with a celebration of glitchy, uplifting randomness on ‘Most Liveable City’ to more morose offerings. The secret of its success lies in the conceptual elements of the record; inspired by places and memories, each track excels at capturing the spirit and humanness of a particular latitude. Based largely on minimal production, tracks like ‘S950′ sound as if they were composed with a musical node app and a few random swipes of the finger, but this is hardly the point. We’re in an age where everyone can make music but few still can make music count. Panda has proven that he deserves to be noticed.

Somehow, Half of Where You Live goes beyond beats, samples, loops and waveforms. On this particular journey, Gold Panda is part storyteller and part electronic folk hero.  Using Asian-inspired tones, he easily affects the imagination and generates vivid pictures of the places he wants us to visit. ’My Father in Hong Kong 1961′ places us squarely in a confused and wandering state with cinematic type chimes and drones that capture the ambient feel of a crowded street all from the fuzzy perspective of a dream. Seemingly without form, the track does a beautiful job of disorienting the senses but quickly slips away into nothingness leaving behind a trance like state. This is quickly broken by the crispness of the bass drum in ‘Community’ which  serves to re-introduce us to the more normal happenings of our neighbourhoods.

Half of Where You Live is a slightly different animal than its predecessor Lucky Shiner, which shares the Asian inspired soundscapes, but appears happy to stay in a more predictable climate. The London-born producer dabbles with lo-fi titbits in ‘Enoshima’ and the opener ‘Junk City II’, all the while mixing in crisp, clear production alongside. At times, repetitions allow for particular patterns to be forever etched in stone as is the case with extremely contagious chant of ‘Brazil’ or the more seductive slant on ‘An English House’.

It’s what all good storytellers do; ignore convention and instead use a multitude of devices in the right places at the right times to convey emotion. Though, on the surface, the tracks on this record are as different as the locations to which they refer, they’re a part of the whole that make up the story about Half of Where You Live.

Album Of The Week

There’s hardly any shortage of nostalgic pop records these days, but Spectrals‘ first proper release, the seven-track Extended Play back in 2010, was one of the better ones I’ve heard in recent years. Whether it was Louis Jones’ dulcet Yorkshire tones or his sharp ear for melody, he produced a collection of wonderfully catchy love songs, tinged with surf pop, that earned him a deal with Wichita and boded well for future releases. His first full-length, Bad Penny, served as a selection of bite-size pop jams, with a handful of real gems alongside a few tracks that didn’t really benefit from the record’s more expansive guitar work.

Jones has toured with pretty much everyone who’s anyone in alternative guitar pop terms; Real Estate, Wavves, Best Coast and Girls all spring to mind, with the now-defunct latter the most noteworthy – bassist Chet White took on production duties on this sophomore Spectrals effort. The sunnier climes that Sob Story was recorded in – at White’s studio in San Francisco – have had an obvious effect on its disposition; on opener ‘Let Me Cave In’, a simmering opening gives way to racing drums and bouncy guitars, while ‘Blue Whatever’ and ‘Gentle’ are in the traditional Spectrals mould, but with chirpier guitar work than we’ve heard before.

What’s probably most striking about Sob Story is the manner in which Jones has sought to diversify his influences. Lead single ‘A Heartbeat Behind’ is pure 50s Americana – hardly a surprising move, given Jones’ retro-pop tendencies – but it’s followed by ‘Karaoke’, which features some Reni-esque funk drumming to underscore the playful refrain of “I don’t think I was really cut out for this.” The stormy ‘Milky Way’ is probably the album’s single biggest departure; distorted vocals and fluctuating guitars combine to create something that borders on the psychedelic. Eerie closer ‘In a Bad Way’ is a less successful attempt at something different; a lingering guitar line, tinged with ghostly wurlitzer, backs Jones’ almost moaned vocals to provide a bizarre close to the record.

There’s throwbacks to the Spectrals of old, too; on Bad Penny, things were kept as tight as possible, with only a couple of tracks topping three minutes, but the title track here, a yearning slow-burner, is a spiritual successor to Extended Play highlight ‘I Ran With Love but I Couldn’t Keep Up’, whilst the understated ‘Friend Zone’ is another step away from that last album’s sharp pop. There’s also a new, and slightly-overproduced, version of old cut ‘Keep Your Magic Out of My House’.

Any record as flat-out nostalgic as Sob Story  is hardly going to push the musical envelope, but Spectrals having signed with a label that carries as much prestige as Wichita is surely proof that there will always be room for good pop music. This certainly won’t be the most original album you’ll hear this year, but it will be one of the most charming, and the rate at which Jones is managing to churn out quality pop songs bodes well for the future, and means you can forgive him Sob Story‘s occasional misstep.

What seems like an awfully long time ago now, I fell in love with Savoir Adore.  Their 2009 debut In The Wooded Forest was a sun-dappled, bare foot jaunt,  an art-pop gem that had aficionados sticking two brightly coloured pins into the heart of Brooklyn on their wall-maps. It falls to Our Nature to reignite sustained interest in whether Paul Hammer and Deidre Muro can successfully tackle the difficult second album question.  Thankfully, these 14 songs don’t disappoint, representing a more mature, slower burning 55 minutes of dream-pop.

Muro and Hammer positively nail harmonies, with they way they alternate lead vocal duties providing an array of textures across the board.  There are points as with ‘Wooded Forest’ when the melodies veer dangerously close to being saccharine, but such imbalances really are few and far between.  Also, gone are the infuriatingly catchy choruses of their previous full-length (try listening to ‘We Talk Like Machines’ a few times and not whistling it for weeks) which gives its follow up a distinctly more rounded feel.

That’s not to say Our Nature doesn’t have more than its fair share of earworms.  Savoir Adore have their story and they’re sticking to it.  For example, the bells-over-scuzzy synths and wistful rhymes of ‘Beating Hearts’ are utterly lush, with another favourite being ‘Regalia’ and its pinched, trebly guitar riff laid over walking bass and staggering staccato keyboard .  Within a relatively narrow mandate, the duo still manage to pack this follow up tight with subtle ideas and intelligent song structures, helping every track unfold neatly over repeat listens.

Our Nature is a seriously accomplished pop record, and a perfect progression.  Less obviously whimsical than In The Wooded Forest but still possessing of its own distinct charm and inventiveness, it feels effortless.  Detractors will claim Savoir Adore have too light a touch, but it’s fair to say that for most, they’ll leave a meaningful impression.

The first time I laid ears upon Comments of the Inner Chorus,  Tunng‘s second album, it was a revelation; alternative folk with strange percussion that was both intelligent and heartfelt.  Comments… was followed by Good Arrows and then, well, …And Then We Saw Land, both of which dialled down on the obscure samples and upped the hook-quotient to generally maintain a stellar quality.  So, though the standard ‘high expectations’ caveat applies to Turbines, I’m going to skip the suspense and confirm that in its own right it’s appropriately fantastic, be you a veteran or newcomer. 

What interests me when a band with such a distinctive sound makes it to album five  is how they reconcile needing to sound fresh with staying true to their legacy, and fans. Turbines - stylistically best described as a cross between the aforementioned ATWSL and COTIC‘ – gets off to a chilled, almost introverted start with ‘Once’, ‘Trip Trap’ and ‘By This’  forming a gorgeous but downbeat trio, possessing of all of the band’s usual playful and surreal lyricism, and drawled vocals.

Overall, this darker mood is probably the main differentiation, though that’s not to say Turbines is thoroughly morose.  The album’s middle third for example certainly kicks things up a notch, with the dense, energetically folk-y fretwork of ‘Bloodlines’ and ‘Follow Follow’ making expert and signature use of restrained electronics and a quietly epic chorus.

It would be disingenuous to say that Turbines represents a radical departure from the band’s previous two records, but the quality of the ideas they’re still mining their intricate music from is still so high that it matters little.  If anything it’s probably more consistent than closest cousin ‘…And Then We Saw Land‘ and definitely to be taken more seriously than Good Arrows.  In fact, far from feeling like a tired riff on an established formula, Turbines might just be the most definitive Tunng record yet.

It’s been a good year for disco and overdue comebacks.  Daft Punk  made sweeps last month with their long-awaited Random Access Memories. Phoenix followed up their commercial breakthrough (2009’s Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix) with vintage nightclub sampler Entertainment.  And here we have Australian dance duo Empire of the Sun’s Ice on the Dune, the overdue sophomore follow up to 2008’s Walking on Dream (that was five years ago).  The difference between the the latter and aforementioned is in how much the former two disregard mainstream expectations, and abandon genres they’ve come to define (i.e. Daft Punk and EDM), while Empire of the Sun seem fully willing to indulge those expectations even further.  The results far from suffer at the expense.

Empire of the Sun think big – as big as their name, 80′s sci-fi album imagery, album titles, and festival histrionics all imply.  Also as big as the accompanying press release for Ice on the Dune, which refers to collaborators Luke Steele and Nick Littlemore as “Emperor” Steele and “Lord” Littlemore, and which identifies the duo’s vision as a “post-apocalyptic psychedelic adventure.” The album is pegged as the ‘second act’ of the ‘Empire of the Sun biopic’, and Emperor Steele describes the title track accordingly:  “It’s about how the Emperor’s head-dress is stolen by The King Of Shadows, bringing chaos to the world.” Littlemore amps up the melodrama one further when he says: “Walking On A Dream was all about surrendering to the music. Ice On The Dune is more aspirational. We want to shoot out positivity like an arrow from our chest.”

Mission accomplished.

For all the grandiosity, the heavy ornamentation, the sonic and visual presentation of a New Wave band lost in space and time, the songs are as big as they are made out to be.  And with how much range. ‘I’ll Be Around’ is a careful whisper, a piece of mature 80s pop with a melody that hints at Cyndi Lauper’s Time After Time’, with lyrics that do the same (especially when they go “Time after time, I’ll be aroooound…”  An atmosphere of synthetic restraint is felt all over. About this song in particular, Steele says, “It always had a great melody but we must have done about eight versions of it. There’s even a Pet Shop Boys kind of version somewhere. All the time Nick and I would look at each other during the sessions and say: ‘Does it get you here, in the heart?’ In the end, it had to be a ballad.”

Another surprisingly-undanceable number is album closer Keep a Watch, which offers a slow beat, offering a David Bowie-esque croon over melancholic bass and keys, rendering something to the mental effect of the Ziggy Stardust album cover.  It’s a tragic classic, and very much indicative of this duo’s capacity for a powerful melody.

On the flipside of the spectrum is ‘Awakening’, which inflates a Bee Gees dance-beat, with everything in Daft Punk’s pre-RAM arsenal. More of that unbridled energy shows up on the once-more Daft Punk-evocative (mostly in the backing robo-coder harmonies) ‘Surround Sound’, which rides on a pulsing jungle rhythm, with a bass line that pounds and begs you to imagine the kind of drum section will be required at Empire of the Sun’s next Coachella performance.

The album is full of high-energy, highly-infectious dance numbers–in a way that demands frequently radio play, big-budget festival spots, distasteful Kesha collaborations, and another five year break between this and album #3.  We can only hope these larger than life figures will beam their intergalactic gifts back to earth a little sooner the next time around.

When Eleanor Friedberger‘s solo debut  Last Summer came out in 2010, it sounded like a skittish, unreliable friend delivering on a long-ago-made promise to be there for you more often. Her work with the Fiery Furnaces – hell, the entire dynamic of the band – was too-often filtered through the the kaleidoscopic ramblings of her brother Matt, and Eleanor’s sultry Dylanesque purr had to fight to be heard over whatever restlessness went on underneath it. On Last Summer, Friedberger allowed herself and her music to breathe a little more – songs rode themselves out over little more than two chords and some killer hooks, whilst the lyrics (and the artwork, which showed her face for the first time) eschewed eccentricity and kept things simple, direct, honest and resonant.

Her new LP somehow manages to go one better on all counts. Let’s start with that fantastic record sleeve: the water looks like crystal, as Eleanor is making a tentative splash into the pool, and her arm is outstretched towards – yup, her Personal Record. Friedberger has repeatedly stated that she can’t believe no one has used the title for an album until now, and even before you open the shrinkwrap to the album (I refuse to make any concessions to downloading metaphors), you can see its use is justified.

There’s a confidence to Personal Record that shatters the tentativeness of its predecessor; sadly, logic still dictates that a soul-bearing album by any female songwriter should sound like Joni or Patti, but one spin of Personal Record casts shades of seventies cult titans like Harry Nilsson and Randy Newman, or a less spiteful Elvis Costello – albeit with a voice that is entirely Friedberger’s own. The almost tourist-like nature of the Fiery Furnaces’ music remains present, but it’s presented in a far more expansive manner – ‘Singing Time’ floats out of the speakers like an old folk song of unknown origin (at least until the references to loud amps and faulty guitar leads put it squarely in the modern age), while the rambling mundana of ‘My Own World’ – key line: “clichés have taken on a shocking new meaning” – paints watercolour flute flourishes over a shuffling beat.

And then, my god, there are the straight-up pop songs. The propulsive ‘Stare at the Sun’ is bound to be an indie disco classic, as Friedberger rhapsodises on the joys of an uncertain relationship (“Give me your toothpaste, give me your ointment, give me your body in bed”), and the bouncy ‘She’s a Mirror’ skips out of the speakers at a blissful clip that entirely warrants its unexpected (and not at all unwelcome) saxophone break. Meanwhile, ‘When I Knew’ – the best three minutes that Stuart Murdoch never got around to writing – is a frontrunner for the year’s best song, following a girl-crush across the globe. The lyrical detail, from Halloween costume mockery (“she was wearing a pair overalls, so I sang ‘Come On, Eileen’ – I was being slightly mean”) to tracking down another copy of a record they both loved (“I scoured London for a replacement – I found it cheap in an Oxford Street basement”), is absolutely pitch-perfect, right down to its gloriously autosuggestive pay-off line. There are essays to be written on songs like this, but you don’t need me to write one here.

Most solo efforts delivered nine albums into a career leave you pining for the glory days of an artist’s former work. Well, for want of a more delicate way to put it – fuck that noise. In Personal Record, Eleanor Friedberger has delivered on every promise she’s ever made with her music, and come up with an ever-unfolding, fully-realised gem.

In morphing, with a subtle switch of consonants, from Lampshades to Landshapes, these Bella Union signees signalled solemn intent. Debut album Rambutan switches scenes and casts its own shadows.

Unquestionably best remembered, in their previous incarnation, for a cup-assisted cover of an old-time bluegrass ditty, the artists formerly known as Lulu and the Lampshades now favour electrified brooding over acoustic cool. The shift of focus emulates their old associates’ Peggy Sue in its maturing tone – but Landshapes still wield the odd ukulele or two.

The album begins in something approaching slow motion, with distinctly prog-ish creaks and chords; plaintive vocals inhabiting a lonely sound that is two parts industrial wasteland and one part Pink Floyd. It’s both surprising and a little circumspect – but the band play their ace next up. ‘In Limbo’ boasts a riff that blows apart any notion of constraint, a release for the pent-up potency that sends the song soaring to fill the space. As on the toe-tapping ‘Insomniac’s Club’, soon to be a single, its quirky catchiness and confident insouciance are instantly appreciable. While this album is pondering rather than playful, Landshapes retain an indie pop sensibility in places.

‘LJ Jones’ sets out with a similar purpose, scudding and scurrying through two choruses before becoming the first of a run of tracks that start to tread rings around themselves, circling the kernel of their own construction as if taking direction from the cover art. Vocals stretch to wordlessness, momentum ebbs inwards and, while there’s often an edge to the introversion – fiddle streaks against the strum, bursts of percussive intensity, flightless flapping – the sense of contemplation isn’t overcome by restlessness. The long-gestated ‘Impasse’, grown to fit the Landshapes sound, spins wheels within wheels, never crashing or crescendoing through the cycle.

‘Demons’, the lone survivor from Lulu’s Cold Water EP, bridges the change and changes the game, simple and unswervingly stirring. Given elegant and gently rousing treatment here, it is troubled with beautiful unease from beginning to end. If the introduction conjures creaking branches and disturbed earth, thereafter the song makes and mines a subterranean landscape, a space where “these demons that you gave to me / make the best and worst of me”. ‘Detour’, following, cannot emulate the impact but is still a turbulent noise-maker, breaking out to fill the space beneath its own decorous arcs and eschewing lyrics as the expansiveness swells.

Rambutan probably achieves its upscaled objectives even before reaching its rapt conclusion – but like so much on Bella Union’s high quality roster, Landshapes’ debut is both assured and assertive in its sense of self, imbued with an individual and fully realised identity. Each song reaffirms the album’s grander essence and even if familiarity breeds a desire for the unexpected, there are no sounds out of place. All four band members contribute to a crisply bittersweet citrus wash of vocals.

Although more nuanced textures take time to emerge through the sustained stylistic soundscape, Rambutan earns instant respect for its creators’ new direction. It isn’t quite a landmark album – but it is a milestone, and deserves its plaudits with or without reference to Landshapes’ own transformation.

When The National took their first stumbled steps towards greater notoriety on their 2003 album Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers, it was as a band whose songs featured characters struggling through the darker side of domestic bliss. Whether that be the alcohol-addled crux of ‘Slipping Husband’ or the marital meanderers of ‘Trophy Wife’, the group’s frontman – and dominant lyricist – Matt Berninger has always strove to peep behind suburbia’s blackout curtains.

Flash-forward to Trouble Will Find Me, the Cincinnati quintet’s sixth, and most streamlined, record to date and they still appear to be fronting many of the same issues. Instead, it’s the fiery rebukes and nights spent lost wandering cities that seem to have been cut by the wayside. Where the whiskey-breathed couch potato of ‘Slipping Husband’ was confronted by a tirade of familial abuse; here, we see a far dourer Berninger prepared to submit to his ghosts on ‘Demons’. Where ‘Mr. November’ was gearing up for war and dreaming of being “carried in the arms of cheerleaders”; here, the bleary-eyed narrator of ‘Hard to Find’ views goings-on from a more removed standing, content that “they can all just kiss off into the air”. While Trouble Will Find Me certainly isn’t the sound of compromise, it’s rife with an air of acceptance, of coming to terms with the inevitability of one’s circumstances.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising then that this is not only the Ohio natives’ most self-referential record, but also their greatest attempt to measure themselves against the legacies of others. After all, if you’re “going through an awkward phase,” as ‘Demons’ would have it, why not check your footsteps with the paths of those who’ve walked before you? There couldn’t be a more fitting summary of this than when Berninger – accompanied by swells of percussion and orchestration, care of his bandmates: the Dessner and Devendorf brothers – confesses, “if you want to see me cry, play Let It Be or Nevermind,” on the driving ‘Don’t Swallow the Cap’. It’s an affecting glance back at two records synonymous with driving social change: the former marking the end of the most important singular output in pop history, the latter acting as a seminal focal point in the rise of alternative rock culture. Similar references are scattered throughout Trouble Will Find Me; Elliott Smith on the bluegrass hymnal of ‘Fireproof’, Guns n’ Roses on the appropriately-titled ‘Humiliation’.

It’s not just the works of others that are well represented on Trouble Will Find Me. In fact, nearly ever part of The National’s 14-year career feels clearly illuminated here: The loftier-than-life choruses of Alligator’s ‘Lit Up’ or ‘Abel’ have more refined prodigies in the rolling drums and blasts of guitar that mark ‘Sea of Love’ and ‘Don’t Swallow the Cap’, the texturally rich haze of High Violet is abundantly present in the swathes of fuzz that introduce album-opener ‘I Should Live in Salt’. The difference on Trouble Will Find Me is that everything feels clarified through a decade of wisdom, with volatility frequently superseded by sensibility. While Berninger and co. may not have the party lit up like “a birthday candle in a circle of black girls” as they once did, there will always be people who’d rather throw off the corny dancing and talk intelligently for an hour or two. The National will always have them covered.

For a band as established as Sigur Rós to lose an intrinsic member is no small thing. Historically, these losses have always been a catalyst for change – sometimes good, sometimes catastrophic – and at January’s  announcement of the departure of multi-instrumentalist Kjartan Sveinsson from the Icelandic legends’ lineup (the first real game-changing turbulence in the band’s career) their enormous global following said a mournful farewell and waited anxiously for news from the officially-remaining three. It wasn’t long before news began coming, drip by drip, and now, with their release of their seventh studio album, their playful hints at a change in direction have been delivered upon.

Kveikur (tr: Candlewick) comes from a strange new evolution from the safe, comforting Sigur Rós we’ve grown to know over the years. It follows 2012‘s Valtari, one of the most truly ambient live-instrument albums in alternative musical history, and, like AC/DC following the death of Bon Scott with Back in Black, they have adapted a sound darker than any previous work to highlight a fundamental shift – a sound that’s aggressive even when compared to the likes of ‘Ný Batterí’ from their breakthrough album Ágætis Byrjun.

Reminiscence is definitely strong here, however. Melodies are proud and distinctive in a way they weren’t at any point on Valtari – a component particularly true of the vocals of frontman Jónsi Birgisson, whose signature falsetto cooings are to-the-point in a way they haven’t been since his much-loved solo album, Go, and, although here more menacing, incorporate some of the same digitally-affected embellishments.

Kveikur’s vigour erupts from its start, with the hellishly ominous slams that introduce ‘Brennisteinn’ (tr: Brimstone), the album’s near-eight-minute opening track; the music video for which widened the eyes of all looking in Sigur Rós’ direction in March of this year. The deep, groove-laden drums are welcome after the blissful lethargy of Valtari - a component of the new album that reaches a climax in the fierce abandon of its title track. ‘Ísjaki’ (tr: Iceberg), the second single from the record, is straightforward, memorable, and full to the brim with wildly fluctuating vocals, whirlwind strings and war-like drums. Tracks like ‘Stormur’ (tr: Storm) are, in some respects, classic Sigur Rós – they’re grand and emotional, with choruses that make you sing along in your head after a few listens with words you likely don’t know or understand. In their instrumentation, however, they’re different beasts entirely. Neither the drums, guitars or synths are ever understated, lo-fi or polite – throughout, they’re devastating, taking control of the band’s poppier sensibilities and lighting vicious fires beneath them. It’s as ‘Rafstraumur’ (tr: Electric Current) swells to its blistering climax that you comprehend the extent to which Sigur Rós have here dived into the epic waters they’ve been dipping their toes in and out of all these years, and marvel at the unfaltering consistency of the resulting work.

This is dark, progressive music for dark, adult emotions. There’s little that’s whimsical or playful to it, and yet it’s still, somehow, pop music – despite being quite unlike anything else currently in the global mainstream. It’s music that concerns the elements; of imposing forces of nature; of beautiful things that move the earth in ways we can’t control, and, in those respects, the record mirrors its track titles. It’s a perilous adventure, as organic as a thunderstorm, leading eventually, with the treacle-thick piano and possessed velvet strings of closing track ‘Var’ (tr: Shelter), to a final, blissful sleep from which you never wish to wake up.

In comparison to its recent predecessors Kveikur is frightening, but it’s frightening in a way that’s primally, morbidly fascinating. This comes, however, with the unavoidable fact that, despite its accessibility, one wouldn’t take it on unless the mood, surroundings and general state of mind were all totally in the right place – unlike previous albums like Takk…, which take significantly less emotional investment. No; Kveikur is a record you play for the sheer catharsis of it – a work of art to plug into when grey buildings and greyer skies tower too densely around you, and you wish for nothing more than to close your eyes and feel the terrible greatness of nature swallow you up.

Even before you hear their music, it’s very easy to find yourself predisposed to love Dinosaur Pile-Up. Just look at their cute moniker – it’s bursting with imagination, full of potent suggestion and ripe with happy childhood memories of playing out fight scenes with plastic tyrannosaurs and stegosauri. Now glance over at that album cover of a chap falling flat on his face – how can they go wrong with such bare-faced self-mockery? Of course, that’s a rhetorical question – you’re better off asking a politician about self-mockery if you actually want a serious answer.

DPU clearly do understand the concept of experimentation, as over the course of their first two albums they’ve set about dumping the twee-ness that made their EP so discardable. Now sporting beefed up electric guitars and with plenty of throbbing bass thunder inserted whereever they can find space for it, they’ve cultured a grungier rock vibe that has placed them firmly back in time, mimicking bands that are either now defunct or have moved away from their original sounds.

So, where exactly do they intend to fit in? Certainly, by starting and ending with a bang, bookending Nature Nurture with their best material, they give themselves a chance here. Opener ‘Arizona Waiting’ is ripe with blasting bottom-end, a lush wedge of Weezer-esque harmonics and a bitter Deftones-esque minor drop, whilst closer ‘Nature Nurture’ burns with a precise, spacious and single-minded two-key chorus. When something this simple forms the album highlight, there’s surely something awry.

The trouble with the running order here is that they spend every track in between carefully placing their feet on paths well-worn by their heroes. ‘Draw A Line and ‘Derail’ rockgasm over a spot of Foo Fighters riff-and-chug teasing, whilst ‘Summer Gurl’, ‘Start Again’, with it’s fluorescent electro riff, and the delicate touches within ‘The Way We Come’ are bruised with Feeder and Ash colourings. Really dig around and you’ll hear the rip-chords and quicker time signature of early-Nirvana in ‘Heather’ and the warm tones of the long-forgotten Arlo glistening through both ‘Peninsula’ and the gorgeous cruise tune ‘White T-Shirt and Jeans’. Tried and trusted methods are employed like the split quiet-loud verses and the short pause before the happyslap of the chorus hits. Essentially, it’s paint-by-numbers songwriting, which is fine if you’re filling holes, but a little more innovation would go a long way.

So, where do they go from here? Well, settling on a signature sound would be a start, be that through greater employment of their enigmatic, tone-changing minor chords or, perhaps, aiming to unsettle the listener with odd, possibly even angry, passages that demand self-introspection upon the listener. Dinosaur Pile-Up remain as lovable as ever but, oddly, considering their position, they appear determined to remain unambitious and, therefore, are in danger of becoming irrelevant. So, whilst the Foo Fighters have chosen to evolve and the more elegiac Feeder still get away with shifting thousands of units a week, on this form, Dinosaur Pile-Up seem destined to remain the poor man’s alternative.

There’s really no great intrigue behind the fact that Camera Obscura barely put a foot wrong over the course of the first thirteen years and four full-length records of their career. They figured out what they were good at, and then did it, in incredibly assured fashion. Their breakthrough, Underachievers Please Try Harder, was replete with the kind of witty lyricism and snappy melodies that the band have proven such consistently dab hands at, but it wasn’t until Let’s Get Out of This Country that those facets were paired with the genuinely lush instrumentation they deserved.

Their last recorded output, My Maudlin Career, was perhaps their most accomplished yet, but after wrapping an extensive world tour, they more or less fell off the map, with little more detail provided about their absence than the ‘personal problems’ singer Tracyanne Campbell alluded to in a recent interview. It was always going to be interesting to observe to what extent an apparently fraught period of conception had affected the sound of a group who have always seemed very confident, and very comfortable, in their own skin.

A mournful, orchestral intro ushers in Desire Lines; it’s a fairly far cry from the sass of their last two album openers, ‘French Navy’ in particular. The strings soon cede to ‘This Is Love (Feels Alright)’; Camera Obscura hardly seem like the most confrontational band  in the world, but it pretty much serves as a middle finger to anybody who had the gall to think they might have lost their touch after an extended period away; it’s a wonderfully tight pop song in the typical Obscura mould, but with an oh-so-slight feeling of desolation that suggests there’s genuine attempts underway to move in a new thematic direction.

The sadness that tinges the horns on that track, and the ghostly synths that run under it, embody the sense of instrumental melancholy that underscores the record. The plodding bass and yearning guitar on ‘New Year’s Resolution’ are perfectly matched to its wistful lyrical content, and the sweeping strings brought in on ‘Cri du Coeur’ accentuate the sentiment behind Campbell’s pining vocal;  ”I know, I know, I know, I’ll cry”.

The elasticity of Campbell’s talent behind the microphone has always been one of Camera Obscura’s most valuable tools, and on Desire Lines, she’s on masterful form, consistently pitching her emotions perfectly. On the record’s more upbeat moments – ‘Break It to You Gently’ and ‘Do It Again’ included – she’s positively chirpy, whilst ‘Fifth in Line to the Throne’ has her in more familiar, heartbroken territory. Barely-there backing contributions from Neko Case and Jim James of My Morning Jacket are left firmly in the shade by way of comparison; this is a band already in possession of the perfect vocal vehicle.

Tucker Martine was drafted in on production duty on this album – a decision which proved the major motivation for the band to relocate to Portland, Oregon to record – and he’s done a stellar job. His work with The Decemberists is testament to his versatility – he sat behind the desk on the ridiculously-overblown The Hazards of Love and its more reflective follow-up The King Is Dead - and he’s taken his cues from the latter on Desire Lines, managing to take a fairly broad instrumental palette and produce something that sounds restrained, controlled and precise, fitting perfectly with the band’s time-honoured modus operandi.

It took a few runs through this record for me to realise why I shouldn’t have been so surprised that there were no signs of the pressure of expectation; Camera Obscura have only ever made music for themselves. Desire Lines is another gorgeously-crafted pop record from a band that make them look easy; melody, harmony and sophistication are all present in abundance. Four years suddenly sounds like an awfully long time to have to wait for the next one.

Album Of The Week

What’s immediately obvious about Soft Will is how studied, pretty and personal it sounds. Hardly radical qualities for an indie rock record in 2013, but Smith Westerns are a band who delivered the line “Do you think is it normal / to go through life oh so formal?“ with all the withering snark you’d expect from a group who skipped college to put out two records of scrappy rock equally indebted to Nuggets as David Bowie. They’re the kind of band who couldn’t even deliver a sentiment as gentle and banal as “I wanna hold your hand / and make you understand” without punctuating it with archly ironic “woo-hoos!”, the aural equivalent of an eye-roll and weary sigh.

And yet half a minute into Soft Will Cullen Omori delivers this: “please keep close to me / I don’t wanna let you off my arm”. There’s no Beatles-quoting distancing or tongue-in-cheek subtext. Indeed the song itself, ’3am Spiritual’, is a notably different thing from what we’ve heard before: weightless, cloud-hopping, a million miles away from the reedy, scuzzy rock the band traded in before, but still really quite splendid. Even the wordless vocal hook – a soaring, festival-ready “whooooa yeah” – that accompanies it only adds to the serene, music-box pretty atmosphere, rather than archly deflating it.

Of course Smith Westerns are all of drinking age now; their normal-world friends have graduated from college, become young professionals, and in a sense Soft Will works on a similar sort of so-this-is-my-life analogue to all those (briefly) optimistic young adults. The album is populated by starry-eyed tracks that plop the band in as yet uncharted aesthetic territory that owes a debt to bands like Galaxie 500 and Beach House rather than Bowie and Bolan. Some of these expeditions don’t work, like ‘Only Natural’ and ‘Cheer Up’ – while some do, like ‘Idol’, with its gorgeous, jewel-encrusted guitar line and sparkling undertow, and ‘Glossed’, which features a ‘Hotel California’-style intro and driving rhythm section; more ambitious still, it even boasts its own track-long coda ‘XXIII’, which, most surprisingly of all on the record, sounds like early Pink Floyd, when they were doing movie soundtracks like Zabriskie Point and Obscured by Clouds – perhaps the last sound you would expect from Smith Westerns. More impressively, it sounds pretty good.

There’s a lot of grit and introspection on the record, too. Soft Will is littered with hippie-ish moans that reveal a nervy unwillingness to dive unreservedly into adulthood. On ‘Fool Proof’ Cullen murmurs, as if asking himself, with quiet desperation, “Have you lost control?” amidst a deceptively calm sea of soft, shimmering guitars. ‘White Oath’, a slow building, relatively straight-forward rock anthem and album highlight, details a kind of millennial anhedonia (“chain smoke my days away, wrote my poems / even though no one would ever read them”) and features the closest thing to that reedy, electric guitar snap that propelled tracks like ‘Weekend’.  Rather than the ecstatic, drunken fillip we’re used to, here it sounds like a beautifully mournful, blues-y collapse that temporarily halts the song’s cresting mantra (“I’m trying to catch my breath”).

In many ways Soft Will feels like the kind of album a band who’ve made a living off of coming-of-age screeds would make once they’d come of age. It’s contemplative, open, almost apologetic for the sometimes fratty band they used to be. And while some will miss that scrappy, grab-bag approach to genre that marked their first two records (dreamy melancholia isn’t quite a tone they can exploit for a whole album, as testified by the album’s end-of-record slump), that they’re no longer the the wunderkids salvaging shamelessly from the 60′s and 70′s, sticking disco percussion in their songs, or ripping off ‘Get It On’ vibes – on balance, a good thing. For all its faults, the heart and maturity at the centre of Soft Will feels more vital and important than their showy genre tourism ever did.

Enjoying their previous output has always required a bit of work on the listener’s part, but with Tomorrow’s Harvest, Boards of Canada take the idea of inaccessibility a step further.  The only hard copies of music from the duo’s first album since 2006’s Trans Canada Highway EP currently available came in the form of a cryptic advertising campaign involving numbers to decode and snippets of noise released on vinyl that, despite having a running time no longer than your average yawn, still fetched a barmy sum on eBay.

Even now, months later, any journalist wishing to critique the album is handed a link to an alternately named record by an act not listed as Boards of Canada, one that just happens to have tracks with identical lengths (though totally different names) to every number on Tomorrow’s Harvest.  I simply have to presume that the record I’m writing about is actually theirs, and not merely an elaborate decoy.

Though the brothers Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin clearly don’t want anyone who shouldn’t be hearing Tomorrow’s Harvest getting their ears around it even a second before they’re supposed to, that’s where claims of inaccessibility must stop being levelled at their return. Though protracted and far from conventional, it’s a thoroughly warm and welcoming listen that contains none of the pretentiousness so often fairly levelled at their contemporaries. Neither a huge leap forward nor a step back for the pair, it sounds decidedly humble for an album heralded with such fanfare; it’s as if they’re aware that when the dust settles, it’ll just be another BoC album – and another very good one at that.

Speaking of fanfare, anyone who’s been following the ridiculous drip feed of a campaign that’s announced this, their fourth LP to the world can be forgiven a laugh at the salute of trumpets that incongruously opens what is otherwise a deceptively calm record.  The initial few seconds of opener ‘Gemini’ are one surprise in an album that doesn’t provide too many; it’s heavy on ethereal haze and ghostly, pulsing rhythms, but few moments of jaw dropping wonder. ‘Gemini’ itself slides quickly from its abnormal opening seconds in to familiar Boards of Canada territory; gently throbbing pulses over a low, rumbling drone.

It’s not until two thirds of the way in to ‘Reach For The Dead’ (a track you’ll already be familiar with if you care about BoC’s return whatsoever) that the album gets its first “Oh hell yes” moment, arriving when a rhythm delivered by the crispest of percussion sounds – overwhelming my skull with the sheer attention to detail given to the sounds. Like much of the record, it’s hugely melodic without initially being particularly memorable, a technique that entices you back in for further, closer listens.  It’s also indicative of another of Tomorrow’s Harvest’s defining characteristics, that being placing the most tuneful, rhythmically exciting and expansive moments alongside pieces like ‘White Cyclosa’, sparse, meandering numbers that can seem more like interludes given their juxtaposition to such undeniable highlights.

If one were to skip to those highlights, you’d be making regular stops. The standout ‘Jacquard Causeway’, which sounds like riding a rusty bicycle through treacle, is the longest and best thing on the record; breaking the six and a half minute barrier despite not containing one bar of wasted music, you find yourself eager for it to continue even longer, so engrossing is its journey.

‘New Seeds’, the tune with the second longest running time, is similarly superb. One of the most rhythmically aggressive numbers here, it’s the star of a dazzling final run of more expansive efforts, arguably the type BoC still deliver better than any act who may have challenged for their crown in their seven year absence (even you, Gold Panda). ‘Palace Posy’, the hopping, jumping, skipping little number that sits at the album’s centre, is a playful masterstroke that sounds like a kids TV show sound tracked by Autechre, whilst its more fiendish but equally invigorating cousin ‘Sick Times’ flirts with filthy bass grooves and bastardised hip hop rhythms to place itself amidst the LP’s most startling moments.

Those aforementioned interludes however are overly plentiful, and in truth, underwhelming. It’s difficult to see what a minute and a half of a robotic voice reading out the numbers from one to ten over hazy synth sounds does for the record other than to break up something that was previously flowing gorgeously, and though the few minutes of ‘Transmisiones Ferox’ and ‘Uritual’ drift by in a way so inoffensive one can’t really pay much attention to them, by the time you reach ‘Sundown’ it’s impossible to view yet another such intermission as anything other than just some more very sad chords in a record that’s bursting with better ways of using very sad chords. What’s more, you get the impression any of their contemporaries could knock out something similar with little sweat – not something you could say about any of the record’s peaks.

Though very few of the songs themselves outstay their welcome, Tomorrow’s Harvest as a whole can feel overly long, and it’s the short songs that are the problem – they feel like unnecessary padding in a record whose triumphs should have been allowed to stand tall and proud by themselves. You’re advised to endure the less inspiring passages, for though numerous they are mercifully brief, and immerse yourself in the rather astonishing range of grander gems on display. Fear not – there are more than enough of them to justify how loopy everyone went at the mere thought of Boards of Canada’s return.

Chapel Club have shrugged off the shadowy malaise that permeated their moody debut in order to get their electro-pop dance on with their shimmering, adventurous follow-up, Good Together. The dramatic stylistic shift in tone and spirit doesn’t necessarily suit the band’s strengths, however, as the London quintet make a grand attempt at assimilating the sounds of artists as diverse as Animal Collective, Pulp, Hot Chip, and The Beach Boys, all under a glistening synth-disco sheen – and in the process lose that distinctive mercurial quality which made them unique to begin with.

It will only take an attentive listener a matter of seconds of the funky, textured opener, ‘Sleep Alone,’ to notice just how much Chapel Club have changed (or evolved, if you prefer). Layered samples wash buoyantly over a pulsing back-beat, while Lewis Bowman’s formerly tormented, lovelorn vocals now take on a swinging croon to accompany the track’s relentlessly upbeat churn. While it’s a bit of a shock to hear how significantly the band has shifted direction on their new record, ‘Sleep Alone’ still works, especially when compared to the sonic missteps that soon follow.

‘Sequins’ has a glittery pop polish that finds Chapel Club trying, unsuccessfully, to meld the modern East Coast inventiveness of Animal Collective with the classic California surf sounds of The Beach Boys. But rather than coming off as fresh and stylish, the song is plagued by creative ambivalence and ultimately comes off as wayward. Elsewhere, the keyboard-driven, spoken-word flutter of  ‘Shy’ sounds like a Cake B-side that went unheard for a reason.

Things get a bit better on the expansive, percussion-fueled ‘Jenny Baby,’ which finds the band really going beyond their sonic comfort zone – it’s as if they got a jump on things and decided to remix the track themselves while ditching the original version. But the song doesn’t go anywhere interesting over the course of its second half, and the six-minute track loses steam at the midpoint. At this juncture, Chapel Club have made it clear that they could take their sound anywhere, and sadly rather than building on the imaginative risks they took with ‘Jenny,’ they give us the two poppiest and punchless efforts on the album, ‘Wordy’ and ‘Scared,’  which both float by innocuously while not making much of a lasting impression (other than once again borrowing shamelessly from An Co and the Beach Boys).

‘Fruit Machine’ has a jaunty, disco-like rhythm, with a decided nod to Pulp during the chorus, but again isn’t compelling enough to be memorable for anything other than sounding so radically different from what Chapel Club has done in the past. Bowman’s vocals are pushed to the front of the mix for one of the only times on the album during the minimalist, synth-laden swing of ‘Good Together.’ But like the recent Justin Timberlake album, this ten-minute track gets bogged down by the needless weight of its own aimless excess, and drags on for far too long.

By the time ‘Force You’ rolls around, the band seem fresh out of ideas, trotting out a meandering psychedelic jam that strives for the grandeur of Pet Sounds but ends up sounding like a cast-aside Smile outtake. The electro-beat of ‘Just Kids’ perhaps serves as a subtle suggestion that Chapel Club are still a young band, and their mistakes should be forgiven, or at least be attributed to the follies of youth. Fair enough. And without question its refreshing to hear this group taking such chances with their sound and style rather than giving their fans a tepid retread of Palace.

But, as with any creative venture, there is an inherent risk involved, and while sticking to what got them here would have been the safer bet for Chapel Club, it still doesn’t mean that their new songs succeed just because they sound so different from what we’ve grown accustomed to from them. They were clearly influenced by the imaginative sonic direction and boundless experimental creativity of some high profile contemporary and iconic bands while writing and recording Good Together, but they ultimately failed to inject enough of themselves into their modernized sound and subsequently lost their own way in the process.

Tagged – with some justice – as “post punk” after the 2008 release of their debut album Beat Pyramid, a release that was of a marked creativity and originality for a pair of twentysomethings, These New Puritans had already made that piece of pigeonholing seem unfairly restrictive by the time of its 2010 follow up Hidden. Now, Field of Reeds succeeds in making even greater leaps – stylistically, in intent, in atmosphere and in sheer musical inventiveness – to such an extent that the band have reached a stage where their output has become beyond any kind of straightforward categorisation, or almost even any simple description.

Jack Barnett, one of the pair of twins (with brother George) who form the core of the band, describes this album, on the press release that accompanies it, in these terms: “The music speaks for itself more than any other we’ve done before. There isn’t much outside of it that informs it and there aren’t any soundbites to tell you what it is.”

He’s not wrong.

Of broadly neo-classical or avant-garde construction, this is not an album that yields very easily to the listener. It’s frequently frustrating, maddeningly opaque for most of its running length, full of jarring moments and sounds that could be described as “ugly” or certainly “graceless”. It’s also a work of quite astonishing complexity, depth and beauty, which might just mark out its creator as a genius.

So the casual listener is likely to take away an impression of Barnett’s deliberately, wilfully untuneful singing (sometimes delivering actual words, sometimes just a selection of peculiar vocalisations), slurred as on ‘Fragment Two’ and ‘The Light In Your Name’, deep and often inaudible, seemingly delivered for the singer’s own edification rather than for an audience.

The complex instrumentation – painstakingly scored and arranged by Barnett, although often sounding as if it has been improvised – again often presents a façade that seems impenetrable. Rhythms, repetitions, melodic patterns and the interplay between voices are all quite simply so far removed from the comforts of straightforward Western commercial rock/pop/indie/whatever musical styles that it sometimes seems that they have been deliberately constructed to exclude – or certainly not to allow for – any easy inclusion.

If you’re a dogged type, though, and persevere, you should at some point [with me, it took about 15+ listens] find areas of clarity starting to emerge. Fragments of melody begin to resonate: a haunting minor key segment in ‘V (Island Song)’, Portuguese singer Elisa Rodrigues’ vocal section, dramatic and impressive, on ‘Dream’, or the childlike delivery of the opening to ‘Spiral’. The crescendo of melody that closes the album on its title track. The rhythmic piano of ‘Fragment Two’. Snippets of lyric pervade your consciousness – ‘Fragment Two’’s “I swim to attrition”, ‘V (Island)’ with its intriguing dualities “Not the seeker, not the found”, “Not the suspect, not the victim” and “Not the questions, not the answers” or ‘Spiral’’s perhaps revealing/enlightening “I got nothing that I want to say”. These rewards feel hard-won, and as such begin to feel precious.

Frankly, though, I can’t deny that in all probability I would have given up on the album much sooner had I not committed to reviewing it. This is introverted, inward-looking and often quite exclusionary music that can feel, in its listening, like a battle is being waged on the listener by its creators. It’s a battle, though, that’s worth fighting. While it isn’t pretty, cute, comfortable or enlightening music, Field of Reeds is important, resonant, serious and very very clever.

When a band that had previously averaged a record every two years suddenly goes six years without a new one, it’s a pretty clear indication that things are running like anything but clockwork. We’ve heard nothing new from Queens of the Stone Age since Era Vulgaris back in 2007, although that’s certainly not to say that they’ve kept a low profile over six enormously tumultuous years.

Josh Homme formed Them Crooked Vultures with Dave Grohl and John Paul Jones, produced an Arctic Monkeys record, welcomed a second child into the world and ‘died’ on the operating table during complicated surgery. Long-time drummer Joey Castillo recently took his leave, whilst live member Natasha Shneider succumbed to cancer in 2008. Former bassist and now-guest contributor Nick Oliveri kept things relatively quiet by his own standards, with just the one drug-fuelled stand-off with a SWAT team. That the band actually managed to get anything done is in itself impressive, but frequent laps of the festival circuit and a tour revisiting their self-titled debut helped keep them prominent.

What Queens of the Stone Age really needed to do with …Like Clockwork was to tap back into the songwriting vein that produced the snappy, incisive likes of ‘The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret’ and ‘Feel Good Hit of the Summer’; Vulgaris was huge fun in places, but overwrought and ponderous in others, often failing to produce the kind of short, sharp shock that the band do so well. Opener ‘Keep Your Eyes Peeled’ isn’t hugely promising in that respect; the record trudges into life, Homme’s vocal acrobatics and intermittent, scratchy guitar pinned down by a sluggish, menacing bassline.

It’s surprising, then, to see it followed immediately by ‘I Sat by the Ocean’, which sounds like the Californian cousin of Blur‘s ‘Coffee and TV’; it’s not Queens at their heaviest, but certainly not far from their catchiest – it’s one of the poppiest songs they’ve ever written. Perhaps surprisingly, given the circumstances of the period of its inception, Clockwork is a wonderfully measured record; you perhaps couldn’t have blamed Homme if he’d wanted to get into the studio and rip through ten loud, intense rock songs, but his songwriting has turned out to prove far more restrained than anyone might’ve predicted. ‘The Vampyre of Time and Memory’ is, at its core, a piano ballad, and yet manages to make the climactic guitar solo fit neatly, whilst ‘I Appear Missing’ moves slowly, deliberately, from a simmering opening to  sprawling epic of a finish that suggest no loss of the sense of dramatic riffery that’s underscored past full-lengths.

Those looking for more typical rock fare are definitely catered for – it’s hardly surprising that ‘My God Is the Sun’ slotted seamlessly alongside older material during the band’s South American shows earlier this year, and ‘If I Had a Tail’ revisits their debut’s ‘Walkin’ on the Sidewalks’ – but the real excitement’s to be found in more experimental territory, irrespective of how successful said efforts turn out to be. The unlikely collaboration with Elton John on ‘Fairweather Friends’ provides a furious rocker that’s just the right side of gaudy, with frantic work from studio stand-in Dave Grohl proving he still has plenty to offer from behind the kit. ‘Smooth Sailing’ is an assured stab at stomping funk, although the meandering ‘Kalopsia’ serves as little more than an uneventful mid-album interlude.

Regardless of how established you are, it takes real nerve to return from six years away with a record as stylistically diverse as …Like Clockwork. It’s bound to throw the band’s fans, especially those with a particular hankering for the more straightforward likes of ‘No One Knows’ and ‘Go with the Flow’, but the self-assuredness that Homme so often projects onstage and in interviews has served him very well indeed; by having faith that his songwriting ability would stand up to being thrust into unchartered musical territory, he’s overseen the making of a tight album that has a cohesiveness that belies how open it is to new – and genuinely exciting – ideas.

The preppy pop sounds of Surfer Blood’s debut Astro Coast back in 2010, led by the hand to the dance by the monumentally addictive single ‘Swim’, were a sweet and cool refreshment. The endearing, fresh-faced Floridians seemed to be channelling The Beach Boys, bubblegum and the 50s-centric songwriting style of a pre-dickhead Rivers Cuomo in a time when such confections were a novelty.

Fun times indeed, and while that record had its dark, unusual lyrical aspects it was left to follow-up The Tarot EP to take a few musical risks via remix work from the likes of School of Seven Bells and Totally Sincere.

Returning here with their second full-length we find Surfer Blood as in love as they ever were with that beatpop, head-bobbing sunkissed rocknroll sound, but with singer John Paul Pitts now mining considerably more disturbing lyrical themes to create the vocal medicine which the musical spoonful of saccharine helps you swallow down.

Take ‘Weird Shapes’, in which abrasive new wave guitars give way to cute arpeggios and Pitts’ nasal waver cooing “The sun’s gonna come/Let it shine on someone else” and later the disarming coda “Secret charmer, pseudo harmer…squeamish voyeur, sick destroyer”. It’s a cool lil’ chugger with a twisted black heart.

Same goes for ‘Blair Witch’, where Tom Morgan’s chords chime over early R.E.M.-style interweaving vocals and hammering snare as Pitts croons “If I can’t taste and get my fill then no-one will” then “I need love” like a beach bum Morrissey in training. It’s a track with real pop chops, offsetting Pitts’ biting cynicism. This is a record of bitterness, of barely masked regret – in many ways perhaps viewable as their attempt to ‘do a Pinkerton’.

The savagery continues on the surreal, vaguely threatening ‘Needles & Pins’; thematically the most obtuse and challenging thing here (“10,000 angels in heaven above/ it sounds like the drop of a pin” being one of the more choice lines) – but the band are still surfing the same faux-50′s vibes as ever. Pleasant as these sounds are, when smoothed down even further by Gil Norton’s emphatically conservative production they do little more than carry the tunes along in fairly pedestrian fashion.

On big, addictive anthems like opener ‘Demon Dance’ and the stop-start of ‘Gravity’. it feels like these glowing gold chunks o’ pop have been the victims of a trade-off – exceedingly memorable melodies instead of vital, shambling musical fury. What, we can’t have both? Tracks that will get onside with you and stay in your head like the pleading balladry of ‘I Was Wrong’ or the luscious FM rock via Nik Heyward of ‘Squeezing Blood’ also fall foul of this lack of musical bite, yet remain memorable moments.

The best tune here, the Teenage Fanclub wail of ‘Slow Six’, is a song not of regret and bitterness but of revelling in one’s own sins. It contains perhaps the most well-realised line Pitts has written to date – “Now when I’m faced with temptation I move without hesitation / Wanting and acting are one fluid moment for me”. It also piles on the musical muscle, with the band allowed to finally let their instruments roar. Yet because of the timidity of the rest of the record, this now feels like a play of violence rather than a band really getting its musical fists bloody.

Closer ‘Prom Song’, anchored by it’s utterly miserable, faultlessly addictive chorus “I just can’t be bothered / I don’t wanna know…” brings this confusing, semi-satisfying piece to an end with a knowing nudge and a half-cocked grin.

The tunes are there, they’re tsunami big and surfer cool – the lyrics are there, bold, bleak and biting – but there’s been an oversight when it comes to stamping on the pedals, letting rip and allowing Surfer Blood to tear this material a new hole. It doesn’t happen often enough here, but you know that when it does in the future (fingers crossed) their hold will be as powerful as the beast from which this record takes its name.

Full Disclosure: I’ve been eagerly anticipating Settle since this duo’s debut single landed on my literal doormat. Two point five years ago ‘Offline Dexterity’ tickled soles and souls the world over, but now the two precocious (well, borderline, they’re 19 and 21) brothers from Reigate have a lot of hype to live up to.

This debut full-length is preceded by ‘Carnival/I Love….That You Know’, ‘Tenderly/Flow’ and more latterly a few of Settle‘s own big hitters.  But to its credit, in an age where cleverly orchestrated PR drip-feeds can inure people to the impact of a proper release, this album still feels like a natural maturation.

Over 14 tracks, Disclosure and friends (a dream-team ‘featuring’ list of the young and beautiful of the deep house/R ‘n B scene) insightfully build upon the kinetic electro that typified their early material.  Without a volte face - this is still the Disclosure you might know and love – those over-eager samples and manic hooks have now been replaced by a deeper disco sensibility.

Case in point: ‘White Noise (feat. AlunaGeorge) ‘, a dancefloor favourite that slots Aluna’s distinctive vocal tightly into the groove, messes around with them and spews it all back up amidst a wonderful flurry of percussive and playful synths.  Or ‘Stimulation’, on which the bass fizzes compulsively along under a stripped back, brilliant falsetto vocal loop.  Rest assured, there are plenty of as-yet unheard tracks that stand toe to toe with the aforementioned, although they never quite surpass them.

What I love about this record is its relatively unhurried nature, and the fact it sticks solidly to the game plan.  It’s the album promised by ‘Tenderly/Flow’ more than ‘Carnival’.  Excluding Doolittle and Aluna, not every vocalist brings their A-game, yet the quality of the brothers’ beats and build-ups means things never dip below the threshold required for this to be a great debut.

Settle is a soulful, accomplished and versatile record.  I’d have loved to have heard Jamie Woon‘s night-silk voice get a little more room to breathe, for Jessie Ware‘s guest spot to have really hit its sultry potential, or for perhaps one more emphatic, hook-laden hit in the vein of album closer ‘Help Me Lose My Mind (feat. London Grammar)’, but that would be asking for as perfect an album as I can imagine.  I’ll more than happily settle for less.

We revelled in the dusky haze of ‘The Throw’ and all its wooze-addled Madchester glory, and we threw our hands into the air for ‘Man I Need’, a tie-dyed psych-pop floorfiller. The Australian pairing of Jono Ma (Lost Valentinos/Foals) and Gabriel Winterfield (Ghostwood) has been causing a ’60s-laced electronic pop ruckus. It’s a distinct style that’s been maimed by psychedelia, pop and shoegaze; each one has left an indelible mark on their music. They are purveyors of rich textures and luscious, wriggly earworms. And, now we can get properly excited for the summer with the arrival of Jagwar Ma‘s debut long-player, Howlin. After tantalising us for months with a steady trickle of singles, we’re due something meaty to sink our ear-teeth into.

‘What Love’ welcomes you into the album. It’s a throbbing dance effort with soft womps of bass and 808 clicks, both married wonderfully to create a solid rhythm that stands above the sonic swamp of melody. Compared to other tracks we’ve heard from them, and considering its choppy, metronomic nature, ‘What Love’ sounds almost as if it’s a remix of itself. ‘Four’ is equally dancefloor-ready. The proto-house synths and screwed vocal samples hint at raves and neon lit cesspits. The beat is again focal, and it’s a far cry from the Beach Boys-infused guitar music or hazy synthpop we were expecting from the duo, but nonetheless, it’s just as psychedelic, and just as hypnotic.

It seems that Jagwar Ma are keen on a similar end goal for most of their tracks. They are obsessed with crafting music to dance to. Sometimes they venture into the jangly past, sometimes they look to the glitchy future and sometimes the dredge up acid house of the ’80s, but regardless of the journey, the results are always the same. This is dance music: it’s meant for parties, for clubs and for losing yourself in.

Aside from the obvious drum’n'bass relationship that’s designed to make you shake your jiggly bits, they utilise a fractal aspect where each spindle of noise is so coated in effects it doubles back on itself for eternity. They thread lyrics between synths and guitars and other lyrics, much like The Naked & Famous do on tracks like ‘Sun’. They create an entrancing atmosphere on Howlin with an abundance of mesmerising tricks and narcotic motifs.

Though there’s a heap of unexpected surprises, there are some things we saw coming. ‘That Loneliness’ is similar to early single ‘Come Save Me’ – it retains an opiate atmosphere, but feels more like basic guitar-pop than the brain-melting sounds found on the rest of the album. It’s gleefully optimistic in tone, with funk riffs and sun-kissed bass, but the lyrics insinuate a far different meaning: “A lonely heart that’s beating twice as loud/ I’m guessing you don’t really remember so what’s the use.”

Jagwar Ma have many tour dates lined up over the summer, including stints at a number of festivals. This sort of summer-drenched music will go down a treat – when they’re not sculpting rave-inspired house music, they’re reeling of pop charmers – and those who catch their sets will witness something special for sure. Howlin is the kind of record designed for the live setting, as it’s just impossible to have the kind of party you’d need to fully appreciate it alone in your bedroom (unless you have a really big bedroom). It’s designed for the outdoors, for huge crowds and for losing your mind to. There are few artists that have perfected the kind of engrossing and engaging dance delights that Jono and Gabriel are demonstrating here.

“The cheesiest songs all end with a smile,” announces Devon Welsh, his voice caked in weariness and defeat. There’s a pause, while piano chords hang heavy with sorrow; tolling bells ringing calamitous portents of doom. “This won’t end with a smile, my love.”

Majical Cloudz don’t really do ‘cheery’.

The electronic artist as confessional singer-songwriter is hardly a new phenomenon – The Postal Service nailed it with emo-disco classic ‘Give Up’ in 2003 – but it’s rarely been achieved with such starkness as on Impersonator, Majical Cloudz’ Matador debut. Rather than dousing his music with washes of bleeps, beats or ambient whiteout, Welsh strips back layers and leaves everything bare, with silence duly employed as textural device.

“I’m a liar – I say I make music,” he claims in the opening title track, but he’s fooling no-one. The song ebbs and flows on a low tide of reverberating vocal loops and tenderly-stroked cellos, deployed subtly and beautifully. A fair comparison might be the first Bon Iver record, which flowed so easily because of its amplified sparsity. But while Justin Vernon channels his woes through a soft falsetto, the voice in question is a powerful, velvet-smooth croon – admittedly one which rarely changes gear across an album that’s already one-paced, but is still capable of imbuing every line with quiet pathos. It’s an addictive treasure.

It’s not instantly easy to warm to though – not least because the mood of the record rarely changes from one of beaten-down anguish. ‘This Is Magic’ sees hushed organs cushioning nightmare-shocked lines like, “I see monsters standing over my crib / And they fall in”. Meanwhile, the unravelling of a relationship becomes slowly apparent on ‘I Do Sing For You’, with the sense of loss growing deeper as the song goes on. “I’m on stage for you / I do sing for you / Of course I do / And I love to,” sings Welsh, returning to one of the album’s recurrent motifs of performance and artistry. It seems to pose the question of whether his songwriting is fuelled by despair, or whether the songs themselves expand that emotion until it’s all he can feel. Needless to say, no answer is forthcoming, but you’ll want to keep listening just in case inspiration suddenly strikes.

There’s a moderately-amusing moment when the “me, me, me” chorus to ‘Childhood’s End’ gets an unintentional vowel-strangling (“…it’s weighing down on me, may, moy,” says Dev inexplicably). That aside, it’s a straight-laced collection of ultra-miserabilist, empathetic pop. Tempting as it may be to label it ‘electronica’, bearing in mind the dominant instrumentation and techniques, it seems more likely to appeal to fans of guitar-wielding sensitive types than those stroking chins to Oneohtrix Point Never, or cutting some rug along with The Chromatics.

Still, tedious genre classification aside, it’s a fascinating record that begs softly for closer inspection and possibly even adoration. These songs may not announce themselves with cheer or bombast, or even pull you by the hips to the dancefloor, but they sure as hell linger in the memory.

Multi-instrumentalist and prime CSS composer Adriano Cintra recently unceremoniously cut ties with the band, citing the fact that fame had gone to the rest of the their heads and the fact they couldn’t play their instruments properly as a reason: Harsh words from the outgoing creative force. Cansei De Ser Sexy (reportedly a Beyoncé quote that translates to: “Tired of being sexy,”) – aren’t mourning the loss of Cintra though, his parting words have had little effect. There’s a definite, clear change in direction on their fourth LP but it doesn’t seem to be of any detriment. The now-foursome are excavating new territories in their sound, and eschew the gimmicky neon ADHD-ness and nu-rave/funktronica of previous offerings, instead opting for subtler tropical electronics and lithe filth-pop.

Produced by Mr. Golden Fingers himself, Dave Sitek, Planta nurtures a deeper sound. The bratty sleaze and facetious lyrics are long gone, and now the Brazilian femme fatales exhibit a serious streak in their synthpop. Gone are the jagged coquettish chirrups, CSS now harness the power of adult electronica. It’s a far more laidback record, even through the elements of sincerity, as everything seems to adhere to a newfound fluidity rather than exploding like a glitter-filled piñata – any sawing synthesiser riffs have rounded edges and the guitar licks are sanded down. But that’s not to say they’ve lost their appeal. Perhaps the edge has vanished, but like many bands do a decade into their career – they’re maturing. It’s a shame it took Cintra’s departure to galvanise them into donning growed-up masks, but at least they now own a sound that they won’t cringe at as the hurtle towards/past the big 3-0.

Lead single ‘Hangover’ is accompanied by Mariachi brass stabs and South American rhythms, a bit like the current (fantastic) Doritos advert. It’s a swirling psych-rock cut, the guitars submerged beneath layers of effects and synthetic keys as lead vocalist Lovefoxxx caterwauls discordantly “Let’s get happy drinking Bloody Marys/ I don’t wanna be your sour cherry.” The track is a flimsy metaphor for a breakup, but as far as electro-pop goes, it’s strong. ‘Dynamite’ is similarly bombastic fare, and one of the only moments that gazes to the past. Enormous chugging bass and waspish flutterings of synth mingle with Lovefoxxx’s vocal detritus (there’s lots of ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’).

Largely though, this is a pretty chilled record. ‘The Hangout’ is all glistening synths and off-beat ’60s guitars – it’s almost twee in nature: “I’d like to know… is there any chance you’d take me for a dance?” ‘Honey’ is the antithesis of early CSS – it’s reflective, thorough and the kind of synth-rock that soundtracks comedowns and wasted midnight wanders. Also, Lovefoxxx appears to be attempting to channel Bob Dylan‘s signature drawl at times. ‘Into The Sun’ is a giant pop belter. Although the verses seem to be remnants of the Cintra administration, the chorus is a washed-out, sun-bleached anthem for cruising in the summer heat.

The sound they won hearts with was impressive. The apathetic urgency of ‘City Grrrl’ is still flawless. As every act must do to stay relevant, CSS have evolved. They’ve shed the skin of before during the process of Planta, and though it harbours a ‘day after the night before’ sentiment, there’s a strong cathartic strand too – this album is as much about personal revolution for the band as it is about exotic pop charmers. They’ve used the time to come to terms with the loss of Cintra and create a sonic identity beyond his input, and it turns out that they didn’t really need him, and, just maybe, he was stalling their progress.

Tricky has found himself in a rather tenuous position as an artist for quite a while now. After bursting onto the music scene in the early days of Massive Attack, and releasing his seminal solo albums Maxinquaye and Pre-Millennium Tension, expectations have always been high for the downtempo Bristol musician. Though with each successive underwhelming effort throughout the late 90′s-early 00′s, fans have routinely turned their collective backs on the trip-hop alchemist, while still holding out for a late-period return to form. So, while the hype surrounding each new Tricky album continues to fade, he’s still faced with those persistent, nagging comparisons to who he was and what he sounded like nearly twenty years ago.

That creative frustration and self-assured confidence burns at the heart of Tricky’s 10th studio album, False Idols, as he tries to put to bed those tiresome artistic parallels while still enhancing and redefining his signature sound. But ultimately, Tricky isn’t concerned with critics and their oft-repeated calls of a career comeback, for in his mind he’s never left nor slipped at all since he first hit the scene — a point he makes abundantly clear on one of the hypnotic standouts of False Idols, the defiantly assertive ‘Nothing’s Changed.’ Tricky’s astute choices for chanteuses this time out are Francesca Belmonte, Nneka, and Fifi Rong, who all lend their dulcet, sultry vocals to nearly all of the best moments on the record, giving these songs a poised, impassioned female perspective that elegantly balances out Tricky’s menacing street leanings.

Of course, with any Tricky album, it’s the haunting, beat-driven atmospherics that ultimately make the songs memorable (or not), and throughout this new record the textured dynamics of these songs pulse with a clean, modern inventiveness, while also echoing the moody tones of his best work. These tension-filled songs are all artfully restrained, while also being vibrantly expressive, crafted to be played in clubs that didn’t exist when Nearly God dropped, while also reminding these insular modern club kids where some of their current hit-makers got their sound from.

After opening the album with a track built around a line borrowed from Patti Smith, “Jesus died for someone’s sins, but not mine,” the rest of the record burns with that subversive attitude, which permeates all of these charged, inspired songs. ‘Nothing Matters’ is a dancefloor jam for the seditious set, while ‘Bonnie & Clyde’ is the stylish getaway song for contemporary cyber criminals.

‘Parenthesis,’ which samples the vocals of the Antlers‘ Peter Silberman and audaciously reworks their song of the same name, is simply as sinister and banging as anything Tricky has done in years, suggesting confidently that there hasn’t been a break in the long story of his career nor any need for any added afterthoughts or appendages to demarcate his creative output.

The rhythmic, soulful ‘Valentine’ lifts a familiar Chet Baker riff, but constructs a wistful tale of loneliness around it, giving it an urban edge that entirely transforms the warm sentiments of the original. But it’s the effervescent pulse of ‘Nothing’s Changed,’ which forms the boastful centerpiece of the record, whether you get drawn in by Belmonte singing tenderly about a relationship or Tricky making an unruffled statement about his career — either way, it works, and gives the second half of the record an unbridled spirit to build off of.

After Rong provides a plaintive, stirring look back on ‘If Only I Knew,’ a funky Prince-like guitar riff launches the dynamic swing of ‘Is That Your Life,’ another wistful, wise reflection on some poor choices that the subject thankfully learned to outgrow. The engrossing churn of ‘Tribal Drums’ simply soars, with its percipient warning of ‘Evil come and evil go’ ringing true to these modern times, especially for the people mentioned in the song who chose to stay home and watch TV for their entertainment. There’s no safety to be found there, Tricky is cautioning.

‘We Don’t Die’ is a saturnine song for the survivors, artistic or otherwise, who find their way through any of life’s darker moments. But that moving track is followed by the albums glaring misstep, the unabashedly twee ‘Chinese Interlude,’ with Tricky perhaps trying to tap into Serge Gainsbourg’s sensual French excursions with Jane Birkin and Brigitte Bardot (who also famously recorded a song called ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ together). But it never approaches that type of originality, and just ends up serving as a meaningless diversion on an otherwise stellar album.

The record snaps back to life with the ominous, grungy bass line that courses at the heart of ‘Does It,’ which calls to action all those who are idly watching the world deteriorate right outside their doors, but chose to do nothing about it, with a “swift decline” awaiting all of us as a reward/punishment for our collective inaction. Tricky takes over lead vocals for the final three mercurial songs on the album, with ‘I’m Ready’ echoing the temperamental cadence of ‘Overcome’ (and ‘Karmacoma’), and the beat of ‘Hey Love’ is reminiscent of Burial’s London-at-night sound, with Tricky singing about intimacy over the top (it doesn’t quite work, sadly). But False Idols ends with the grand, rightfully egotistic musical statement ‘Passion Of The Christ,’ which finds Tricky not only brazenly standing up to his imposing musical shadow at long last, but trying his damndest to finally tower over it once and for all.

It was fitting that Jon Hopkins made his first major imprint on the national consciousness alongside Kenny Anderson. For a while their back catalogues are sonically disparate, the pair mirroring one another in other, striking ways.

Anderson, mostly under his nom de plume King Creosote, has dozens of solo albums. And while Hopkins’ oeuvre may be less vast, he’s spent the last few years project hopping – from production desk to recording studio, laying down a host of exemplary remixes along the way. Both employ a rigidly DIY approach: KC through the Fife-based Fence Records he runs with Johnny Lynch (aka Pictish Trail) and Hopkins with his enormous collection of field recordings which were used on Diamond Mine to such stunning effect. Neither man seems to bothered about pleasing anybody but himself either, as evidenced by Anderson’s idiosyncratic, nomadic recording existence and by Hopkins’ chameleonic approach from project to project.

Which brings us to Immunity: the outstanding fourth solo album from Jon Hopkins and a huge departure from anything he’s done before. The last we heard of him, Hopkins deconstructed Luke Abbot’s ‘Modern Driveway’, one of the finest electronic tracks of 2012, and remoulded it as a solo piano piece. And following the successes of his collaborations with Anderson and Brian Eno, he could have easily continued along the same ambient path to few complaints. On Immunity, though, he takes for the opposite tack. The album is the most dancefloor-friendly Hopkins has produced to date. Whereas the excellent Monsters OST, released in 2010, hinted at a more aggressive tonality to anything we’d previously heard, it stopped short of cavorting with balls to the wall techno – which is the dominant theme here.

The menacingly industrial opening track ‘We Disappear’ – all synthetic grind and mechanical beeps – segues wonderfully into the pulsating ‘Open Eye Signal’ (I defy you to stay in your seat) to set the tone. The pair showcase Hopkins’ ability to dabble deftly with dark, chilling atmospherics, but – as he’s shown so often – rarely does he turn up anything other than beauty.

Just as he brought a modicum of order to Anderson’s sprawling, meandering folkiness, Immunity hammers home the notion that few know how to stitch an LP together as well as Hopkins. After the breathlessness of the opening one-two, comes the expansive, ethereal ‘Breathe This Air’. After the cumulative beast of a centrepiece ‘Collider’, comes the gorgeous, piano-led ‘Abandon Window’ – perhaps the most orthodox Hopkins track on the album.

The record is an absolute trip: a movable feast pressed to 12 inches of microgroove. At times, it will have you lurching for the nearest patch of danceable floor; at others, your head will be thrust back, eyes closed in bliss; while the finishing title track, with King Creosote on vocals, is the reluctant, melancholic, but acceptant dying embers. This summer – if we ever get one – deserves to be soundtracked by this, one of the most enjoyable, well-crafted albums of the year.

Album Of The Week

Throughout each song on Small Black‘s elegant new album, Limits Of Desire, there exists duelling themes of both an endless search for meaningful partnership, as well as a question of whether that blissful union is even possible in this disconnected, distant age of ours. The striking, symbolic album art epitomizes that unsteady partiality, showing that intimacy is achievable to those who work for it, but only to a certain extent, and exposing that vulnerable side of ourselves always comes with risks and hidden peril.

And while that might be a lot of charged significance to place on a batch of shimmering synth-pop tunes, the Brooklyn quartet invites that type of depth and meaning to be found within their sonic excursions, for they are searching for answers themselves throughout these pleading and poignant numbers.

While the group have moved beyond the moody, dense texture of their stirring debut, New Chain, in favour of a glossy, more up-tempo sound, they still maintain the enthralling pulse that caught the attention of indie club kids back in 2010. The current music climate has been over-saturated with lo-fi bedroom chillwave projects in the subsequent years, which perhaps explains the band’s desire to give their current sound a more expansive, lush production; proving they’ve outgrown their humble Long Island beach-house attic origins. And by pushing Josh Kolenik’s vocals further up in the mix, the songs tell more of a narrative of discovery than their hazy, ambiguous earlier material.

The dynamic sense of promise and possibility that courses through the album’s opening track (and lead single) ‘Free At Dawn,’ suggests that this record could be the perfect soundtrack to the late night tales that unfold after you leave the club alone. But really, this gorgeous, soaring number is perfect for any occasion, and starts the record in a triumphant fashion. But the restless spirit that permeates the album also indicates that the solitary excursions of ‘Free At Dawn’ aren’t enough for the protagonists of these songs (or for us listeners as well). The subject of ‘Canoe’ might be “caught between two shores,” but they have the means to get somewhere better than where they are at, and this record is about that intrepid journey and the inevitable discovery that results from taking that leap of faith.

Echoes of M83‘s soaring, pulsating synths colour the ebullient corners of Limits Of Desire, with ‘Canoe,’ ‘No Stranger,’ ‘Breathless,’ and ‘Proper Spirit’ all crafting an inventive updated pastiche to the celebrated French outfit. But while the songs ultimately manage to churn with their own distinctive energy and originality, they occasionally fail to stand out from one another all that much. The tracks wind up forming a different part of the same summer breeze – one that passes by rather innocuously, so that only the feelings are remembered, not the moments themselves.

The fragile dichotomy of passion suggested by the album art is apparent on tenuous love songs like ‘Sophie’ (which is strongly reminiscent of ‘Love My Way’) and ‘Only A Shadow,’ where the objects of affection certainly aren’t what they seem, if they are even there at all. These diaphanous songs illuminate how we often create these ideals in our own minds, then set off on an impossible quest to find these illusory paragons who don’t actually exist, leaving us frustrated, disappointed and ultimately alone, left to face the ills of society on our own.

The album reaches a grand conclusion with the optimistic yearning of the title-track, followed immediately by the doleful tones of ‘Shook Loves,’ which only proves how quickly something good can go so wrong, and how our hearts can be broken far too easily. The vibrant, rhythmic closing number, ‘Outskirts,’ shows just how far the band have taken us over the course of the album, but also gives us a tear-stained map on how to get back to the city – where we must start over again along with the shiny potential ushered in by a new morning, and follow where our hearts lead us from there.

Even ten years into their career it’s difficult to believe that CocoRosie exist. They’re the kind of band that seem imagined: A gothic fairy tale of twilight imagery and aural eclecticism residing a step outside of the norm, indifferent to trends, fashions and fickle opinion. Two sisters, living in Paris by way of Iowa and Hawaii, New York and Native American vision quests, one an opera singer and the other an artist – their music a childlike but deeply shadowed collage of beats and glitches, of ivory and experiment, the organic and the electronic commingling beneath two of the strangest, most incongruous and most captivating voices on record.

Individually they’d be remarkable but together, with their dichotomous collision of rasped nursery-rhyme half-raps and octave-defying vocal operatics, Bianca and Sierra Casady are fascinating, albeit polarising artists. Google searches return at least as much vitriol as praise, with whole articles from established outlets entitled Why Do People Hate CocoRosie? One, An Examination in Six Parts, opens “CocoRosie are divisive, if not flat-out widely disliked.”

To some degree that’s a response to their aesthetic, to those irritating song titles with their irritating spellings, those terrible album covers and the wretched false moustaches. 2010’s Grey Oceans exhibited the worst design choices of any object yet made by man, a painful mesh of bootleg fonts and self-consciously wacky adornment so cringeworthy that I had to hide the inlay behind a pencil drawing that I made myself. Some nights I awake, shivering and slightly fevered at its proximity and mere existence. But their music? Their music’s never been an issue. Unconventional, certainly, and challenging, maybe, but always interesting, even when it isn’t particularly likeable or entertaining. Perhaps especially then.

Tales of a GrassWidow is unlikely to shift any of those perceptions, whichever side of the argument you sit on. The artwork might be a considerable improvement but the eleven tracks show little shift in the sisters’ sound, which remains as beguiling – or as infuriating – as ever. Its strongest moments are frontloaded, opener ‘After The Afterlife’ a sweetly melancholic assembly of slight piano and pacey synths, Sierra Casady’s introductory vocal refrain a literal welcome to their world. ‘Tears For Animals’ reworks last year’s single, trading the Z for a more downbeat rendering that pushes Sierra to the edges and brings Antony Hegarty more to the fore.

He’s very much a presence on the album, providing vocals to three songs and an influence throughout – in itself no bad thing as Antony’s voice is always striking, and even more so when juxtaposed with those of the Casady sisters, but he does draw the focus away from Sierra and arguably eclipses her overall. With the exception of ‘Tears…’ his songs are some of the weaker ones, too, part of the back end of Tales… that starts to drag round about Track 9, everything after the beautifully understated ‘Far Away’ passing by with barely a synapse fired. They’re pretty, yes, but decidedly empty, drawn-out and insubstantial and – the unfocused clatter of the ‘hidden’ bonus track notwithstanding – somewhat soporific.

But that’s just the end. In the main Tales of a GrassWidow is an invigorating listen, a patchwork of shifting moods and genres from the hypnotic grind of ‘Child Bride’ to the belligerent hip-hop of ‘End of Time’, the half-heard whispers and Indian flute of ‘Broken Chariot’ and the ebbing fade of ‘Gravedigress’. Sure, it’s not likely to win over CocoRosie’s naysayers, but why would the Casadys care about them: their world’s far more compelling than the one most of us live in, however imperfect this latest glimpse might be.

While Daft Punk triumphantly return with supposedly the “boldest, smartest, most pleasurable dance album of the century” and as the hugely superfluous term ‘EDM’ seeps further and further into popular usage, it seems that now may well be as good a time as any to begin question the current state and dissemination of ‘Dance music’.

Over the past 10 years we have seen the proliferation of a once underground scene into the mainstream, more often than not to be watered down and made palatable to a marketing teams idea of “the masses”. Dubstep is of course the most notable example and one that has been treaded so many times I will avoid dredging up, but it feels that this once underground culture, like Punk and Rock and Roll before it, has finally had it’s watershed moment. Now, well beyond the point of crossover, one of the groups that ushered in this new wave release their second album Cold Spring Fault Less Youth. Moving over to electronic goliath Warp, the group are poised to seal their reputation as a defining act of contemporary electronic music.

Album opener ‘Home Recording’ holds no major surprises and certainly none of the reinvention promised by the duo and the ubiquitous Joy Oribsion synths continue into the second track (the first of two appearances from once voice-du-jour King Krule) lending the album worryingly familiar sonic palette. But then by track 3, the duo have re-found the kaleidoscopic beauty that was once their hallmark. Space, atmosphere and anticipation all build and through excellent use of restraint (not one sign of a drop), the track blossoms into something wonderful and unexpected. The influence of Flying Lotus is immediately apparent, but never feels intrusive.

From this point onwards the album unfurls in a dangerous, psychotropic landscape. The synths on tracks such as ‘Lie Near’ swell to the point of bursting, the drum beat on ‘Blood and Form’ marches on relentlessly, pneumatically and the live instrumentation present throughout fleshes out a sound unreachable by their contemporaries, still stuck behind laptops. Instrumental track ‘So Many Times, So Many Ways’ serves as a beautiful centrepiece to the album, subtle but with enough darkness to maintain the unsettling ambience contained in the rest of the album. There are tracks that sometimes feel devoid of anything to really separate themselves from the album as a whole, but it is more that the album feels cohesive, making it easy to listen to from start to finish. The 11 tracks are ordered perfectly and sit together remarkably well.

This album certainly is full of accomplishment and some truly stand-out tracks. Whilst it does feels devoid of any of the supposed reinvention promised by the duo (anyone vaguely familiar with labels such as Brain-Feeder, R&S, Hessle or Mille Plateaux will instantly be able to recognise the various strains of influence at work here), it is the aptitude with which the two marry, at times very disparate, sources of inspiration that impresses. From a group that helped to lay out the blueprint for the nebulous scene that was post-dubstep 4 years ago, it’s fair to say I was perhaps expecting something more revolutionary. But at a time when dance and electronic becomes increasingly homogenised by the mainstream, Mount Kimbie have released an album that still refuses to court the mundane.

The 1980s is a decade which most remember as tied up with the monstrous Thatcher-Reagan office, decadent electro, rampant consumerism and unfortunate hairstyles. An actual handful of people will remember it for C86: The sub-genre born from indie to become guitar music’s wimpier, NHS bespectacled sibling. Emblematic of this movement were The Pastels, a Glaswegian ensemble led by Stephen McRobbie with a neat line in sweetly wry jangle pop. Returning 31 years after forming with their fifth full length release, it’s clear they are ready to slot back into their cosy niche.

Slow Summits is an album where even the title is smattered with self deprecation, reflecting a band who never appeared to be in a rush to reach the lofty heights of fame and success afforded to their indie counterparts but certainly awarded ample recognition in the circles they quietly move in. Here is a body of work that quietly illustrates- rather than shouts about- why that is. It’s in the soft, effortless vocals of Katrina Mitchell on ‘Secret Music’, a tale of unspoken affection. It can be felt in the curious nostalgia weaved through the strings and lilting harmonies of ‘After Image’. It is poignantly evident in the all out romance of ‘Kicking Leaves’ and the adoring memory “There’s a drawing of you with your eyelashes black on your cheek/You’re asleep” and is even found in the playful bounce of single ‘Check My Heart’. It’s not cinematic or grandiose but it’s much more real than that and therefore much more interesting – the soundtrack to a glorious mess of a life, not a movie.

Slow Summits is, forgive the clumsiness, a very British album, bound up in earthly passions and waxing lyrical in unmistakable Scottish tongue about the beauty of seemingly banal reality and the value in the anti-ostentatious. They may have been around long enough to develop an easy cynicism but they haven’t lost their wide eyed affection, dry twist on a phrase or their love affair with lo fi. At nine songs it is a slight but irrefutably charming record, full of deconstructed pop to absolutely dote on, as has always been their speciality. Though it has been sixteen years since their last studio album, not much is technically new here except a further tendency towards the mellow and ongoing hopeless romanticism.

The Pastels possess a hushed and humble kind of gorgeousness, they’ll forever be just on the outside of the hipster zeitgeist and that’s just fine, because who do they need to impress? Never household names, nor major festival headliners, The Pastels are The Pastels and have already claimed the fans they’re going to. They’re a band’s band loved by everyone from Sonic Youth to Kurt Cobain to your forever inward, blushing, 30-something neighbour, trapped in the spirit of awkward adolescence with a vice-like grip on his Creation Records collection.

Back on their 1997 album Illumination, Stephen McRobbie sang “I’ve been thinking
we never had much luck”. Whether or not he’s referring to their status as perpetual favourites of an exclusively cult crowd, we’re not sure. Well, it’s not like it’s about to change but judging by Slow Summits, we’re sure if it did, it wouldn’t make for half as graceful a climb.

With the shoal of boy-girl indie pop duos swarming in the wake of the White Stripes over the last 10 years, quality has predictably varied from the sublime (Summer Camp) to the shocking (The Ting Tings – may we never forget our folly).London-based Big Deal, made up of Alice Costelloe and Kacey Underwood, carved out their own space in that niche field with 2011 debut Lights Out, a low-tech set of lovelorn melodies and grunge riffs that were refreshingly rough around the edges.

The lack of drums lent its tracks an appealing amateurishness, as if the listener were hearing them for the first time through the walls of the upstairs bedroom. The album’s atmosphere was lifted by singer Costelloe’s swooning lyrics and grunge-Lolita persona – equal parts naïve ingénue and precocious seductress, delivered in a sultry series of heartsick croons and sighs.

The relative speed with which Costelloe and Underwood have produced their follow-up, June Gloom, suggests there’s been no real effort to polish up the scuzziness that formed the core of Lights Out’s pleasure centre. And that turns out to be the case; June Gloom’s riffs thrum and thrash with that familiar home-made aesthetic that recalls vintage Nirvana and Dinosaur Jr.

Big Deal’s big change this time around is the addition of drums and bass – and they enter the fray in a big way. Opener ‘Golden Light’ begins with a delicate interplay of vocals and guitar washes that could have been ripped straight out of Lights Out, but this is quickly revealed as something of a playful fake-out when a full rhythm section comes clattering into play a couple of minutes in. From then on, rowdy percussion is pretty much the order of the day, as thunderously expressed on rose-tinted slacker anthem ‘Dream Machine’ and the riotous stomp of ‘Teradactol’.

Costelloe and Underwood might have clamped some steel on to their sound, but the vibe of all-consuming romantic nostalgia, led by Costelloe’s butter-wouldn’t-melt vocals, remains undisturbed. The duo confidently reaffirm their sensitive touch when exploring the kind of sweaty-palmed yearning that never really goes out of fashion. ‘In Your Car’ crashes around with abandon, but its lyrics nail the total surrender of young love in its early stages – the construction of a world for two that acts as a salve for all the other apathies of teenage life. “Driving in your car,” Costelloe chants, “I want to be wherever you are”.

As before, Underwood’s somewhat bland voice works best as a support and counterpoint to Costelloe’s, as on ‘Pillow’, which finds two lovers haunting each other with their own inadequacies. The track’s louche, sinuous central riff, which wouldn’t be out of place on a Nick Cave or Mark Lanegan record, also flags up an enticing new avenue for the pair to broaden their approach in the future.

The introduction of a rhythm section must have been a tough decision for Big Deal in the early stages of June Gloom’s conception. After all, transforming their songs from the fragile sketches of Lights Out to the punchy compositions of its successor flirts dangerously with mundane rock ‘n’ roll convention. But in Costelloe and Underwood’s increasingly capable hands, June Gloom preserves Big Deal’s essential qualities while injecting new muscle into their lovelorn tales.

This is perhaps best embodied in the album’s final tracks ‘Close Your Eyes’, a relationship post-mortem that builds from intimate confessional to chest-thumping resolution with rare grace. It’s a song Rivers Cuomo would have been proud to write, and represents the culmination of the duo’s work to date. Who knows where Big Deal’s troubled teen flings are headed in the future, but for now, June Gloom marks another confident step forward in the band’s quest to live up to their name in the indie-rock landscape.

The time has come for Danish post-pop quartet When Saints Go Machine to release their much-anticipated third long-player. Infinity Pool is a highly synthetic effort that sees the band fall further into the rabbit hole of electronica. Almost every strand of sound has a sci-fi twang to it – from the manufactured beats to the robotic tenor of Nikolaj Manuel Vonsild. Where previous cuts like ‘Kelly’ were slathered in radio earworms for easy access, this fresh venture sees them favour the avante-garde, delving into experimental pastures rather than a comfort zone – there are still moments of pop grandeur, but not the kind that Grimmy would play.

They’ve inseminated their brooding, seedy noises with distant genres like ’90s house, trance and hip-hop (just listen to the Killer Mike collaboration, ‘Love And Respect’), creating the kind of genre that would get played in abandoned warehouses on the outskirts of London or strobe-lit basements in NYC. It’s a languid rave, everything pulsing and throbbing exactly at the right moment, but never fast enough to cut shapes to. It’s not for glowsticks. Infinity Pool also nurtures a psychedelic facet, a dimension of the music that’s distorted and woozy, riddled with technicolour hallucinations and dilated time, where concepts of space become a rainbow reality.

‘Infinity Killer’ features Vonsild’s R&B vocals up front, a common motif on the record. There are similarities to The Child Of Lov, but where Lov veers towards Southern rap/soul, WSGM sprint towards dance music, and the rhythmic pitter-patter of house. Their sound isn’t identical by any means, but their methods are alike – they’ve both dissected worn styles and screwed them back together in a unique way. ‘Iodine’ is another example, bringing shuffling hip-hop percussion together with the sacresanct screech of organs and strings to create a sort of urban hymn, like a ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ for the Age Of Information.

For all the pop pomp, the LP seems like it embodies the aftermath of a global disaster – there’s stages of unrelenting destruction, moments of isolated clarity and parts where the dust has settled and you can look to the future – in that respect, it’s highly cathartic. There’s a traumatic undercurrent throughout, but even in the darkest corners there’s an element of hope and determination, ensuring that the record doesn’t descend into a dark pit of despair. Infinity Pool is the kind of album that you’d listen to in the eye of a storm; as chaos rages around, you can experience a desolate calm.

‘Mental Shopping Spree’ whips and darts in erratic directions, with polyrhythms dancing in the background and a focal strain of dubstep-infused sound. They tactfully avoid becoming a Skrillex knock-off by merely using the dramatic fizz, rather than migraine wobs. ‘Degeneration’ is also bass-heavy, though far more malnourished in terms of texture – most of the time it’s just one whirring synth and Vonsild’s affected vocals.

Infinity Pool is ridiculously ambitious, but fortunately the gamble pays off. It’s not an album that will leap out and grab your lapels demanding attention, it’s one that’s quite content inside itself, one that will require you to listen closely and tease out the genius. On the surface it’s pretty alienating, perhaps fans won’t agree with the direction they’re taking, but in the long-run When Saints Go Machine will reap the rewards. They prove here that they are masters of all they survey, crafting an anthology of innovative tracks that feature pop streaks. They’ve struck a perfect balance between pushing boundaries and making people dance.

Album Of The Week

Anyone hoping to hear elements of the gritty guitar-infused rock of Wye Oak on Dungeonesse‘s self-titled debut album are bound to be in for a shock. A welcome one, but still a shock nonetheless. Sure, Jenn Wasner’s soaring vocals breathe life and spirit into both diverse projects, but with Dungeonesse, her dulcet tones float over a funky, disco-pop pulse instead of the wistful, Neil Young-like Americana of her other band.

Wasner collaborated on Dungeonesse with Jon Ehrens, from fellow Baltimore band White Life, with the pair sending each other portions of songs which they would add sonic flourishes to until they were complete. And what arose out of the project is a fresh, upbeat batch of slick R&B-inspired jams that are clearly indebted to many past eras of pop music, while still managing to sound entirely modern and original in the process.

The album launches playfully with the vibrant, Mariah Carey-like bounce of ‘Schucks,’ which has plenty of buoyant echoes of Mimi’s ‘Fantasy’ layered within its luxuriously textured synth strains, while Wasner is clearly having fun delivering the track’s self-assured but decidedly frisky lyrics. That lighthearted spirit courses through the entire record, injecting these songs with a translucent charm that makes them light as a breeze while still maintaining a club-anthem cool that will have everybody nodding their heads, no matter what side of the indie/pop line you stand on.

The rest of the album sashays on by with very few missteps, even though both artists find themselves a fair way outside of their musical comfort zones. ‘Drive You Crazy’ is an unquestionable pop gem, with Wasner’s vocals quickly adapting to the rapid fire beats generated by Ehrens, while the moody ‘Show You,’ still maintains a lively effervescence within the hazy synth cadence. ‘Private Party’ would sound perfectly appropriate playing in a nightclub or roller-skating rink (remember those?) in any of the past four decades, with a distinctive twist on the best that pop, disco, R&B, and soul have to offer.

While the contributions from both TT the Artist and Baltimore emcee DDm both sound a bit forced and out of place on a project that doesn’t need any outside help, they ultimately are such minimal blunders that they pass by without dragging these dynamic tracks down. The best part of this record is that no matter how indebted these songs are to the Top 40 pop hits of yesterday, this collection never approaches pastiche, with both Wasner and Ehrens percipiently aware of the imaginative direction they want these jaunty numbers to take.

The record also manages to stylistically capture the beginning, middle, and end of a fabulous night out in the city as well as the fitful elation and heartache involved in any love affair. ‘Shucks’ seems to handle the primping involved in any foray out on the town, while ‘Private Party’ and ‘Nightlife’ both capture the energy and endless possibilities that lie just beyond the door of any club. And ‘Wake Me Up,’ ‘Cadillac,’ and ‘Soon’ all convey wanting something real and tangible after the craziness dies down and the artificial sheen of the city gets scrubbed away by the daylight.

There’s no telling what the lasting power is for a project like Dungeonesse, with both Wasner and Ehrens having other bands to fall back on. But if this ends up being just a fanciful one-off, what a splendid and stunning sonic detour this was. The Baltimore duo boldly and confidently stepped way outside of their own respective musical boundaries on this project, and crafted some irrepressible pop treats of their own that don’t have any hints of the saccharine toxicity and self-seriousness that plagues much of the mindless hits of today. Dungeonesse have brazenly managed to distill the best parts of modern and classic pop radio down to a sweet, everlasting core while creating their own sparkling, sugary sound in the process.

The song that, for all intents and purposes, proved to be Laura Marling‘s breakthrough provides an interesting instrument with which to gauge her relentless progression over the course of her short career to date. ‘New Romantic’ is wonderfully written; honest, witty, somehow both charming and heartbreaking, and yet it seems, by way of comparison to what’s come since, almost juvenile.

The failed-relationship basics of the lyrics stand out; Marling doesn’t write songs with turns of phrase like ‘pretty fit’ any more. Some of the vocal nuances commonplace on later records had yet to emerge, and the nerves that threatened to cripple her live performance of it on Jools Holland back in 2007 are a thing of the past. That a fundamentally excellent track seems a little simple, in retrospect, speaks volumes about how rapidly Marling has managed to nurture her considerable talent as a songwriter.

Her second full-length, I Speak Because I Can, was a huge leap forward, startlingly mature in pretty much every aspect. Lyrically, she moved in a far more oblique direction, replete with historical references, whilst a firm sonic shift into folk territory would invite favourable comparisons with Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell. The days of chipping in on chirpy pop songs with Noah and the Whale and Mystery Jets were already a distant memory at the age of just twenty, and constant critical use of the word ‘precocious’ was an almost-insulting understatement. The follow-up, A Creature I Don’t Know, served mainly to build on Speak‘s folk foundations, with just enough evidence to suggest efforts were being made to experiment; the stormy drama of ‘The Beast’ and ‘The Muse’s Americana-tinged shuffle are cases in point.

Opening Once I Was an Eagle with a four-song, fifteen-minute suite is certainly indicative of Marling’s ambition, but it’s by no means overblown. She doesn’t really do kitchen-sink, and these first four tracks are a masterclass in restraint; with the vocals and acoustic guitar the only constants, further flourishes are included only where necessary – tom-tom drums and strings on ‘I Was an Eagle’, touches of piano on ‘Take the Night Off’. These opening fifteen minutes serve as a metaphor for the record as a whole, a reflection of its largely cohesive feel. This is especially true in lyrical terms; uncertainty and foreboding are ubiquitous, as is the more direct approach to the topic of love than on her last two albums.

It’s difficult to decide whether Marling’s experimental self-discipline is frustratingly conservative or impressively prudent. ‘Little Love Caster’ is a quiet, minimalist effort in the mould of the older likes of ‘What He Wrote’ or ‘Rest in the Bed’, flecked with Spanish guitars and a brooding string arrangement, and the Dylan-esque ‘Where Can I Go?’ is underscored by a breezy organ. Those tracks successfully apply a little diversity to the tried-and-true Marling template, but the record’s truly thrilling moments arrive when she lets new ideas dictate her songwriting. ‘Master Hunter’ is a revelation, simple pot-and-pan percussion drowned out by rollicking guitar and a genuinely aggressive vocal. ‘Devil’s Resting Place’ sees menacing, almost tribal drums race alongside frantic keys, with erratic, Indian-inspired string runs helping to create a sound dramatic enough to conjure up the images of the occult that the title hints at.

Marling manages to keep the quieter tracks stylistically diverse enough to suggest that there’s real progression; on ‘Pray for Me’, a song she’s been playing live since 2011, she opts for an intriguing combination of picked guitar, cello and bongos, whilst there’s plenty of bluesy flourish in the vocals on ‘When Were You Happy? (And How Long Has It Been)’. It’s unquestionably a more adventurous album than Creature, and perhaps the one caveat to its excellence is its sprawling running time; sixteen tracks over the course of more than an hour always sounded like potential overkill. There are a couple of tracks that might’ve missed the cut – the ponderous ‘Little Bird’ is a prime contender – but you could probably argue that to do so would be to miss the point of a record that’s supposed to be expansive, that was never meant to seem pithy, and that really is intended to serve as a vehicle for Marling to dip her toe in a variety of waters.

That she’s done so in such an organised manner, producing a record that’s diverse but not disparate, is hugely to her credit. She might not be interested in a full-blown departure just yet, but her twenty-three years of age and prodigious work rate both count in her favour on that score. Marling has delivered Once I Was an Eagle with a charisma lacking in most of her peers, and the poise of a far older hand. She’s no longer one of the country’s most exciting prospects; she’s one of its greatest songwriters.

The albums that stick with you, and I mean really stick with you, the one’s that become woven into the fabric of your very existence are often some of the most unassuming. More often that not, they enter your life under some magical circumstance, soundtracking it for months at a time and leaving an indelible mark on your memories. It is usually without warning they will seep into your consciousness evoking such strong emotional connections to a time, a place or a person that they can often be hard to return to.

One such album for me was Sam Amidon‘s 2008′s All Is Well. Ostensibly a reworking of traditional (mostly Appalachian) folk songs, the album possessed a rarified beauty in its fragility. Amidon’s voice breaks, the orchestra swells and the stories of heartbreak and loss unfold on an album so perfectly crafted in its arrangement and production would be, to my ears, impossible to follow up. In 2010 Amidon released I See the Sign. Markedly more immediate than its predecessor, it was a strong release yet it lacked the ineffable grace previously present.

Three years on and Vermont born Amidon is no longer recording with Reykjavik based collective Bedroom Community, but has moved to London to start a life with folk singer Beth Orton. Working with long time collaborator Thomas Bartlett (with who he recorded his first album) and multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily, this album tones down the lush orchestration and electronics of the previous two and instead brings out the more Jazz inspired elements of his work.

One of the many idiosyncrasies of Amidon’s past is his time spent studying under free-jazz violinist Leroy Jenkins and this influence can be very clearly heard in tracks such as ‘I Wish I Wish’ with it’s exploratory trumpet solo. That is not to say, however, that this is a Jazz record. There are certainly elements throughout but the strongest influence is still clearly his love of traditional music; the songs are performed with an almost reverential respect of the source material. Tracks such as the hypnagogic ‘Pharaoh’ and the beautiful title track showcase not only his love but his innate understanding of the appalachian vocal style. Each trill and warble evokes the beautiful but desolate landscapes from which most of these songs hail. On tracks such as ‘As I Roved Out’ and ‘Streets of Derry’, his playing (banjo and fiddle respectively) comes to the forefront and as with most of this album, is incredibly impressive.

While this album is by no means a huge leap forwards for Amidon (some could argue it’s a retreat to more familiar territory) , for me this is not a problem. What he does well here, and has always done well, is to embody traditional music; its harmony, its lyrical themes, and at the same time imbue the music with a vitality that never feels forced or disrespectful of its roots. Even the inclusion of a Mariah Carey cover (an unusual cover is commonplace on Amidon’s albums) doesn’t ever feel cheap or gimmicky and is handled with the same respect that makes this a truly sincere and beautiful album.

When we first heard Crystal Fighters‘ spirited foray into alt. dance with efforts like ‘Plage’ and ‘Champion Sound’, it was clear that we had something pretty special on our hands. The British/Spanish five piece spout youthful vigour, a penchant for sun-laced sounds and bounding pep of a puppy – even the most heartbreaking of their cuts is carried by a lightness and a golden haze.

Not only is their sound summer-bound, but it’s also insanely danceworthy – it’s the kind of organic club music that’s designed to soundtrack beach piss-ups in the sweltering heat, as you eat charred burgers and swill warm beer. They’ve got an original sonic identity that’s full of throbbing beats and luscious synths, but also the warmth of ukuleles and vocal richness.

Their debut, Star Of Love, polarised critics – some doled out 10/10s, others were keen to thrash them down. However, both camps saw potential in their sound, with many outlets patting them on the back for their original take on dance music and indie rock. They brought something to the table that wasn’t just fresh, but also amazing – apparently it was a concept record based on an opera “written by a man whose sanity disintegrated” before it could be finished. The LP was an engrossing combo of interweaving Basque folk and contemporary electronic music – and on the successor to Star Of Love, Cave Rave, we hear the familiar jangle of what made Crystal Fighters so fascinating in the beginning.

For Cave Rave, Crystal Fighters wanted to expand their horizons. They’ve brought in a host of authentic world instruments, like the txalaparta, the txistu and the Bolivian charango; they sought the wisdom of African musical icons and explored the sounds that cultures of the world have on offer, soaking in the variety, cherrypicking their favourite parts. There’s a notable Latin feel to the record (‘No Man’), there’s even some tribal percussion (‘LA Calling’). What has started to fade though, is their penchant for synths – this album careens away from the dance music aspect (as a genre) – but some efforts, like ‘Separator’ and ‘Are We One’ retain their techno streak, proudly showcasing pangs of dubstep and Calvin Harris pop hooks.

Other tracks, like the lead single ‘You & I’, eschew the synthetic. Sauntering through your speakers with the jauntiest ukulele intro you’ll ever hear, the track wears a splatter of reggae over straight-up indie-pop. With vocalist Sebastien Pringle’s adorable “I don’t need nothing else, no one else but you and I,” it’s plain to see that the cut is an ode to singular, relentless and all-encompassing love, told through tropical rhythms, backing vocals ripped from Lilo & Stitch and uplifting melodies. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a more perfect summer tune. Opener ‘Wave’ features similar joie de vivre – it’s a sprawling paean of life and love, told via celestial guitars and atomic percussion.

Truthfully, for all of the global influences and toil, you barely even notice. There’s no time to pause and dissect the record, and just as you think there’s a gap to breathe, they drag you by the scruff of the neck and force your to grin and boogie. From start to finish, it’s a delirious pleasure, even if there’s a weak moment or slip in quality, you’re blind to it as their knack for eternal happiness and glorious melodies distract you. They’ve poured so much time and effort into Cave Rave – but you may never get a chance to appreciate that aspect of the album, because for all their intrinsic talent and informed attention to detail, their passion for pure pop is overpowering. It’s like someone trying to explain to you something in great detail at a party – it may be very interesting, but we’re sure you’d much rather just get another beer and dance like a loon.

There’s a lot to be said for solitude. Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle once told me about his writing process and being on tour and said the key was to spend as much time as he could on his own and then the songs would come.

Martin Crane, the man behind New York-via-Austin’s Brazos seems to have learned something similar in coming to write his band’s second album Saltwater, a follow-up to 2009′s promising debut Phosphorescent Blues; the themes of the record – isolation, solitude, the sea – formed after a move to NYC found Crane working on a 19^th century sail boat and reading Moby Dick.

So far, so “screenplay by Zach Braff”. But given that Melville’s book spoke to Crane, and that he found himself listening to music that shared the explorative tendencies of that tome, we should be thankful for the inspiration that’s resulted in the hook and harmony-heavy tracks on this album.

Recorded with a new drummer and bassist, Saltwater manages to combine – often to sparkling effect – indie-pop hookery with the aforementioned explorative music of Pharaoh Sanders, Can and Harmonia to come across as a kind of rambling, transcendental version of The Shins.

Given they’ve also toured with Grizzly Bear it’s also interesting to hear echoes of Daniel Rossen’s writing in Crane’s music, mainly in the freewheeling nature of the majority of the tracks. We begin practically mid-song in opening track ‘Always On’, as bright synths bounce along with a quasi-Afrobeat kick and a flamenco acoustic guitar flourish. With barely concealed glee, Crane sings “yes, I’m gonna love you til you’re real” and sounds like he’s in the business of creating a companion for himself out of his isolated imagination.

It rolls along unanchored, and is joined in the carefree ranks by ‘How The Ranks Was Won’; that track driven by a motorik chug reminiscent of American Analog Set’s late-career output and is an absolute winner. That’s followed by a pair of crackers: ‘One Note Pillow’ is a jazz-flecked odyssey drenched in echoed harmonies that’s definitely been a result of some time listening to Veckatimest, while ‘Valencia’ is, appropriately enough, a summery and playfully Spanish-tinged track.

Each listen makes any flaws in the record more elusive. There’s the lovely and sad waltz of ‘Deeper Feelings’, the stunning cyclical guitar lines of ‘Irene’ – essentially a jam but addictive thanks to Crane’s engagingly human voice – through to the title track which shares the same freewheelin’ spirit as the preceding track, and again Crane’s lyrics and voice are the star attraction. It’s also the most overtly “about the ocean” song on the record alongside ‘How The Ranks Was Won’, but really – do the themes or inspiration really matter when the tunes are this good?

Crane, along with new Brazos band members Spencer Zahn and Ian Chang, haven’t quite created “transcendental groove music” with Saltwater but as a difficult second album goes, this is a total breeze rather than a mainsail-battering ocean storm.

Apparently it’s impossible to talk about Daft Punk without hyperbole. You can set aside all the praise coming from critics, as much as that confirms my point.

Just look at “The Collaborators” video series about the making of the pair’s new record, Random Access Memories, and you’ll find the artists themselves tripping over each other to make the most exaggerated assertions. Todd Edwards claims that he moved from New Jersey to L.A. because of the recording sessions. Chilly Gonzales states that he doesn’t usually like to collaborate, but made an exception for “people who are in possession of some true key to the zeitgeist.” DJ Falcon simply stated that, “For me, they never disappoint.”

But perhaps the most hyperbolic statement about this album is also the simplest: that every hyperbolic statement may all be true. Daft Punk have not only made a career-defining album, but the smartest dance album since disco. Which makes sense, not only because Memories is a disco record, but also because disco was the precursor to EDM. Aside from the vocoder’ed vocals, you’d be hard-pressed (at least, on the surface) to believe this album came from the same guys who created the ecstasy-filled ‘One More Time.’

But then again, this is Daft Punk we’re talking about – the group that never does the same thing twice and rarely follows trends. Naturally, if EDM is what’s de rigueur, then Daft Punk can’t make an EDM record. Even if they’re the reason that, say, Skrillex has a career. No, not for Daft Punk. Electronic dance music is who they were. Throwing out  the samples (apart from album-closer ‘Contact’), recording on analog and bringing in Nile Rodgers to play guitar, Nathan East to play bass and J.R. Robinson to play drums – the duo go backwards in order to move forwards, and make a statement.

Two androids made dance music with emotion, basically. But they’re still robots, meaning that this music is as meticulous, as precise and fed through as much calculus as anything the Daft Punk have released. Now, this may seem odd if you consider the French duo’s comments about how dehumanized the process of making music has become. Such modern studio perfectionists as Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter are forced to use computers in order to find the perfect sounds, and the duo has admitted as much. That said, computers aren’t the basis for composition. They aren’t an instrument, they are a tool.

Just one tool used in the making – “crafting” might be a better term – of this album. ‘Giorgio by Moroder,’ for example, is a nine-minute, multi-part suite that opens with a spoken-word intro by the titular Italian legend and closes with a paranoid guitar solo before fizzling into a bath of feed-back. In between you’ll find: a synthesizer making concentric circles around a sparse rhythm section, two different breakdowns (a short, jazzy outing and a percussion freak-out), orchestration and a second spoken word part. Is it over the top? Yes. Self-indulgent? Or course. Insists upon its self-importance? Absolutely. Features entire portions that are unnecessary? No question. And that’s the point, and why it works. In effect, Daft Punk have made a dance record that comments on the imperfect nature of humanity. In the case of ‘Giorgio,’ the observation is that sometimes life is frivolous, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be fun or surprising.

So, in other words, Random Access Memories is as much a progressive rock record as it is a disco record. Well, Daft Punk’s version of disco, anyway. Attentive listeners will discover that beneath this disco-based album lie shades of trap music drizzled over ‘Doin’ It Right,’ jazz fusion injected into ‘Motherboard’ and ‘Contact,’ and even AOR rolled into ‘Fragments of Time.’ None of it shouldn’t work. Combining progressive music with disco is by itself a tough order, and that’s especially true if you add any of the above ingredients. But Daft Punk make something work that shouldn’t because they’ve always been about the road less traveled.

This explains why on Memories, they had someone other than themselves sing into a vocoder. The Strokes’ Julian Casablancas appears on the synth-pop gem ‘Instant Crush’ with his voice filtered through their signature style, something that initially feels profane. No one sings into a vocoder! It’s practically been their trademark for two decades! But it works with Casablancas because the song’s about being frustrated by a relationship. “Now I thought about what I wanna say/ But I never really know where to go,” he sings over a tumbling melody. “So I chained myself to a friend/ ‘Cause I know it unlocks like a door.” Casablancas simply sounds reluctant to accept how perplexing life can be, especially regarding relationships. The vocoder, then, acts as a way to fully demonstrate how bemused he is. That he’s is the only guest whose vocals get this treatment suggests a mistake, one that precariously sticks out. It’s the kind of song you’d record assuming it’ll be a b-side. But to these robots, it makes perfect sense do something seemingly blasphemous and put it on an album. They wouldn’t be who they are otherwise.

It’s the same reason they had Paul Williams sing on ‘Touch,’ the assumed centerpiece of the record. A full-blown space rock ballad featuring a samba detour in the middle, it’s a track that, upon hearing, caused a fellow critic to remark Williams was a bad choice, as he lacks “the gravitas to pull it off.” That may be true, but may have also been the goal. Here, Daft Punk are going for groove, for living in the moment, and for blemishes. So, yeah, they could’ve used a superstar like David Bowie, but it wouldn’t fit. The robotic duo went slightly under the radar in service to a song that, lyrically, is simultaneously the most and least human thing Daft Punk have ever been a part of. “Sweet touch/ You’ve almost convinced me I’m real/ I need something more,” Williams sings over the somber piano coda. It’s beautiful and sad.

There’s that dichotomy, again: Robots making songs about feeling. Even when they make the perfect summer song, it’s got a pessimistic underbelly. ‘Get Lucky,’ featuring Pharrell Williams, is the breeziest thing Daft Punk have ever made. The itchy slink of Nile Rodgers’ guitar suggests a wonderful sunset that never ends. Yet, Williams sings of two people that aren’t exactly in sync with each other: “She’s up all night t’ill the sun/ I’m up all night to get some/ She’s up all night for good fun/ I’m up all night to get lucky.” Pharrell was quick to point out the meaning of the song goes beyond sex, but even if it isn’t, the boy and girl are clearly on different wavelengths. To the guy, the sparks aren’t there and result is disappointment. But he isn’t leaving: “ We’ve come too far/ To give up who we are.”

Album closer ‘Contact’ opens with audio from the Apollo 17 mission over the cautiously optimistic synth from The Sherb’s ‘We Right Tonight.’ The immediacy of the song is then thrust forward when the song begins its sprint as more and more synths are piled on each other. Omar Hakim’s drums stumble over themselves as they dash alongside. Suddenly, everything bleeds together into a sonic haze and begins an ascent straight for the sun. Pulses quicken. Then…it fizzles out in an anti-climax and the album is over.

Which is just another way for Daft Punk to comment on being letdown. This album is a perfectly imperfect vision of humanity as seen by two androids. It’s not cynical or calculating like a robot might view it but it isn’t cheery, either. Even when they sing optimistically about music and life, there’s a hint of inhuman over-simplicity: “Let the music of your life/ Give life back to music.”

Yet, as Todd Edwards observed, it’s somehow a robot duo that is ironically “bringing soul back to music.” Edwards sings lead on ‘Fragments of Time,’ the record’s most human song. Juxtaposed to a busy AOR arrangement, he speaks of being content even if that means siphoning off happiness from memories – be they real or digital. It’s this seemingly stark contrast that colours all of Daft Punk’s work. Despite the level of fastidiousness that’s standard to Daft Punk, Random Access Memories still sounds loose. The album doesn’t feel synthetic or disingenuous, as it perhaps should. So perhaps these two are cooler than anyone you know. Perhaps they are the cultural apotheosis everyone’s in awe of. Then again, to create music of this calibre, perhaps they really are two robots from another planet.

Attention spans, huh? Boring! There’s a certain type of indiepop collective that sees fit to adopt a ‘kitchen sink’ approach to instrumentation and arrangement, as likely to draw from the cutesiest of fey pop as it is to draw from what The Waterboys dubbed ‘the big music’. You know the types: Bearsuit. Architecture In Helsinki. Los Campesinos! Bands who’ll veer from lo-fi jauntiness to mini-Arcade Fires to nonsensical electro within the space of a single verse.

To that list you can add Kill Rock Stars’ own Boats, a five-piece from Winnipeg with more ideas than is really fair. Like the aforementioned acts, their capacity for concentration is small. They’d rather drag songs backwards through hedges than bother with anything as deathly dull as revisiting a verse or chorus. An odd bunch? First impressions of third LP A Fairway Full Of Miners suggest that’s the case.

Much of this is down to head honcho Mat Klachefsky’s frankly bizarre voice – a strangulated, high-pitched yap that scratches eardrums like Wallace Shawn ingesting helium as a cure for laryngitis. Opening toe-tapper ‘Animated GIFs’ sees him wistfully advising us to “never ever change your font size,” shortly before a demented breakdown proclaims: “O frothy eater of sandwiches! Laminated hands will command you!” In short, it’s a little difficult to get a handle on his subject matter, although there’s an engaging quality to his delivery that makes him worth sticking with.

The rest of the band work more cohesively, applying mob shouts and sunny pop ‘oohs’ to the ADD-riddled backing. A chest-swelling trumpet line props up ‘Great Skulls’, while knackered old synths power the scrupulous power-chug of ‘Sad Legs’, and ‘Advice On Bioluminescent Bears’ features the soft tones of the glockenspiel – the indiepoppers’ traditional weapon of choice. Meanwhile climaxes and codas appear from nowhere, allowing individual tracks to flow powerfully and endearingly into realms that seem far from their starting points.

The dense attack of their melodies make for a somewhat heady brew – a little too rich to fully absorb on first listen, perhaps – and for all the expansive nature of their songs, Boats are far from genre-hoppers: it all sounds most assuredly like indie. But then again, they’re never going to be world-beaters; the only thing they seek to dominate is the madcap universe inside their collective imagination. And there they sit: rulers of all they survey. Oligarchs of delightfully batshit guitar pop. It’s worth paying ‘em a visit.

When Baths debut Cerulean emerged in 2010, Will Wiesenfeld was bracketed with L.A beat scene artists like Flying Lotus and Nosaj Thing, but he always had a spark of something different about him. His sound mixed deep saturated beats with wistful samples and falsetto vocals that imbued a sadness to the record, one which seemed more human and much less exhausting to listen to than those peers. This second album only serves to highlight the superficiality of those previous associations, as Obsidian is a casually accessible but black-hearted collection which he has called his “weird version of a pop record”.

The songs here are definitely more immediate than on Cerulean but they’re no less intricately constructed, with repeat listens teasing out several layers of little auditory oddities. The hooks on ‘Miasma Sky’ mask a meandering almost jazz like structure and distract from the wealth of ambient details that percolate throughout. ‘Ironworks’ is a gorgeous number on which Wiesenfeld croons a brewing storm over lilting piano keys and sepia strings whilst softly strewn beats jostle for position underneath. On tracks like this one and ‘No Past Lives’ his classical training really becomes apparent by its juxtaposition with more thoroughly modernist production. The opening four tracks of Obsidian are quite unstoppable though, striking a perfect middle ground of such technical vivification and a tone of heart-on-sleeve introspection.

There is a definite mid-point lull though as the sex-obsessed but oddly sexless pairing of ‘Incompatible’ and ‘No Eyes’ serve up some disconcertingly trite lyrics with little to compensate musically, other than the brilliantly noisy coda that drowns the latter track in more palpable aggression. It’s a surprisingly isolated burst of volume as well (matched only be the NIN like stomp of ‘Earth Death’) considering that much of the album was written following a debilitating bacterial infection which rendered Wiesenfeld unable to do much of anything for several months, and its dense claustrophobic atmosphere feels like an expulsion of pent-up negativity.

It is a dark cloud of an album for sure, as a glance at the song titles suggest, and his moribund lyrics throughout are occupied with death and decay often to a point of overkill. Instrumental closing track ‘Inter’ lifts that cloud though with a haunting romance, an atmosphere which feels eerily similar to Donnie and Joe Emerson’s indie-movie favourite ‘Baby’. It channels a quiet loneliness which is detached from the buzzing anxiety of the rest of the album, a snapshot of something simpler and optimistic.

Twisted, beautiful and introspectively bleak, Obsidian has a lot of qualities which I expect will keep me coming back to it, but it feels lacking as well. Its emotions are strangely impenetrable, because for all it sounds like an emotional record on surface the more you sink into it the more it seems only like the outline of one. His falsetto wavers and his wordless harmonies cast shapeless rain clouds while noises bubble and burst in the vicinity but it’s difficult to feel anything specific toward most of the songs beyond a superficial level.

It’s perhaps ironically this which makes it a “weird pop record”, its surface. There’s no denying the technical ability and songcraft is there, and unpicking the layers is the most enjoyable part of listening, but it’s emotional tugging ultimately strikes as hollow, not through insincerity but in being too obfuscated or overbearing for me to really love these songs. Wiesenfeld’s lyrical talents are yet to routinely manifest the same subtlety as his composition, but there is enough here to suggest that he is definitely capable of closing the gap.

The reason that Primal Scream have been one of the most compelling bands of the last 25 years is entirely down to their being one of the least reliable. Listening to any new Primal Scream album seems rooted more in trepidation than excitement. As a true student of rock and roll – and someone who seems to love every revolutionary piece of music he hears – Bobby Gillespie simply can’t seem to tell what he is and isn’t good at.

Hence, his band have never had anything longer than a run of two great albums at a time and, when you think about it, there isn’t really a Primal Scream Sound. After pretty much predicting the last decade with the unimpeachable XTRMNTR, the slide into mediocrity has been slow and painful, either through increasingly bland rehashes of former glories, or Riot City Blues, a blooze-rock record that makes everything the Stones put out in the eighties sound like Exile on Main Street.

So, on paper, More Light seems poised to change that – albeit in a relatively regressive way. Their most interesting collaborators all stop by – Andy Wetherall, Kevin Shields and David Holmes – and the ever-touted “return to form” seems predicated on it being a XTRMNTR for the 2010s. Politico-cultural commentary? Check, including two references to Thatcher and Guy Debord in the first three songs. Dense, bleak soundscapes? You got it. Bobby G trying his hand at rapping again? Shudder. Yup. That’s here too. In fact, at 13 tracks in 68 minutes (and with a member of the band on the cover of the album for the first time since the eighties - Bobby G, obviously), Primal Scream sound genuinely determined to prove themselves for the first time in ages.

And guess what? Some of that effort pays off, just not always in the ways you’d expect. Sure, there’s the relentless gonzo rock and roll euphoria of ‘Hit Void’ – More Light‘s worthiest successor to anything on XTRMNTR - but it’s the more spacious moments of the album that really pay off. Most promising of the bunch is ‘Walking With the Beast’, the best ballad the Primals have conjured since ‘Keep Your Dreams’. A loving tribute to (read: straight-up rip-off of) the third Velvets album, it’s all muted twang and hushed strums, while the lyrics are unashamedly pulled straight out of the class of ’69.

Similarly, the intricate acoustic psychedelics of ‘River of Pain’  and ‘Goodbye Johnny’ – on which Gillespie actually croons – sounds like Lee Hazelwood by way of a David Lynch soundtrack, suggests that there’s the kernel of a sound that the band are hitting upon waiting to be properly explored.

Unfortunately, it’s simply not to be, at least not here, and these more reflective moments are caught up in an all-too-similar tidal wave of the kind of self-important bluster you’d hope Bobby and co would have outgrown by now. While there’s nothing quite at the ‘Suicide Sally and Johnny Guitar’ level of awful, the ungodly trip-hop-hip-hop-post-punk-gospel nonsense of ‘Culturecide’ and ’2013”s opening saxophonic Krautrush (which, lyrically, is part curious time-capsule, part embarrassing politics lesson) veer dangerously close. Meanwhile, the just-plain-boring stretch of tracks from ‘Sideman’ to ‘Relativity’ sounds a hell of a lot less subversive than it obviously thinks it does.

At its best, More Light shows that even this far into the game, Primal Scream still have some aces up their sleeve. Unfortunately, the rest of the time, it’s the sonic equivalent of the moment in Almost Famous when its fictional band’s lead singer petulantly insists “I’m incendiary too!” There’s too much telling and not enough showing across More Light‘s 70 minutes, and while its most impressive moments clearly see the band give out, another flickeringly interesting record dominated by pseudo-revolutionary scattershot sloganeering and half-baked riffery suggests they may well do better to just give up.

“Re-Mit is going to absolutely terrify people. It’s quite horrible. The Fall have had enough and we’re coming for you,” announced Mark E. Smith in a recent interview. It was inevitable, of course, that this would provoke the assumption that Re-Mit was going to be a formidable continuation of the widely deplored Ersatz GB. But as the guitar lines of instrumental opener ‘No Respects’ descend into a primitively pummelling groove – it almost sounds like a blithe paradox to the malevolent, disorderly brawl of Ersatz.

In fact, ‘No Respects’ is The Fall reverting back to a time when they were at their most accessible. You almost expect  Brix Smith’s customary yelp to interject the garage-rock stomp that forms its essentially playful core. And just when you thought Smith was being facetious with his emphatic claims, the record promptly abandons its façade and transcends into the chaotic sprawl of ‘Sir William Wray’ with its dominant synth, intertwining guitars and boisterous vocal squall’s. For a second there we thought we’d been duped by post-punk’s undisputed ruler and sole constant, but it was a short-lived sensation.

The Fall’s trajectory has never remained unchanged – but Mark E. Smith’s unyielding pursuit to be anything other than predictable is perpetually present. There’s nothing habitual about any Fall album – except the force of Smith’s famous declamatory bark – his prominent but often detached utterance – infinitely cryptic but sounding more apathetic over time; gradually losing coherency over the course of their discography. Although that doesn’t imply any signs of complacency, because it’s Mark E. Smith’s contrary instinct that has turned The Fall into one of the most prolific, consistently compelling cult acts in British music.

Of course, The Fall do have a ‘Trademark’, and it’s their ability to undergo a myriad of stylistic changes over the years without eschewing that archetypal “Fall sound” – defined by abrasive guitar and frequent use of repetition, continuously underpinned by Smith’s idiosyncratic vocals and esoteric lyricism. And that’s perhaps why Ersatz GB wasn’t particularly triumphant to the majority of critics and fans alike, because the prominence of Smith’s lyrics is distinctly amiss, lost under the cacophony of  brutish instrumentation and Smith’s incomprehensible snarl.

It’s almost surprising just how much more lyrically focused this record is in contrast to its precedent. This is particularly distinct in ‘Jetplane’ in which Elena’s predominant keyboard sound is coupled with an infectious military march rhythm, sustained by Mark’s cantankerous rant about airline queues. Despite the mundane subject matter Smith shows his inherent deftness for depicting banality using shrewd poetic discourse, meanwhile Elena’s keyboard proficiency is evocative of a certain Fall sound that hasn’t quite been interpreted this well since the late ‘80s.  Elsewhere Mark E Smith is a ferocious presence. ‘Hittie Man’ recalls early ’80s Fall with its post-punk growl and ominous bass, while tracks like ‘Victricola Time’ and ‘Noise’ feel  much like redundant fillers that could easily be forgotten.

And that’s why Re-Mit affirms the general perception of recent Fall albums being primarily one on, one off. While Ersatz initially sounds not quite as involved or developed, Re-Mit seems more focused with a vision – it’s what you would expect The Fall to sound like in 2013, 30 albums down the line (having pretty much released one a year since their inaugural studio effort Live At The Witch Trials in 1979). It is fully charged – it’s hard as nails – yet none of this record seems to be in the same brutal vein as Ersatz GB. And while it achieves clearer production and a style that is livelier and more melodically centred, it doesn’t sacrifice its uncompromising and challenging nature. Instead it revisits elements of The Fall’s past while continuing to be innovative.

Re-Mit isn’t exactly going to win over the uninitiated, but for abiding fans this is an album that – while it doesn’t reside amongst the best of their work – certainly deserves to be credited as one of their most ambitious, envelope-pushing albums of the band’s discography. Never have The Fall sounded so brilliantly abstruse or downright weird – maybe at least not since Levitate. It’s an unsettling, incomparable racket of The Fall at their wonderful, frightening best.

Where to begin with Mark Lanegan’s voice? It’s a melted-down chainsaw. Soft beams of light shooting across a bubbling tar pit. A rusted tractor set ablaze amidst heavy downpour. Rich. Ragged. Ridiculous. It’s also one of the most uniquely expressive voices in American music – arguably similar to that of Tom Waits in its ability to extricate a sumptuously soulful croon from the sound of over-zealous vocal cord scrapings. But unlike the perma-hatted veteran, Lanegan never gives into the gnarl. He’s simply a vessel for sorrows that are resigned to their fate: in other words, the blues.

For all the raw feeling summoned by those rattling pipes, Mark has always worked best in collaboration with others. Sure, he’s made stand-out solo records since making his name as the Screaming Trees’ frontman (‘Whiskey For The Holy Ghost’ and ‘Bubblegum’ representing particular career highlights), but sparks have truly flown when rubbing shoulders with the likes of Isobel Campbell and fellow Gutter Twin Greg Dulli. On Black Pudding he’s enlisted the help of multi-instrumentalist Duke Garwood, and the results are often stunning.

The opening title track introduces us to Garwood’s nimble guitar work, which is both delicate and yet subtly powerful, paving the way for the tone of the rest of the album. Basic blues motifs serve as a peg on which to hang his ideas, which make songs feel like meditative explorations of mood rather than linear stories. Nothing is resolved. Instead we find textural experiments like the quick bursts of guitar drone that scorch ‘Mescalito’s arid shuffle, coalescing and gradually evaporating like sunspots in the desert heat.

Then there’s the tumbling, intuitive piano that stumbles dizzily around the drunken lament of ‘Last Rung’, brashly beautiful in its plaintive chaos. In the midst of all this, Lanegan offers thoughtful whispers of lost loves and portents of doom – “Death rides a white horse,” he sombrely intones, “But I ain’t seen him yet.” If that reads like a defiant claim of invulnerability, the song’s fooling no-one. The line is practically shrugged into your speakers, grimly accepting the inevitability of mortality: a spine-tingling moment.

‘Black Pudding’ works best at its most sparse, which is why flute-drenched psych ballad ‘Shade Of The Sun’ is infinitely more arresting than ‘Cold Molly’s loose-limbed, stoned groove. Minor quibbles aside, however, it feels more like the product of two minds in sync than a collection of contrasting ideas thrown at the wall, which tallies up with Lanegan’s admission that Garwood is one of his “all time favourite artists”.

With an over-saturation of pseudo-folkies grabbing acoustics and aiming pointlessly for some intangible sense of ‘authenticity’, it’s easy to feel that there’s an over-saturation of terrible faux-Americana in this day and age. By plunging impassively into their own hearts of darkness, Mark Lanegan and Duke Garwood have demonstrated that there’s still plenty of life lurking in the muddy waters of the blues.

From a creative and personal standpoint, reaching a moment where crawling is the only real way you can move forward typically represents a crushingly low period for an artist. So, by Pure X titling their second record Crawling Up The Stairs, you know damn well going in that it’s going to be a dark, heavy listen.

Yet, within the raw despair and utter anguish that courses through their stirring new batch of songs, the Austin, Texas trio have also layered a subtle optimism and slight hope. For indeed, the title does mention going up the stairs after all, and that promising direction suggests a light awaits after this lingering period of darkness, giving the album some necessary depth and life that prevents these songs from getting dragged down in a hopeless abyss of misery.

Frontman Nate Grace went through plenty of personal turmoil to make it to this point, after suffering a serious leg injury while skateboarding and not having any insurance to cover the necessary surgery, he struggled to reach a point where he could finally walk again. And meanwhile, while Grace was fighting to stand, the rest of the band were caught in a state of creative stasis that kept them immobile in their own way. Crawling Up The Stairs was born out of that wretched sense of unrest and toil, with the group throwing themselves desperately and passionately into their new album simply because that was the only thing left for them to hold tight to at that point.

And while Stairs represents a subdued sonic departure from the guitar drenched hazy atmospherics that permeated Pure X’s stellar debut, Pleasure, these new songs still pack the same textured musical punch, just drawing from a deeper, more vulnerable source. The ethereal title track serves as a hushed introduction to the proceedings, leading into the desolate, somber plea of ‘Someone Else,’ which has you haunted and broken before it even hits the halfway point. But rather than reveal their fragile emotional state so plainly, the band retreats into the psychedelic excursion of ‘Written In The Slime,’ which could be about anything after all, but the grimey title  - and the overall tone of the record itself – suggests aspirations that have been dragged through a foul mire.

The ominous, post-disco pulse of ‘I Fear What I Feel,’ lets bassist Jesse Jenkins and drummer Austin Youngblood lock in and dynamically lead the track into the dark corners of a dance party at the end of the world, with Grace admitting how tired he’s grown from the pain. Heavy, heady stuff, no matter how funky the groove is. The vibe is a bit lighter on ‘Things In My Head,’ even if the subject matter remains rooted in Grace’s fatalistic musings. And things obviously won’t get any brighter on a song named, ‘Shadows And Lies,’ with Pure X heading towards The Downward Spiral in both the slow-burning squall of the song structure and Grace’s vanquished histrionics.

‘I Come From Nowhere’ and ‘Never Alone’ both have a warped, Beatles-like churn to them, sounding like devilish Sgt. Pepper’s outtakes filtered through a harder and heavier drug use that doesn’t have an eventual bright side nor a Ringo to save them. The second half of the record snaps out of its hazy psychedelic muddle with the urgent accusations that lie at the unsettled heart of the raucous ‘How Did You Find Me,’ which is driven along by Grace’s fiery guitar work and his ragged vocals. But the song speaks to the subject getting found at his one of their darkest moments, with a positivity and pop sheen buried within the tempestuous arrangement.

The album winds to a graceful close with a trio of songs that all contain rebirths and new starts, with the hopeful acoustic strum of ‘Thousand Year Old Child’ leading fluidly into the Zeppelin-like interlude, ‘Rain At Dawn,’ before the record closes with the promising electronic swing of ‘All Of The Future (All Of The Past),’ which has a bold, vibrant spirit to it that suggests that better times lie ahead, we just have to make sure we’re there to enjoy it. Dark elements permeate the menacing corners of Crawling Up The Stairs, and while it may have been a long, grueling journey to get through, it seems that by the end of this bumpy road, Pure X have reached a positive creative terrain that suggests their long climb up the from the bottom was worth all the effort and pain it took to get there.

Though her records have previously explored a variety of topics ranging from the overdue birth of a baby dinosaur to the musical powers of the planet Neptune, as the title of her sixth album makes clear, Scout Niblett – or Emma, to her mum – has finally turned her gaze inwards.

The remarkably brazen It’s Up To Emma does a lot to set alight any notion of kookiness that might continue to plague her but Scout Niblett is still better appreciated as a formidable all round oddity than a particularly dazzling musician. Simplicity is too long a word for what’s going on here; her astounding wail of a voice is rarely accompanied by anything other than a guitar or drum, and only quite rarely are both of those instruments playing at once.

Even though they’ve been recorded with a sympathetic grit that ensures the album packs a punch even in its quieter moments, it’s almost as if what’s going on with the instruments is meant to be the last thing on your mind. Proper enjoyment requires a level of submission, an admittance that you’re going to let Scout do her thing, be that whispering, yelling or bellowing, and find out from it what you can.

Singing largely about herself, it’s an album littered with first person pronouns – ‘Can’t Fool Me Now’, ‘My Man’, ‘What Can I Do?’ – but its nine, stark selections of grungy folk rock are far from self indulgent. She inhabits situations that at their best are as gripping as any horror film; varying from mildly harrowing descriptions of love in ‘Woman and Man’ to outright premeditations on murder in the opening ‘Gun’, and though they’re nothing to do with you, you’re captivated by the conviction with which they’re delivered all the same.

In honesty, it’s not the sound of someone who sounds totally OK. It feels poised between angry raging and introspective shyness, often, as on the wildly dynamically varied ‘Could This Possibly Be?’, in the same song. What you’re meant to make of Scout Niblett’s state of mind at the end of it, other than having had your suspicions of her wild talent confirmed, is likely to be different for every listener.

Though It’s Up To Emma contains a few too many numbers unnecessarily stretching over four minutes when three would probably have gotten the point home with more force, there is one such song (‘Can’t Fool Me Now’) that warrants such a running time. A defiantly sprawling number that builds from the most threadbare of guitar-led beginnings into a string laden, choral epic, it finds Niblett sounding surprisingly comfortable with being out on a limb. The feeling of empowerment it provides her translates with majesty to the listener, too. Imbibing such personal performances with a universally relatable humanity is the greatest strength to a record that makes fragility sound pretty devastating.