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Gruff Rhys – Seeking New Gods
Album review: This seventh solo album by the Super Furry Animals frontman set out as conceptual biography of East Asian active mountain volcano Mount Paektu, but this piano-led set of songs with a 70s psych-pop grandeur also has personal elements, and is produced by Beastie Boys producer Mario C
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Sophia Kennedy’s Monsters - impossible to control or define
Album review: An unholy, beguiling and at times mischievously brilliant mixture of pop, Tin Pan Alley, vintage showtunes, hip hop, abstract electronica and horror film culture, the Baltimore-born, Hamburg-bred artist is just as impossible to define as to not enjoy
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Julia Stone’s Sixty Summers
Album review: Third album leaning towards quirky, intelligent and inventively experimental pop by the artist from Sydney with oodles of brass, drums and funk guitar and electronica – by Annie Clark aka St Vincent and Thomas Bartlett
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Poetic ends: friends Marianne Faithfull with Warren Ellis
Album review: Alongside music by the Australian composer and musician, the iconic singer recites well-known poems from Coleridge, Keats, Wordsmith and more, with addition sounds by friends Nick Cave, Brian Eno and cellist Vincent Ségal
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Art D’Ecco’s In Standard Definition
Album review: A stylish and charismatic glam-rock electro-funk-disco pop second album, echoing everything from early 70s Bowie or Bolan’s T-Rex to 80s synth New Romantics, by the wonderful Canadian androgynous singer
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Caoilfhionn Rose
Album review: Sounding like a sunlit landscape of whispering grasslands, this beautiful mix of folk, jazz, ambient electronica and gentle psychedelia comes with the pure, soft, soaring voice of the Manchester singer-songwriter
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Matthew E. White and Lonnie Holley
Album review: This first collaborative release between the Virginia songwriter, producer, and founder of Spacebomb Records and the Alabama sculptor is an experimental fusion of jazz, funk, electronica and exclamatory spoken-word observation
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La Femme’s third LP
Album review: The French band’s third album is an attractive, energetic mix of classic vintage sounds from 60s candy floss pop to 80s synth new wave, instrumentals that could TV themes, whispery and sensual hip hop, disco and dash of rave
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OH NO …
Album review: This 12th album by the Californian experimental electro-pop, postpunk band led by Jaime Stewart may be the most unusual of year, an oddball set of diverse duets with many guests that sometimes has the melodramatic quality of later Scott Walker
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Promises more than fulfilled
Album review: This transcendent, astonishingly beautiful work, from a five-year collaboration, culminates in genre-spanning exquisite music over nine continuous movements that could easily top the best of the year
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Sketchy: Tune-Yards
Album review: Rhythmically complex, and restlessly clever, the latest release by California’s Merrill Garbus and Nate Brenner wrestles with a variety of issues from gentrification to gender privilege and climate disaster
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Circularities and patterns in nature: Hannah Peel’s Fir Wave
Album review: The electronic music composer’s mesmeric LP is inspired by the cyclical and fractal patterns of nature with access to and reinterpretations of the original music of the celebrated 1972 KPM 1000 series: Electrosonic, the music of Delia Derbyshire and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop
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David Balfe
Album review: Moving, passionate, angry, grief-stricken and tender, this mix of beats, samples and striking spoken word lyrics by the Dublin performer and producer David Balfe is a powerful tribute to a lost friend
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Wondrous wallowing: Great Spans of Muddy Time by William Doyle
Album review: Inspired by the work of Robert Wyatt, early Eno, Berlin-era Bowie and Syd Barrett, this is intriguingly experimental, challenging but at times beautiful electronica work by the artist previously known as East India Youth
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Ideas constantly sprouting: Chad VanGaalen’s latest album
Album review: An inventively eclectic homegrown release of tasty psychedelia, krautrock and folk by the Calgary songwriter and eccentric animator who uses a huge variety of instruments including his own invented lithophone
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House Music is Bell Orchestre’s first album in a decade
Album review: A wondrously absorbing and beautiful first release in a decade by the Montreal-based group of musicians with 10 tracks flow seamlessly into each other via coalescing classical and electronic instrumentation.
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A wonderful vocal new version of Gazelle Twin’s 2018 album Pastoral
Album review: An extraordinary reworking of one of the most brilliantly evocative albums of recent times, Elizabeth Bernholz’s 2018 LP Pastoral is re-animated with electronic drone choir NYX to create equally profound and disturbing versions of seven songs and a new title track
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Sunburned Hand Of The Man’s latest album
Album review: An eclectic and fascinating album of newly edited tracks by the prolific Boston Massachusetts collective, covering everything from gentle acoustic to thrash metal, indie, psych, electronica, krautrock and everything in between
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Jane Weaver’s 11th album, Flock
Album review: The Liverpool and Widnes-raised artist returns with a mesmeric and uplifting 11th album that takes a variety of elements - electronica, psychedelia and acid folk morphing into fabulous alternative pop record that really takes flight
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Smerz’s album Believer
Album review: From stark and abstract, to serene, ambient and dancefloor, the debut LP from the Norwegian duo Henriette Motzfeldt and Catharina Stoltenberg is an experimental adventure taking in everything from classical to techno
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