Back catalogue: All genres

Review: You should never assume too much when it comes to Eartheater. Powders on Mad Decent and finds the maverick modernist at her most vulnerable and exposed. Where she's so often warped and manipulated her voice as part of her hyper pop experimentation, here she comes through in strikingly direct terms whether soaring over elegant threads of synthesis (on gorgeous opener 'Sugarcane Switch') or covering System of a Down's 'Chop Suey' in fragile, acoustic fashion. Even after so many albums, it feels like we're still in the process of understanding the many dimensions of the Eartheater creative universe, and here is but one new galaxy to explore.

Review: Greater Manchester art-rock auteurs Elbow return with their highly anticipated tenth full-length Audio Clarity. Known for their "one for the masses, one for the few" dynamic that saw 2019's experimental Giants Of All Sizes offset by 2021's lush, intimate Flying Dream 1; their latest venture appears poised to recapture the avant-garde post-rock machinations of their earliest work, pre-dating the Mercury Prize winning success of 2008's The Seldom Seen Kid, and harking all the way back to their more challenging Cast Of Thousands days. Described by vocalist/lyricist Guy Garvey as "gnarly, seedy grooves created by us playing together in garagey rooms", the mathematic, slow burn of lead single 'Lovers' Leap' twists odd time signatures around interlocked grooves while building towards a post-funk finish, sonically and compositionally highlighting their more involved, frenetic approach as opposed to their recent output's more minimal set-building. In short, Elbow are back for themselves and whoever else cares to follow them yet again down their labyrinthine tapestry of artful ruminations.

Review: Leeds indie stars English Teacher serve up a fantastic debut album here with 'This Could Be Texas'. Preceding hits 'The World's Biggest Paving Slab', 'Nearly Daffodils' and 'Mastermind Specialism' have all topped BBC 6 Music playlists and helped build the band quite the following. Their rise continued to soar after they appeared on Later With...Jools Holland, and they have since played a sold-out UK and US tour. Lead singer Lily Fontaine's vision for the album was "an odyssey to space, revealing Doncaster's likeness. It's about navigating in-betweens, cherishing home, and tracing Desire Paths." Fontaine reflects on being mixed-race in post-Brexit several times throughout the album and it comes here on lovely green vinyl.

Review: A third album of wonderfully intimate, idiosyncratic songwriting from multi-instrumentalist Stephen Gilchrist - formerly the Stuffy in the much loved Stuffy & The Fuses - in his Stephen EvEns guise. The name may be singular, but from the choir of voices singing the opening tune 'A Song For Europe' to the child's voice at the end of seafaring epic 'Hello Salty Salty', this is very much a community effort and feels like it, with Stephen's core collaborators Jimi Scandal (guitar) and Crompton Whesp (drums) joined by guests like former Curve/Echobelly bassist Debbie Smith, longtime Cardiacs keyboard player William D Drake and Hurtling/My Bloody Valentine guitarist and keyboard player Jen Macro. The mood palate is on just as grand a scale as the personnel list, from the Nick Drake-style acoustic guitar/strings interplay of 'Firefly' to the beefy hip-hop backbeat of 'BBQ Head & 7 Bells', a two part track, the first half dedicated to the joys of cooking in the garden, the second about paranoia and the threat of violence. Elements of psychedelia, some gorgeous analogue synth tones, a penchant for a quirky time signature and/or arrangement all add to what's already a very tasty concoction that anyone with an ear for a tenacious earworm or two will love.

Review: A triumphant return for modern synth-pop chart-toppers Everything Everything, Mountainhead is an album-length analogy for our present condition, and an oozing forth of slick, joyous music at that. "Making a mountain out of a molehill" is certainly lent a positive spin when considered in light of "starting from nothing", i.e. music career-making; Everything Everything did just that in the mid 2010s when they charmed their burgeoning audience with their sophisti-synth prowess, and this is a sophistication that can only be continually reinforced hereon. For their latest concept album Mountainhead, all of society is imagined as working towards the creation of a manmade mountain; at the top is rumoured to be a huge mirror that reflects endlessly recurring images of the self, and at the bottom of the pit is a giant golden snake; the primal fear of all believers. Everything Everything make joyous work of the dreaded maxim, "the taller the mountain, the deeper the hole", delivering glitzing, falsetto'ing gems in the form of 'Cold Reactor' and 'R U Happy?', both of which transcend their initial synthpop reveries to become more than their constituent sum.