At three decades deep in the creative industries, it's fair to say Trevor Jackson is a renaissance man. He is a designer, filmmaker, music producer, radio and club DJ, compilation curator, label owner (he introduced Four Tet and LCD Soundsystem among others to UK audiences), professional grouch – and impossibly prolific in all those spheres.

Disc of the Day reviews new albums, week in, week out, all year. Below are the albums to which our writers awarded five stars. Click on any one of them to find out why.

SIMPLY THE BEST: THEARTSDESK'S FIVE-STAR REVIEWS OF 2017

Alan Broadbent: Developing Story ★★★★★  The pianist's orchestral magnum opus is packed with extraordinary things

Óttarr Proppé, the stylish chap pictured above, was appointed Iceland’s Minister of Health in January this year. Last Saturday, when the shot was taken, he was on stage in his other role as the singer of HAM, whose invigorating musical blast draws a line between the early Swans and Mudhoney. At that moment, at Reykjavík Art Museum, it was exactly a week on from the declaration of the first results in the country’s Parliamentary election, the second within 12 months.

It seems to be the season for light entertainers to show us their musical chops, with Nick Knowles, Bardley Walsh and Jason Manford all doing their level best to prove that they are All Round Entertainters. Matt Berry, however, provides a rather different twist on the comedian-troubadour trope.

The autumnal release deluge is upon us. Vinyl’s thriving and writhing. Raise a glass to it. Do it. However, records that, in another month, would have been reviewed here, music that would have been in the ALSO WORTHY OF MENTION section, has been unfairly passed over.

Possibly named after a variety of magic mushroom, left-field Glaswegian six-piece Golden Teacher have been turning out their very strange idea of party music since 2013. Initially they did so for local freak-fostering collective Optimo but have since appeared via various outlets, finally ending up on their own eponymous label. Their sound is electronic but also organic, with percussion that rolls and sometimes has a touch of the more polyrhythmic, advanced drum circle about it. Don’t let the words “drum circle” put you off for Golden Teacher are an invigorating proposition.

Heavily stewed in the outer fringes of dub where the likes of On-U Sound Records have resided for decades, Golden Teacher are also unafraid to add layers of further psychedelic echo. In the case of “Diop” and the eight minute title track, tribal percussion designed to untether the mind takes over. A good reference point might be the best moments of Micky Hart’s Rolling Thunder album, if it had been made for Nineties clubbers rather than hippies (he’s the bloke out of The Grateful Dead who liked going cosmic on his bongos). No Luscious Life also has a post-punk sensibility, an edge that recalls New York skronk-dance outfits such as !!! and Outhud.

There are a couple of attempts – sort of – at vocal pop, or at least alt-pop, since it sounds nothing like the tween meme phone-piffle that mostly haunts the current Top 10. “The Kazimier” is Grace Jones by way of The Tom Tom Club and the synth-poppy “Spiritron”, a keys-fuelled ode to the singer’s “cosmitron”, is akin to Fujiya & Miyagi attempting to make P-funk.

There’s a lot of music about that doesn’t attempt anything new. Life is blighted by the stuff. Not Golden Teacher. In an era when it’s hard to do so, they use their imagination to push the boat out. This is head-fry music for freaky dancing. If they weren’t named after that psilocybic fungi, they should have been.

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Overleaf: Listen to a four minute edit of Golden Teacher "Sauchiehall Withdrawal"

An encounter with Homer Flynn is disconcerting as the extent of his involvement in The Residents is unclear. He acknowledges that he speaks for the eyeball-headed quartet whose identities are unknown. As he talks, it's clear he has intimate knowledge of their creative process, their motivations and what they think. He discusses them as “they”. Occasionally the word “we” is used.

Sleaford Mods are not just those two sweary guys with a laptop from Nottingham. Their unique mix of acerbic, politically conscious lyrics and lo-fi earworm loops have rightfully earned them a growing and devoted following across the country. Indeed, the audience at Manchester Academy is packed with moody 20-somethings and middle-aged punks. Rather than appearing intimidating, however, the atmosphere is full of camaraderie and childish excitement, as everyone waits for these de facto voices of the disaffected to take to the stage.

First up, though, is Nachthexen, an all-female four piece whose guitar-less new wave takes as much from early synth-pop as it does from Gang of Four et al. It’s easy to see why they’ve been picked as support for Sleaford Mods. There’s something no-nonsense about their music, which lets the monotonously despairing vocals (think The Cure’s first album) soar above them. “Have You Seen The State” perhaps most perfectly unites the hard drums, cosmic keyboard, and guttural bass underneath the singer’s bleak vision. Their new single “Disco Creep” is similarly indebted to synth music. It wouldn’t sound out of place alongside early LCD Soundsystem or the darker side of Bronski Beat.

They’re smiling because Williamson is confronting an important issue head-on

After Nachthexen finish, we’re treated to a playlist of Eighties power ballads, dad-rock, and oddness, seemingly created by someone who’s never heard what the headline band sound like (Joe Esposito’s “You’re the Best”, anyone?), until Sleaford Mods enter to an atmosphere nearer to that of a football stadium than your average gig venue. Singer Jason Williamson greets the audience with a chipper “Awight?”, before beats programmer-cum-nodding dance icon Andrew Fearn, in his trademark snapback, quickly triggers the first track on his laptop. The noodling bassline of “I Feel So Wrong” starts winding its way through the audience, and everyone begins to move.

With the set largely consisting of songs from 2017’s English Tapas, Williamson’s energy is such that he seems to fizz and pop with spit, tics, and fury, strutting around the stage between songs like a peacock. The contrast between the wit of “The angel of the Midlands has flown away, probably south” and the frequent raspberries made into the mic are part of what makes them so much fun live. There are also singalongs a-plenty. From the marching “Army Nights” to the dance-punk tinged “Jolly Fucker”, the crowd is behind Sleaford Mods the whole way.

The band’s’s enduring centrepiece, “Jobseeker”, kicks off the encore and whips the audience into a frenzy. The joy on every face chanting, “I’m a mess, desperately clutching onto a leaflet on depression supplied to me by the NHS”, initially seems odd, until you realise that they’re smiling because Williamson is confronting an important issue head-on. They fly through the driving “Tied Up In Nottz” and finish on the twisted choral demon that is “Tweet Tweet Tweet”. 

The night is best summed up by Williamson himself in one of his pre-song titbits: “I know there’s a lot of fucks and cunts, but really it’s all about love.” It’s comforting to know that there are still bands like Sleaford Mods with something to say that matters.

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Overleaf: Watch Sleaford Mods live on Seattle radio station KEXP

British singer-songwriter Nick Mulvey’s new album, Wake Up Now, is one of the year’s finest. However, there’s a moment on the single “Myela”, a heartfelt Afro-Latin stomper protesting the plight of refugees, which can grate. The song suddenly stops and female backing singers begin a nursery rhyme chant of “I am your neighbour, you are my neighbour”. On record it seems trite; however, in concert at this eye-pleasing, airy Bexhill-on-Sea venue, it’s transformative. Mulvey and his five-piece band use the sequence as a launch pad for a cosmic jam, before settling into a brief snippet of Gary Clail & On-U Sound System’s “Rumours” (“of war”).

The song is one of this concert’s highlights and Mulvey introduces it by deadpanning, understatedly, that “truth is not rampant” in the world in 2017. His music, by contrast, is fervent in its truth-seeking. It seems to be aiming towards a higher purpose and, at its best, achieves elevation. He may look quite ordinary in his jeans, black shirt, beanie hat and dark beard, but his skill with a guitar is revelatory, and his quiet demeanour is belied by moments when the music takes off to somewhere else. In a funny sort of way – and not musically – there’s something of the Grateful Dead about it all, but Mulvey and co. have not yet reached the place where four-hour jams are de rigeur.

The set runs through most of the new album, dips into his first album, and even includes an unreleased song called “The Doing Is Done” which effectively combines drone harmonics with an African chant aesthetic. His sound is very WOMAD, a stew of global styles, built around his voracious appetite for learning new guitar techniques from across the world. His band is there every step of the way, notably his wife Isadora on ukulele and backing vocals, his multi-instrumentalist sidesman Frederico Bruno, and, most visual of all (including the frontman!), the striking, blond-maned valkyrie Fifi Dewey on synth and scorching electric guitar solos.

The band leaves the stage to allow for a rather tentative campfire-style audience sing-along to Mulvey’s most recognisable song, “Cucurucu”, which he has to restart due to a cough, but is there to add texture to quiet beautiful songs such as “We Are Never Apart” and the new album’s stunning meditation on death, “When the Body Is Gone”. They don’t play one of Mulvey’s most popuar older songs, "Nitrous”, but they get away with it because there’s enough potency to keep everyone happy in new songs such as “Unconditional” and the encore-opening, enthneogenic ballad “Infinite Trees” ("Seems to me a galaxy is calling us/Calling us on and on/Calling us into its infinity”).

If I had a quibble, it would be that there’s sometimes a solemnity which adds occasional unfunky weight when this band make music that's elastic, wide-eyed and lighter than air. This could just be because it’s the last night of the tour and, in any case, it’s nit-picking. It’s a great gig, and it climaxes with the second best song of this year, “Mountain to Move”, so we’re sent off onto the wildly windswept seafront singing its ecstatic chorus, “Wake up now!”, an anthem for our times.

• More New Music reviews on theartsdesk

Overleaf: watch the video for Nick Mulvey "Mountain to Move"

80 Aching Orphans ought to be hard work. A four-CD, 80-track, 274-minute overview chronicling 45 years of one of pop’s most wilful bands should be a challenging listen. The Residents have never made records which are straightforward or were meant to be, and have never made records conforming to prevailing trends.