Robin Rimbaud, AKA Scanner, has been releasing music for over two decades. There was a point in the mid-Nineties when he was a media “thing” due to the way he sampled sounds plucked from the airwaves. Shockingly, this included phone calls because cordless home phones are as accessible as any other radio signals. He has long operated on the art-intellectual spectrum, bridging electronic, industrial and avant-classical, collaborating with everyone from Wire to Michael Nyman.

So to Fibolae, titled for a word that came to him in a dream, and his first album in eight years. Giving background to this release on his website, Rimbaud says “I lost my entire family and left the comfort of a familiar city, London, to live in a former textile factory to re-invent my life.” The album opens, then, with “Inhale”, a melee of ansaphone messages from his late family, as well as John Balance of Coil and others, all passed. This leads into a furious drum barrage which, in turn, settles to a mournful synth’n’strings arrangement, rage giving way to grief. It sums up the atmosphere. Furious tracks such as the enjoyably ballistic, seven-minute closer “Savage Is Savage”, the album’s juiciest cut, rely on dense percussion to express passion, but always backed by carefully chosen melodic tones.

Much of the album, however, is about mood rather than attack, and that mood is gloomy, albeit tuneful and often ear-engaging. “Nothing Happens Because of a Single Thing”, for instance, has a drum & bass feel to it, but is more like a film soundtrack than a dance number, while “Spirit Cluster” skitters and glitches but is laden with sad strings, coming on like a goth Moby.

Scanner, at his best, is playful, mischievous and accessible, as well as thought-provoking. Fibolae is a personal album, perhaps not the best entry point to the work of this once-prolific artist (this writer would recommend 1997’s accessible, oddly poppy and spooked Delivery). It is, however, an emotional outpouring that’s darkly worthwhile for those disposed towards a suite of crunchy, electronic melancholy.

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Overleaf: Watch the video for "Spirit Cluster"

Evanescence have been away for a while, and fans looking for a whole album of new material will be disappointed. There are only two proper new songs on Synthesis (plus a couple of instrumental interludes). Instead, it’s an album of operatically-inclined orchestral interpretations of music from the band’s previous three albums, tinted with a light touch of Gary Numan-esque gothic electronica. If you like the idea of Finnish symphonic metallers Nightwish having it out with Canadian mezzo-soprano balladeer Sarah McLachlan, then, hey, Synthesis is for you. Everyone else should stay well away.

Evanescence has long been the vehicle for lead singer Amy Lee, but she’s been off doing solo stuff, TV and film soundtracks, etc, since the band’s last tour finished five years ago. She does not, after all, need to work if she doesn’t want to. Evanescence’s 2003 debut sold enough to provide for her over the course of four or five lifetimes (or more!). So Synthesis is a labour of love, it’s Lee finally embracing her middle-of-the-road aspirations, assisted by Hollywood composer/arranger David Campbell. The tone has more in common with Celine Dion than her stated heroes such as Björk and the like. It’s the bombast of Sarah Brightman attached to the template of goth-pop hits such as Evanescence's globe-dominating chart-topper “Bring Me to Life”.

There’s something stentorian about it, headache-inducing, and not in that good ol’ heavy metal way, just in the sense that it’s teeth-jarringly histrionic. Take “The End of the Dream”, originally on their last eponymous album: it starts out moody and intriguing, Lee’s plaintive vocal emoting over a grumbling electronic tone and some bells but, about two minutes in it explodes into a dirge that then, in turn, blows up into truly preposterous Wagnerian pomp. Of the new tracks “Hi-Lo” and “Imperfection”, the former is forgettable but the latter has a certain gothic electro-pop bounce before it goes completely OTT like all the rest.

There’s a market for this kind of music, a big one, which is great news for Evanescence, but not for music lovers the world over.

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Overleaf: watch the video for "Imperfection" by Evanescence

An underground American star since 2010’s Strange Cacti EP, Angel Olsen’s distinctive brand of indie folk-rock was propelled to new heights in both Burn Your Fire For No Witness (2014) and then last year with MY WOMAN.

Mélanie De Biasio is a Belgian jazz singer, an album-charting artist in her home country, and rising star elsewhere. She is not a woman who takes the straightforward path. No album of Nat King Cole covers for her. No Jamie Cullum guest appearances on her third album, Lillies. Instead, she offers up her own moody take on alt-pop which, if she feels like it, as on the smoky slow late night piano title track, might sit within an immediately recognizable jazz idiom, but is equally liable to be something pulsing, electronic and very quietly groove-ridden, as on the single “Gold Junkies”.

De Biasio has said she composed the album by locking herself away, no flash studio, just her, some software and a mic. “I wanted to go back to the seed of creativity, the simplest materials,” is how she put it. Lillies is, consequently, often pared back. “Sitting in the Stairwell”, for instance, acapella, with just finger-click percussion, recalls the ethno-musical folk recordings of Alan Lomax across the southern US states, a blues worthy of Vera Hall, although De Biasio’s voice is gentler and more musically nuanced.

There’s not much you can dance to, unless we’re talking slow ballroom in a dusty bar in a David Lynch film, but occasionally De Biasio sets an electronic pulse tickering along. “Afro American” fits this bill, offering up a midnight electronic head-nodder, with a catchy tune and, tinted with flute, De Biasio’s original instrument. Lillies also has something of post-punk’s aesthetic about it. The closing “An My Heart Goes On”, wherein De Biasio whispers against a scratchy backdrop, is stark, sonically bleak, a bit New York no wave, but eventually builds via a rising bassline into something more red-blooded.

Mélanie De Biasio's latest work does not put her in easily definable territory, occupying jazz’s shadowed underbelly, but its gloominess is never morose, and what eventually shines through is warm and very human.

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Overleaf: Watch the video for Mélanie De Biasio's "Your Freedom is the End of Me"

Marilyn Manson, the man and the band, have maintained impressive global success for over two decades. Their albums – this is the band’s 10th - continue to shift by the bucket-load, and they can still sell out a worldwide stadium tour. Partly, their appeal is tribal. In the age of the beige hoodie and jeans, they don’t kowtow but continue to offer a studded, debauched black-splatter of Hollywoodised punk-goth kitsch. In recent years they’ve also undergone something of a musical renaissance. This continues on Heaven Upside Down.

As with 2015’s The Pale Emperor, film composer Tyler Bates is co-producer. Bates’s sense of drama and the epic, honed on Zack Snyder’s films and the Guardians of the Galaxy series, fits well with Marilyn Manson’s OTT sensibilities. This time round, though, after the bluesy theatre of their previous album, the band return to the attack of earlier works, but with the wannabe-Nine Inch Nails traits polished into something slicker and larger.

It doesn’t always work but there’s plenty to enjoy for both fans and newbies. “WE KNOW WHERE YOU FUCKING LIVE” has a doom-funk pulse that propels its hammy punk fury along, “Saturnalia” contains guitar work that truly sneers, as well as a cracking chorus, and the closing slow-stomper “Threats of Romance” sounds like something The Sweet might have written for a musical, which turns out to be no bad thing.

The band’s eponymous singer-lyricist still has a way with words, ever-ready to kick up a stink, notably with the catchy “KILL4ME” and its chorus “Would you kill, kill, kill for me?”. However satirically this is intended, it’s bound to cause raised eyebrows, appearing so soon after the Las Vegas massacre. Manson has, after all, been blamed by tabloid fools for gun atrocities before. More entertaining are the opening lines of “JE$U$ CRI$IS” where he claims he writes songs to fuck and fight to, then offers the listener out for both.

Entertaining is the word. Marilyn Manson still deliver on the promise of their look and attitude. Heaven Upside Down is not quite in the league of its surprise swamp-rockin’ predecessor, but the best of it belts out of the traps with a pop-industrial panache that’s unarguable.

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Overleaf: Watch the video for Marilyn Manson "WE KNOW WHERE YOU FUCKING LIVE"

London indie-rockers Wolf Alice’s debut album, My Love Is Cool, made it to no 2 in the charts a couple of years back. It was a bona fide success story and a rare thing, a gold record for a female-fronted outfit who major in grungey, ambitious post-Pixies rock. It was derivative, but also showed a feisty, admirable willingness not to be pigeonholed, especially on songs such as the ecstatic “Freazy”. Its successor initially seems destined to be even more wide-ranging, to reach headier heights, but then settles, during most of its second half, for being simply a decent album.

Let us not damn Visions of a Life with faint praise, however. There’s real meat to get teeth into. The clanging wooziness of opener “Heavenward” is immediately replaced by the sweary punk smash-up “Yuk Foo”, and then Wolf Alice really show their pop colours with the skanking, Slits-like-yet-polished “Beautifully Unconventional” and the lush “Don’t Delete the Kisses”, which comes on like an electro-pop commingling of Blondie and Franz Ferdinand, with Ellie Rowsell doing a Pet Shop Boys-style rap in the middle.

Her rapping makes a return on the unpredictably brilliant “Sky Musings”, the lyrics for which are literary, modernist, lateral, crafted, and dramatic. The swooping themes of “Planet Hunter” are more briefly and simply cast, an oblique, intriguing, self-repudiating love-life assessment – possibly – while the theatrically building “Formidable Cool” also weaves words with aplomb. Throughout, the ghost of the Cocteau Twins spooks about but never poltergeists.

And that’s it. Apart from the final, enjoyable eight-minute title track blow-out, the latter half of the album indie-coasts along rather forgettably. Never mind. Eight out of twelve songs is a good hit rate. And four of them are corkers! Also, most of Vision of a Life’s intended listeners will quibble less about indie predictability, which makes this an authentic, slightly-left-of-centre success story.

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Overleaf: watch the video for "Beautifully Unconventional" by Wolf Alice

September and October see a deluge of new releases. Everybody and their aunt puts out an album as autumn hits, so theartsdesk on Vinyl appears this month (and next) in a slightly expanded edition. As ever, the fare on offer is as diverse as possible, from black metal to Afro-funk via film and TV soundtracks. All musical life is here, ripe and waiting.

VINYL OF THE MONTH

The Horrors have always had a penchant for churning out pop-tinged gems, and on V, with help from Adele/Coldplay/Florence and the Machine producer Paul Epworth, they’ve applied their same winning formula to darker music. The album cover, a mishmash of faces, sums up V perfectly – it nods to a huge range of influences, creating something that feels larger and more engaging than all of them on their own.

“Hologram” oozes in with monolithic drums and hazy synths, storming its way to the four-minute mark before offbeat eight-bit sparkles create a solo that’s as bemusing as it is enjoyable. We’re hearing a highly polished version of a band who’ve always sounded highly polished. Next track, “Press Exit To Enter Hell” and single “Weighed Down” showcase classic Horrors, boasting sunny vibes and wandering structure.

The weirder moments of the album are among the best. The muddy “Ghost” is arguably the most out-there moment on the album, as its croaking organ loop explodes into a colourful blend of Americana, post-rock, and glitch-pop. “Machine” has an industrial slant which gives its catchiness a sense of danger and unease, whilst “Gathering” slowly turns from bland indie-folk to something that wouldn’t sound particularly out of place on Bowie’s Blackstar. It’s perhaps the most hopeful song on the album, with the refrain, “There’s someone out there, seeing everything and who knows what you know”, coming across as comforting rather than cosmically creepy.

V is an ambitious album, coming in at just under 55 minutes; whilst many of the songs could easily have been shortened into more accessible pop hits, their commitment to slowly building each song might just be what makes The Horrors still so enigmatic five albums in.

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Overleaf: Watch the video for "Machine" by The Horrors

Gary Numan famously has a devoted fanbase. For this album he had a live video feed that allowed them, for a small fee, to watch him in the studio, working on it from conception to completion. Unlike any of his peers from the post-punk years, he draws new young fans to his contemporary releases. His 21^st century career has seen him growing more and more gothic, heading far into industrial-electronic Nine Inch Nails territory, albeit with his own twist. He is many leagues away from the pristine synth-pop that made his name circa 1979-81.

Numan’s last few albums have grown progressively more and more morose, sacrificing his pop sensibilities at the altar of gloom’n’doom. The last one, Splinter (Songs From a Broken Mind), was unremittingly dirge-like. Savage, however, has an unlikely bounce, and is the best thing he’s done in at least a decade. It’s a concept piece, imagining a future world where resources are gone, all is desert, where “human kindness and decency are just a dim and distant memory”. Numan always had a thing for sci-fi. Indeed, post-apocalypyic Mad Max imagery influenced one of his less successful mid-Eighties looks. Savage is, then, as gloomy as ever, overlaid with Numan’s ongoing focus on biblical imagery and the perils of Christian dogma. What makes it is the sound, which is amped, widescreen, techno and adventurous.

Co-producer Ade Fenton has long been Numan’s partner in the studio, and he excels himself here. Songs such as “Ghost Nation” and “My Name Is Ruin” have a crunchy, granular electronic feel, but are also epic. And for fans of “the old stuff” there are even hints of the minor key synth riffs that originally made Numan’s name (especially on “What God Intended”). Numan moved to LA a few years ago and it’s as if the hugeness of the landscape has filtered into his music.  

From “Bed of Thorns” to Vangelis-like closer “Broken”, there’s also a heavy Middle Eastern flavour to the album’s melodic make-up, a muezzin wail translated to stadium electronics. The lyrics, of course, run along the lines of “I’ll show you ruin/I’ll show you heartbreak/I’ll show you loving/And sorrow and darkness”, but this time he’s unafraid of a big chorus. You can imagine “When the World Comes Apart” being sung en masse by fans.

Gary Numan’s latest album surprises by taking what he’s been steadily doing for a decade and a half, and reinventing it, boosting it, increasing its vibrancy and electronic power.

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Overleaf: watch the video for Gary Numan "My Name is Ruin"

Nick Mulvey’s 2014 debut album First Mind may be one of the century’s best so far. Album number two, then, has the critical bar set high. On that opening record, the ex-Portico Quartet singer-songwriter majored in complex-yet-simple songs that wove intricate Latin/classical-flecked guitar work with electronic tones and a sense of wide-eyed openness. Wake Up Now initially seems to be travelling a similar path, but soon proves to be marinated in African feeling and have its scope set more cosmically. It is a lovely album and a match for its predecessor.

In a cynical age, where irony is king, Nick Mulvey is a man out of time. Perhaps he’s the harbinger of a more beautiful era around the corner. In 2017, after all, even the word “beauty” is regarded with wariness. Imbued with the spiritual philosophies of Ram Dass, a surviving key player from the last age of peace’n’love, Mulvey’s music has an unfettered grace. He applies this to the plight of refugees on “Myela” and “We Are Never Apart”. The latter is a twinkling, gorgeous strum that seems to be floating in orbit, while the former may be held up as evidence for those who find Mulvey’s work cloying. Its Afro-pop “I am your neighbour/You are my neighbour” chorus will certainly be too nursery rhyme trite for many.

Much of the album, however, is inarguable. The intriguing lyrics of songs such as “Transform Your Game”, which boasts chunkier percussion than Mulvey usually goes for, are matched by a subtle musicality that’s both featherlight and delicious. The gentle, jazzy, almost ecclesiastical “When the Body Is Gone” is a song that sticks up two fingers to existential angst, even death itself, while the epic sing-along “Mountain to Move” achieves anthem status. There are moments when Mulvey faintly recalls Peter Gabriel at his most ecstatic but, other than that, there are no comparisons. He’s a man alone, pushing at the forefront with unembarrassed joy and longing. I want to go with him.

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Overleaf: Watch the video for "Myela" by Nick Mulvey