The Duke Spirit’s newest album, Sky Is Mine, comes quickly on the heels of 2016’s well-received Kin LP and Serenade EP. Produced by the band themselves, and featuring vocal contributions from the likes of Josh T. Pearson and Duke Garwood, it shows a softer and more contemplative side of The Duke Spirit. Frontwoman Liela Moss goes so far as to claim that “sonically, Sky is Mine is the most tender record [The Duke Spirit] have made”, and she’s not wrong.

Ironically then, the first thing that hits you about album opener “Magenta” is the dirty and propulsive bass of Toby Butler, yet this sets the template for the rest of Sky Is Mine, which juxtaposes grit and beauty with mostly enthralling results. On “Bones of Truth”, soft strings ensconce the slow waltz rhythm in warmth and fragility, while the magic of “See Power” lies in the little discordances that pepper the song, giving it a biting edge underneath the deceptively pretty vocals and structure.

“YoYo” merges the avant-pop of Jesca Hoop with the exotic sway of Blur’s Think Tank, in what ends up being the most insistent and engaging listen of the album. It teeters on mania before plunging into the icy “The Contaminant”, a song with a vulnerability reminiscent of Daughter. Vocally, Moss describes the album as a “snapshot of a palpitating heart that values above all things, life”; while a grand claim, her crystalline vocals are never cold – on the contrary, the (perhaps underused) Duke Garwood on album closer “Broken Dream” lends Moss’s repeated “waiting, waiting, show me / fading, peaceful, show me” a vague sense of hope and expectation.

A beguiling listen, Sky Is Mine showcases this indie/goth band staying on top of their game.

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Overleaf: Watch the video for "Magenta" by The Duke Spirit

Perhaps most famous as the singer in seminal Nineties art-pop band Stereolab, Laetitia Sadier has worked hard in recent years to establish herself as a solo artist in her own right through a series of well-received avant-muzak albums, including this year’s Finding Me Finding You.

Pulling together a music documentary strikes me as a simple enough concept. Gather your talking heads in front of a nice enough backdrop, splice with archive footage in some semblance of a narrative order and there you go. There’s no need to, say, hire a minibus and attempt to recreate a near-mythological gig from 20 years ago. Especially if that gig happened in France.

Christmas came, and brought with it the usual silly-season headlines. "Vinyl outsells digital downloads" came the cries, bringing with them a vision of a plastic phoenix rising from the ashes. The truth was, of course, much more prosaic – digital downloads are falling faster than Icarus as more people take to streaming services and abandon even the most ethereal physical things for an internet full of stuff.

Meanwhile, in the real world, a rather wonderful release by Laurie Shaw, a ludicrously prolific 22-year-old, Ireland-based singer songwriter, passed by with barely a mention. That’s the reality of vinyl releases; many of the most interesting are limited editions put out for love rather than money on shoestring budgets by labels who appear to conjure magic out of thin air.

The beautifully presented, two-record package from Sunstone records is the first release proper by the multi-instrumentalist. It comes on the back of slew of CD-R releases (57 albums to date if his bandcamp site is to be believed) and is a work that reaches far beyond Shaw’s tender years.

The collection of 30 songs certainly doesn’t short change, but there’s much more here than simple value for money. While Shaw’s recording methods could most accurately be described as raw, marked by distorted guitar, sudden stops and occasionally chaotic percussion, they're never out of place with his bursts of vital, energetic psych.

Many will hear (correctly) shades of The Fall, the muscular musicality of The Coral and the energy of punk behind these songs, but there’s also an unashamed sense of American classicism on show here, from Elvis Presley to Don Fleming’s criminally underrated Gumball via Captain Beefheart's straighter moments.

The songs themselves are noisy, spiky and often fun (not least an inspiring cover of Tom Jones’s 1971 hit “She’s a Lady”) and so consistent in their resolute determination to lodge themselves in the listener's subconcious that picking out highlights is an almost impossible task. Having said that, the pummelling powerhouse of “Rights for the Native” segueing into the delightfully introspective “Double Denim” with its opening line, “Decade number two, Still in love with you, I wonder if the future will have boots that zip themselves,” is a moment I could happily revisit a thousand times.

Had I heard this last year, it would have undoubtedly made my end-of-year list, and I suspect that many would agree. It’s a solid argument for buying a turntable, but if you’re not for turning, you can buy the files on bandcamp. Think of it as a late Christmas present to yourself.

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  See the video for "Juice" by Laurie Shaw overleaf

Good grief, was Out of Time really 25 years ago? This was the seventh studio album from the li'l ole band from Athens, Georgia, and the one with which they finally cracked open the mainstream international market. This was when people still used to buy CDs, and a time when it was still possible for bands to sustain slow-growing careers which built steadily from the ground upwards.  

I'll be straight: I wasn't sure what to expect at this show, because I've never been a Björk fanatic as such. I loved – and saw live – The Sugarcubes as a teenager, I've raved to her Nineties Debut and Post era tracks, and I've enjoyed plenty more since, not least the intimacies of Vespertine [2001] and the wild expansiveness of Volta [2007].

There's a lot of neurosis these days about retro-ism and lack of innovation in music, as if the shock of the new is all that gives things value. Of course, this is something worth keeping in mind: we certainly don't want to end up in a Keep Calm And Carry On world of faux nostalgia for golden ages that never existed, ingested as an analgesic as the present crumbles around us. But taken as dogma, it becomes a very one-dimensional way of looking at things, and can stop us appreciating how much newness there is in our ever-complexifying relationships to the past.

One of the great things about club music is that it deals with ageing in very different ways to rock – and as such can offer fantastic creative rebirths. Witness theartsdesk's recent startling Q&A with Mark Hakwins aka Marquis Hawkes, who'd been around the artistic block and back a good few times before achieving his current success. Or Sean Dickson – the singer with Scottish indie band The Soup Dragons, who went from Eighties psychedelic janglers to Nineties baggy-clothed ravers, then faded away.

This is not a standard dance music story. Marquis Hawkes is one of the club music success stories of the past couple of years – since the first release in 2012 on Glasgow's revered Dixon Avenue Basement Jams, there've been many 12" club hits on multiple connoisseurs' labels, and his album Social Housing on the Fabric club's Houndstooth label has soundtracked many people's summer this year, with the artist all the while remaining anonymous.

De La Soul are the posterboys for creative longevity in hip hop. While some contemporaries have maintained a presence by relying on “heritage” status while going in ever-decreasing circles musically (hello, Public Enemy), the trio – still in their original line-up almost 30 years on – have never stood still. They've maintained strong relationships with the hip hop world, both underground and mainstream, while reaching out to interesting alternative collaborators (Yo La Tengo, Gorillaz etc) who've put them in front of new audiences.