In a recent interview with theartsdesk Bombay Bicycle Club talked about jamming together in their kitchen in Covent Garden in central London, but listening to A Different Kind of Fix it sounds as if they had their sights set further afield at the time. Their third album boasts an epic ambition that was absent from their more intimate second album, Flaws. This is a set of tunes that is big but never overblown, confident but never boastful. There are some lovely, grand chunks of rhythm that should make Fix a fixture in halls of residence up and down the country this autumn and could even finally break BBC in America.

It opens quietly, with swelling strings that evoke Mendelssohn's Fingal's Cave. After they give way to a jazzy percussion and wordless vocal interplay, Carlyle declares, “I used to sleep/ Too many secrets to keep”. Floreat itself was almost a secret, almost not released. Thankfully, this dream of an album is now coming out. Seamlessly roaming across jazz, Cajun music, English classicism, show-tune styles and electronica, Floreat is one of this year’s benchmark releases.

Bruce Springsteen and Krautrock might not seem obvious kin, but the second album from Philadelphia’s The War on Drugs brings them together. It’s not clear what’s coming as Slave Ambient opens, but this is a dizzying, audacious and supremely confident journey that marries the seemingly disparate.

Nat Baldwin’s alt cred is impeccable. Not only is he a former bassist for Brooklyn’s über-cool Dirty Projectors, he’s also responsible for a string of releases that began with 2003’s free jazz set Solo Contrabass. Also prepared to take a stroll with the less cool, he’s been heard on a TV ad for Orange mobile phones, the one with the barefoot, ladder-descending lady. Although People Changes worms intimately in, it’s hard to detect a singular voice. Formerly in thrall to Anthony Braxton, he’s now trying on Arthur Russell.

So how did you survive the 1980s? I don’t mean money-wise; I’m sure you had plenty of that. I mean musically and therefore spiritually. It was a diet of Thomas Mapfumo and old Nina Simone albums that got me through the first half, until the Red Cross parcel of Tom Waits’s Rain Dogs arrived in 1985. Who knows how many times that treasured piece of vinyl got lowered onto my 30-quid hi-fi in my desperate attempt to ward off the encroaching thunder of Phil Collins’s drum kit and myriad other musical abominations of the period?

This is where the delirium kicks in. Tired but happy, the attendees started the third day of Sónar festival slightly boggled by how to pick and choose from the strange delights on offer. Saturday was when the true musical variety of the festival was displayed: straight-up hip hop to eye-popping South African tribal dance displays, balmy ambient revivalism to apocalyptic techno, heartbroken electronica to deranged prog rock: it was all on offer...

I'm tired of Emmy the Great being lumped in with crappy singer-songwriters who've had way too much hype but couldn't write a decent lyric if they were tied to a chair and had a pistol pointed at their temple. Emma-Lee Moss bloomed from a singer-songwritery London milieu but she's a cut above the pack.

The playfully titled, deliriously deadpan Kaboom doesn’t so much explode onto the screen as briefly sparkle then fail to ignite. Superficially it’s an intriguing confusion of murder mystery, Generation Sex romp and slacker comedy, and is relentlessly prone to flights of Gregg Araki’s trademark psychedelic fancy. As shag-happy as a teenage boy, with its drugs, witches, cults and cast of nubiles it sounds like fun, right? Unfortunately, for the most part, it’s a bit of a drag.

The last time I saw Atari Teenage Riot play was in a gig venue above a pub some time around 1999 and it was one of the most intense gigs I've ever experienced. Then-member Carl Crack – who would take his own life not long after – was clearly a man on the edge, and the entire group were acting wired, scared and weird. They made the most stupendous racket, and the well-over-capacity audience reacted by leaping about so violently that the building needed structural repairs afterwards. To be part of that seething crowd required commitment, passion and complete obliteration of ego – it was easy to see the power of the cult around ATR's leader, Alec Empire.