The Deconstruction is the 12^th album from Californian rockers Eels, written and co-produced as always by perennial frontman Mark Oliver Everett (“E”). With 2014’s The Cautionary Tales of Mark Oliver Everett garnering mixed reviews, The Deconstruction seems determined to do the same, constantly blending the emotional with the whimsical. Whilst this works to an extent on a track-by-track level, it unfortunately makes the album feel disjointed as a whole.

Manchester trio The Longcut’s latest album, their third, comes nearly a decade after their last one, but is rife with ideas and energy as if it's still riding the crest of their initial success. Their M.O. is twofold, either shoegaze-ish, jangle-tinted numbers with wispy indie vocals in a singing style not a million miles from Ian Brown of The Stone Roses, or mantric post-Krautrock jams that pulse with building energy. The cuts in the former style are not dramatically special but the ones in the latter tend to be vividly realised and truly dynamic.

The best of Arrows boasts imaginative production, combining drone guitar tactics with subtle electronics. This is partly courtesy of Tom Knott, regular associate of psych-folkers The Earlies, who mixed the album and added brass sounds to the nearly nine-minute “Popic". It's one of the best songs, the album’s catchy chorused centrepiece, and it blossoms into a prolonged rock-out which owes debts to Philip Glass. Other stormers include the ascendant guitar-led instrumental “Beasts”, the bleepy synth banger “Deathmask” and the closing “Monuments”, a Godspeed You! Black Emperor-esque wall of euphoric guitar distortion.

The slower, janglier cuts, the ones with more focus on singing, are not quite as effective, but neither are they a wash-out. So much about popular music is timing and luck. It’s so often about catching a wave as it starts to swell, riding a combination of genuine gigging popularity, fan devotion and media acclaim. The Longcut’s stars were aligned perfectly for just under a year circa 2005-06 when they were one of the hottest new bands in Britain. For whatever reasons, their career never exploded and now bands such as FEWS are the hopefuls mining this territory. Don’t disregard this band yet, though, for there is enough potency on Arrows to bode well for a future resurgence in their fortunes.

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Overleaf: watch the video for "Deathmask" by The Longcut

Three years ago The Vaccines’ last album, English Graffiti, received a mixed response. It appeared to be a stab at moving sideways from the previous two, at proving they were more than just a guitar band in the classic indie mould, that they could also be studio-produced into the realms of polished pop. It was an experiment they’re now, perhaps, less sure about. In any case, The Vaccines 2018 is a different band. Drummer Pete Robinson has left, to be replaced by Yoann Intonti of fellow London major-indie outfit Spector, and keyboard-player Tim Lanham has also joined. On Combat Sports this five-piece re-engage with the tuneful, new-wavey rock that made the band’s name.

Once upon a time this sound was called “power pop”. After the original late Seventies’ punk explosion various bands embraced the energy but not the gnarly, lo-fi ethos. The Vaccines’ sound bears especial comparison to the American acts who did this, the likes of The Knack, The Cars, The Go-Go’s, The Romantics and Martha and the Muffins who bridged the world of sweaty, parochial underground clubs and slick, nationwide FM radio. On a tune such as the thoughtful “I Can’t Quit” this is writ large, but it’s also there on more thrusting, lively cuts such as “Nightclub”. It’s all bouncily catchy.

The short of it is that The Vaccines are very good at this. Songs such as the pounding, shouty “Surfing in the Sky” leap out of the speakers with undeniable verve, while the album also boasts a romantic side, hinting that band-leader Justin Young has found love in New York, where he now resides. Songs in this vein, such as “Maybe (Luck of The Draw)” and “Young American”, are among the album’s most likeable and unforced.

Combat Sports may not sound original to anyone with a sense of musical history, but that’s not really the point. The Vaccines are one of the only guitar bands who can actually reach the Drake/Dua Lipa demographic, which only makes their catchy retro stew the more unique and enjoyable.

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Overleaf: Watch The Vaccines perform "Put It On a Tee-Shirt" live

This column last encountered Cocteau Twins in 2015 when the compilation The Pink Opaque and the Tiny Dynamine/Echoes in a Shallow Bay album, which collected two EPs, were reissued on vinyl only. Now, it’s the turn of two albums-as-such: 1983's Head Over Heels and 1984's Treasure.

Considering the coal-dark nature of her music, it was unsurprising Sweden's Anna von Hausswolff was dressed entirely in black while meeting up at London’s Rough Trade East shop to talk about her new album Dead Magic. Less foreseeable was her sunny disposition and willingness to veer off topic. She happily explored what has brought her to this point and spoke enthusiastically about her inspirations.

For some a lack of development is failure; not for Kim Deal. Her songwriting and voice have influenced hordes of indie bands from the Eighties until now – indeed the “angular” clang and arch drawl of bands indebted to Pixies, and The Breeders, her band with sister Kelly, is as great a cliché as blues licks were in the Sixties and Seventies. Yet still, on this reunion album for The Breeders' 1993 lineup, the voice, sound and structures remain utterly distinctive and gloriously alien, a world away from the imitators, just as they shone out as different from all around them during The Breeders' greatest success in the grunge years.

Like all The Breeders' albums, this is short, as are the songs: 12 of them in 34 minutes. Yet each takes you places within its structure. There are obvious festival anthems, like the high-speed “Wait in the Car” with its stop-starts and “woah-oh woah-oh”s, and “MetaGoth” which almost sounds like a conscious Pixies nod with its one-note basslines playing off detuned Duane Eddy surf twang and shrieking lead guitar. But these are full of lyrical puzzles, snappy twists and odd tuning that could only be this band: nothing is obvious.

And when things brood, it's not like the slightly fuzzy drift of the last Breeders album Mountain Battles (2008): everything on “Walking with the Killer” and “Blues at the Acropolis” fairly crackles with energy and invention, and delight in the hum and buzz from misusing guitars and amplification, always in the pursuit of that ever-present strangeness. Lyrics are terse, full of repeated phrases, but every so often throwing up something eerily evocative like “junkies of the world lay across the monuments” or “I polish my scales and get nearer and nearer”. The title makes absolute sense: this feels like the work of people open to every sensation, all edges sharp, everything new and unfamiliar, even as they make no attempt to escape the sound they created all those years ago – a bit like John Peel said of the late Mark E Smith and The Fall: “always different; they are always the same.”

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@JoeMuggs

Overleaf: watch the reunited Breeders play 1993's 'Drivin' on 9'