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

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

One of the more interesting developments of this decade is a blurring around the edges of modern soul music: almost a complete dissolution, in fact, of the boundaries of R&B. From the hyper-mainstream – Drake, The Weeknd, Future – via Solange, Frank Ocean, Blood Orange and Sampha, to fringe experimentalists like Atlanta's Awful Records, international Afro-diasporic collective NON and UK one-off Dean Blunt, R&B is being remade as dark, unpredictable and unsettling.

This is, in many ways, an underwhelming evening, but the fault does not primarily lie with The Psychedelic Furs. Things start well with support act Lene Lovich who gives a lively performance, in a black’n’red ensemble with striped sleeves and a gigantic, beribboned, plaited wig/hair/hat confabulation which has something of Big Chief Sitting Bull about it. Despite not playing her only Top 10 hit, 1979’s “Lucky Number”, she whoops and theatricalises while her band delivers a suitably punchy new wave racket.

The Psychedelic Furs aren’t going to get away with not playing the hits, especially as this round of gigs is entitled the Singles Tour. The curious thing is that they didn’t really have any big hits. Despite a hefty and deserved reputation, based on their grittily swooning first three albums, and moments from the fourth, they only had two bona fide Top 40 singles. One of these, “Pretty in Pink”, they dispose of early in the set, almost throwing it away. Like Simple Minds with “Don’t You (Forget About Me)”, they allegedly have a tricky relationship with the song, due to its Hollywood recontextualisation by writer/director John Hughes (in the 1986 film of the same name: at least The Psychedelic Furs wrote their most famous song; Simple Minds, whose song was used in Hughes’ The Breakfast Club, did not).

All but one band member wear shades throughout - it was ever thus

Ostensibly reformed since the Millennium, this band has not been very active, until now. In concert, they're a six-piece, very much fronted by the two brothers, Richard and Tim Butler, who kickstarted the group during the Seventies punk era, although Sax player Mars Williams is also a big presence, showboating hither and yon. Most members wear hussar-style military coats with lines of closely set brass buttons, although Richard Butler, the frontman, soon takes his off to reveal what appears to be a dotted black pyjama top with white piping around the lapels. All but one band member wear shades throughout. It was ever thus.

Their set runs in the approximate chronological order of their single releases. This is not necessarily a good thing, as they begin with their richest material, cuts such as “Danger”, “Mr Jones” and, especially, “Love My Way”, which closed with a wolfish howl from its singer; then things slowly bog down in later, lesser fare, although they save their other hit, “Heaven”, until the end, before an encore of first album gold. The big problem, though, is the sound.

The Psychedelic Furs’ music is nuanced. It always had a heartfelt, frowning subtlety, with its rock sensibility more in line with Roxy Music or David Bowie than, say, The Damned, and yet the sound from the stage tonight is a smudged, indistinct blur of distortion, with the singing inaudibly fudged way down in the mix. It’s crappy. Putting all my cards on the table, I should mention there are also a few very irritating gig-goers who somewhat spoil my enjoyment. I grow heartily sick of precious, stock still, middle-aged once-were's who regard rock gigs as standardised church ceremonies they’re super-entitled to watch, unhindered by anything lively, social or rock’n’roll.

The Psychedelic Furs appear to be having a ball. Their set-list could do with tweaking but if you say you’re going to play the singles then you have to play the singles! There are rumours of a new album, their first in over a quarter of century, and the band seem invigorated. It bodes well. As for tonight, the difference between what they played and what we heard very much undermined this show.

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Overleaf: watch The Psychedelic Furs perform "Love My Way"

With the wind behind them, the San Francisco-founded band Deerhoof are one of the greatest live experiences you can have.

A striking and memorable debut made possible by a combination of crowd-funding and an Arts Council grant, Stories of the Sky combines 31-year-old Kev Minney’s twin obsessions, music and astronomy.

The second decade of the 21st century will undoubtedly be remembered for huge innovations in accessing music, just as much as for the music itself. As well as acknowledging upfront talent, then, the Hospital Club’s h.Club 100 Music shortlist for 2017 makes it clear what’s going on behind the scenes is currently as important as what’s out front.

It’s telling that, on their 2014 debut LP, Ballad of the Ice, Dori Sadovnik and Niv Arzi covered Bauhaus’ epic proto-gothic ode “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”. The 1979 single, with its incessant shuffle, dubbed-out tape delay and post-punk guitars, straddled the worlds of rock and dance with perfect balance and fine judgment.

The brass band/electronica interface is not a seam which musicians have previously mined regularly. Or, for that matter, at all. Mary Casio: Journey to Cassiopeia is probably – nothing else springs to mind – the only album teaming pulsing analogue synths with trombones, trumpets and tubas. Add in its creator Hannah Peel’s ploy of adopting the alter-ego Mary Casio, an elderly, small-town, north of England stargazer who travels to Cassiopeia, and it’s clear this is a high-concept album.