From beginning to end, B​-​Sides and Rarities plays through like a regular album; as though it collects a series of tracks recorded where a cohesive release with a flow was the goal. Yet this 14-cut collection is a compilation with its earliest selection from 2005, the year Beach House formed. Its most recent tracks are from the sessions which resulted in the two 2015 albums Depression Cherry and Thank Your Lucky Stars.

Hug of Thunder makes its case with “Victim Lover”, its ninth track. For the first time on Broken Social Scene’s follow-up to 2010’s Forgiveness Rock Record, the album takes a breath to focus on the song rather than its architecture. “Victim Lover” is a drifting, lovely reflection with a hazy atmosphere balancing a yearning vocal line against a soulful, gospel-esque chorus.

Considering Shelleyan Orphan, Melody Maker said “someone’s been smearing themselves in art…were they artists or did they just wallow in shit?” While the late Eighties’ British music press often made assertions to seek attention, slagging off a band because they sought to follow their own path is, with hindsight, rich given that roughly contemporary cover stars such as Chakk and Set The Tone dealt in music so precisely fixed in the moment they now sound as dated as Sheena Easton’s efforts to get funky and U2’s lunges at the blues.

“When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life,” said Samuel Johnson. It’s utter balls, of course. When someone’s tired of London, they’re probably just knackered and wouldn’t mind living somewhere with more trees, fewer people and in a house that isn’t partitioned off by papier-maché walls. For many, returning, like salmon to the counties that spawned them, is the obvious move.

While the 36 records reviewed below run the gamut of Wreckless Eric to Democratic Republic of the Congo Afro-electronica, this month there’s also a special, one-off section for modern classical. This is due to an ear-pleasing haul of releases reaching theartsdesk on Vinyl lately.

Initially released to coincide with Record Shop Day (we’re in the UK so yes, it’s a shop, thanks very much), we’re a little late out of the blocks with the Miracle Legion frontman’s latest solo venture, but then, The Possum in the Driveway is an album that benefits from a little time to bed in and take root.

Finally, a new band that lives up to a fine name and great cover art. Then again, Shitkid do a whole lot more than that. Their music sounds like the antithesis of contemporary chart-pop, which is refreshing, but even better, also doesn’t do the usual things artists do when they want to prove, absolutely, that they’re anti all that stuff. Shitkid is 24-year-old Åsa Söderqvist from Gothenberg, Sweden, and most of this album sounds like it was recorded down the bottom of a well, but in the best possible way.

Söderqvist’s M.O. is a punk-bored, sometimes cutesy, always teen-like, dry-as-the-Gobi Desert delivery, laying out matter-of-fact, conceptually isolated lyrics (eg, “Drive fast, that’s it, that’s immortality/I know, I’m wrong, and if I fall off I would die alone/And then again I’m happy with no helmet on/And he is behind, we’re on two motorbikes”). All this over an uber-primitive drum machine, occasional synth stabs and, more often, fantastic, sleazy Cramps-like guitar riffs, the whole thing sounding, apart from the lyrics, as if it’s been filtered through a musty old mattress.

Somehow, given how pared back the music is, the sonic muffle curiously allows moments that do shine to jump out in a really effective and original way. There’s a drugginess to it too, an opiated, downer-ville edge, even as far as the singing occasionally slurring like a gouching junkie. It adds to the otherness on tunes such as the nodding-out “Tropics” and the demented “On a Saturday Night at Home” which appears to be about Söderqvist’s bravery at facing “shiny, shiny” daylight (“It would have scared them, sure, to see what I have seen”).

There’s so much on offer here: the child-like, horror filmic psyche-out that is “Likagurl”; the unexpectedly amped up vocals firin’ into angst-ridden possessiveness on “Alright”; the uncategorisable synth slowie “Getting Mad”; every song's worth investigating. The dictionary definition of the word “uncanny” is “strange or mysterious, especially in an unsettling way” and Fish is a brilliantly uncanny album, a feast of difference, and certainly one of the most intriguing, exciting albums to appear this year.

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Overleaf: Watch the video for "Tropics" by Shitkid

Yasmine Hamdan has gone from being an indie star in Beirut a decade ago with her adventurous band Soapkills to being a bona fide solo star with a couple of sophisticated albums behind her, the latest Al Jamilat recently released.

As if listening in on the heart of a robot, it begins with a throb over which a disembodied voice sings as a classic motorik rhythm kicks in. The song, “H>A>K”, perpetually builds and then abruptly ceases. It ends with “I Wish”, where a folky melody is underpinned by rattling drum machine, insistently strummed guitar and analogue synth wash. In between, songs of secret societies, a mysterious architect and attempts to find a destination by tracking the paths of butterflies which may or may not be there.

That Pumarosa’s single “Cecile”, a Breeders-channelling monster, is not on their debut album says everything about their confidence. The 10 songs on The Witch have the heft of rock music, but also a more-ish femininity, both in the vocal department and the elasticity of their construction. They have a looseness, even an electro-pop funk on occasion, that’ll have student discos jigging to the likes of “Honey” or the seven-and-a-half-minute throbber “Priestess” (with its chorus of “You dance, you dance, you dance”).

Universal subsidiary Fiction is generally home to indie-style bands that are going to go large, the ones who dream of one day using string sections and playing US stadiums, all the while “keeping it real” by wearing hoodies and jeans. Snow Patrol were the blueprint band when the label relaunched a decade-and-a-bit ago and, since then, Fiction have had success with groups such as Tame Impala, The Maccabees and Athlete. Pumerosa are a perfect fit. The pairing should soar. They sound original enough to have what’s left of the music press slavering, yet their songs are also approachable, tuneful and lathered in gigantic production by Hot Chip/Bat For Lashes studio whizz Dan Carey.

At the heart of the band is theatrically astute frontwoman Isabel Munoz-Newsome, whose vocals swoop into terrain somewhere between Björk, Siouxsie Sioux and Florence Welch. Indeed, the latter is a good starting point for comparison, but Pumerosa’s music is less mannered. The lyrics throughout are opaque, ripe for interpretation, but delivered with suitable passion. “They keep falling in love with you/Angels and Philistines/Falling in love, it’s true/Prophets and punks/Getting High” runs the opening to the well-crafted Pixies-meet-U2 “My Gruesome Loving Friend”.

Having followed their career thus far, I'd hoped Pumerosa’s debut might be edgier, more envelope-pushing, which was, perhaps, unfair. Instead, from the catchy, bass-riding alt-rock of opener “Dragonfly” to the closing “Snake“, wherein “Baba O’Riley” keys groove off into a head-nodding psyche-jam, The Witch sounds like a big, prudently adventurous breakthrough release.

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Overleaf: Watch the video for "Dragonfly" by Pumerosa