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.

On first pass, Beautica comes across as an exotic hybrid of 1991 school-of-Slowdive shoegazing and the fidgety music pre-Stereolab outfit McCarthy had perfected around 1989. But there’s something else; a lilting characteristic to the vocal melodies suggesting an inherent melancholy. Yet although the album’s makers were not bouncing with joy, the hymnal sense of reflection running throughout Bizarre’s Beautica is, contrastingly, uplifting.

There was a time, a decade or so ago, when US indie bands would adopt such idiosyncratic names it almost felt like a ploy to stop them selling out. No band epitomised this trend more than Brooklyn's Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. But whilst CYHSY managed to avoid crossing over into the mainstream, their self-released debut did become a cult hit. A biggish one.

The keeper on Burning the Threshold is “Around the Axis”, a glistening, three-minute instrumental rooted in the finger-picking of Davy Graham’s classic 1961 arrangement of “Anji”. Building from its inspiration, “Around the Axis” deftly interweaves three guitars, suggesting where Graham and other contemporary solo stylists such as Bert Jansch may have gone early on if they had not been lone instrumentalists. It also suggests one aspect of where Pentangle were at in 1969 and a familiarity with the 1966 Bert Jansch/John Renbourn album Bert and John.

Brit singer Rose Elinor Dougall is best known for her various associations with Mark Ronson and her time in the polka-dotted girl band The Pipettes. Ten years into her solo career she’s well-liked by much indie-centric music media but has yet to carve herself out a recognisable larger profile. Her second album, co-created with London producer Oli Bayston – AKA Boxed In – is sweet-natured, an electro-poppy extension of her 2010 debut, but, unfortunately, lacks real impact.

At September 2010’s MTV Video Music Awards, Lady Gaga took the stage in a dress made of stitched-together cuts of meat. The outfit, she said, was a political statement worn to draw attention to the aspect of the US military's don't ask, don't tell policy preventing anyone who "demonstrate[s] a propensity or intent to engage in homosexual acts" from joining the forces. The first female singer to wear a meat dress on stage, though, had less of a profile.

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

Oczy Mlody is so weak it’s a wonder it makes the finishing line. The album’s 58 minutes are taken up with unfocussed songs, fragmentary arrangements, moments of grating novelty and such a lack of sense of purpose, it’s hard to figure out why they bothered.

In 1996, the NME ranked Super Furry Animals’ debut album Fuzzy Logic as the year’s fourth best. It sat between Orbital’s In Sides (number three) and DJ Shadow’s Entroducing. Beck’s Odelay took the top spot and Manic Street Preachers’ Everything Must Go was at two. Fuzzy Logic was on Creation Records and the Oasis-bolstered label’s only other album in the run down-was The Boo Radleys’ C’Mon Kids (15).

On the final night of Iceland Airwaves 2016, Polly Jean Harvey and her band are ranged in a line just inside the edge of the stage constructed inside Valshöllin, a sports hall south of Reykjavík’s city centre. The festival’s five days have climaxed with a diamond-hard performance drawing heavily on this year’s Hope Six Demolition Project album.