Album: Crowded House - Dreamers Are Waiting

★★★★ CROWDED HOUSE - DREAMERS ARE WAITING Strong return for newly expanded quintet

A strong return for the newly expanded quintet

More than three decades after their acclaimed, self-titled debut, Crowded House has grown from a trio to a quintet. In addition to the group’s lead singer, main songwriter and founding member, Neil Finn, the current incarnation of the band includes co-founder and bassist Nick Seymour, keyboardist (and former Crowded House producer) Mitchell Froom, plus Finn’s sons Liam on guitar/vocals and Elroy on drums.

Album: Billy F Gibbons - Hardware

ZZ Top’s frontman still has the blues

The Blues is one of the few genres of modern music which isn’t completely in thrall to the Cult of Youth and there might even be a view that older is better among its practitioners. Indeed, the likes of John Lee Hooker and RL Burnside, to name only a couple, were still turning out tunes at ages when anyone else might have hung up their guitars and dedicated the rest of their lives to relaxing with some quality malt whisky.

Blu-ray: Masculin Féminin

★★★★ BLU-RAY: MASCULIN FÉMININ Godard's playful and philosophical cinema

Godard's playful and philosophical cinema

Jean-Luc Godard’s film-making career, a restless quest for a cinema that questions the medium as well as its place in the social and political context, is both astonishingly prolific and unique. Rarely drawing directly on autobiographical themes, sometimes refusing to be credited as the sole director, he nevertheless remains the most personally driven of all the stars of the French New Wave.

Album: black midi – Cavalcade

★★★ BLACK MIDI - CAVALCADE London experimentalists evolve into new pastures

London experimentalists evolve into new pastures

The title of Cavalcade, or a “dramatic procession”, could not describe better the contents of black midi’s new release. This cavalcade of an album moves between fast and noisy tracks like the singles “John L” and “Chondromalacia Patella” to the soulful “Marlene Dietrich”, the slowly building psychedelic repetition in “Diamond Stuff”, and the nearly 10-minute closing opus “Ascending Forth”.

Album: Twenty One Pilots - Scaled and Icy

★★★★ TWENTY ONE PILOTS - SCALED AND ICY The minstrels of millennial angst

An arrestingly upbeat release from the minstrels of millennial angst

If there's one songwriting technique Twenty One Pilots' Tyler Joseph has perfected over the years, it's the art of combining upbeat melodies with angst-ridden lyrics for maximum emotional impact. It’s evident throughout his band's work (and never more so than on 2015's multi-platinum Blurryface); Scaled and Icy simply takes the formula and pushes the "upbeat" to the limit. 

Album: Gary Numan - Intruder

The unsinkable electro-goth loudly tackles global environmental meltdown

Gary Numan says that his new album “looks at climate change from the planet’s point of view… it feels betrayed, hurt and ravaged… it is now fighting back.” Intruder is, then, a bleak, apocalyptic concept album. Given his last album explored similar terrain and that gothic dystopian wordplay has been central to his work for a decade, this isn’t new territory. Then again, his Eighties fans shouldn’t quibble.

Album: Lambchop - Showtunes

★★★ LAMBCHOP - SHOWTUNES The always mordan Kurt Wagner reaches new levels of gloom

The always mordant Kurt Wagner reaches new levels of gloom

Lambchop leader Kurt Wagner has suggested that the title of this album is semi literal: that he wanted to write “something akin” to classic, Great American Songbook show tunes, rather than his usual country-tinged style. If so, it’s for a rather gloomy sort of a show.