This BFI boxset of Derek Jarman films from the first phase of his career, brilliantly curated by William Fowler, is an exemplary package: a treasure trove of extras accompanies his first six features, here presented in re-mastered form, and a thorough, well-illustrated and thought-provoking 80-page booklet with extensive material about the films and a wealth of essays.

An album that enchants and surprises in equal measure, Heritage sees US sax player and composer Owen Broder explore the full gamut of American roots music – from blues and Appalachian folk to bluegrass and spirituals – through the prism of modern jazz.

Sometimes music reaches a point beyond which there's no point in going. Thus it is with Napalm Death who, 30 or so years ago, hit on a formula for furious noise generation, and though they've shifted line-ups many times since then, continue to make more or less the same racket to this day. OK, there are aficionados who will be furious at this allegation.

Last year, the BFI commemorated the 50^th anniversary of the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality with the release of Queerama, part of its Gross Indecency film season.

It rather surprising to note that Mary Chapin Carpenter turned 60 earlier this year, which means she’s been making records for half her life, around in ours for 30 years – but it seems like yesterday. She has wisely resisted the album-a-year treadmill, which means that in assembling the “reimaginings” of songs from her back catalogue for Sometimes Just the Sky, she had a dozen studio albums to choose from.

I first saw Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker at the Green Note in Camden just as they released 2013's Fire and Fortune album. The room was packed and they were brilliant, their own songs mixed with traditional pieces and choice covers. What was striking was that their own songs didn’t pale, lyrically or melodically, beside the others. Something good was going on here, embodied by Clarke’s limpid voice of longing, refute, realisation, and melancholia, alongside Walker’s brilliance as a guitarist and arranger. Since then, they’ve signed to Rough Trade from which came 2016’s stellar set of covers and originals, Overnight, last autumn’s gorgeous The Birds EP, and now Seedlings All, the duo’s first album of all-original songs.

And what songs. They have the heart and intensity of a lighthouse beam, warning travellers from the rocks and sandbanks of relationship, belonging, desire. And purpose, too, because the opening track, "Chicago", unpeels the humiliation familiar to many a rising artist in new territory – the gig where no one turns up. The musical settings range from artful, multi-layered art folk-pop through jazz. Kit Downes, with whom Clarke released another EP late last year, features on the album’s list of players, alongside Andy Cutting on melodeon, a cello trio and drummer James Maddren. And around them are Clarke’s voice and lyrics, both of which are singular in their effects.

Her voice, classically trained, is a superb instrument of emotional transmission, one that can encompass the wide-eyed and innocent, as well as the knowing and the hurt. Lyrically, she is on a different level to most of her songwriting peers in contemporary British folk. Songs such as "Bells Ring" take a metaphysical dive into what is, at first, a familiar bell-ringing image of love and union, but rapidly shapeshifts into something much more entwined, ambiguous and absorbing. Lyrically, hers is an intense set of interiors, backlit and spotlit by Walker’s settings, illuminating a heart’s abbatoir and boudoir side by side. Hers is a voice with a most human reach and resonance. Listen to these songs and you’ll find your own face there, reflecting the condition of your own interior.

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Overleaf: Watch the video for "Chicago" by Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker

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

The last we heard of US duo Daphne & Celeste was 18 years ago, when they made their name with three hits, notably the nursery-rhyme playground chant bitch-offs “U.G.L.Y.” and “Ohh Stick You”. They famously performed under a hail of bottles at Reading Festival in 2000, then disappeared, going on to peripheral film-acting careers. Max Tundra, an alt-tronic artist who is released on vanguard labels such as Warp and Domino, now engineers a comeback for this millennial, tween-pop pairing. On paper, this is a great, original idea. Upon listening, it’s partly successful.

Mostly gone is Daphne & Celeste’s bubbly juvenility, although they still emanate shiny glee and sweet harmonies. Instead, Tundra has created a meta-commentary on pop, conceptually similar to what artists such as Scritti Politti and The Associates were doing at the dawn of the 1980s. The music is modernist electro-pop, then, yet often awkwardly so, perhaps deliberately. Songs such as the one-minute title track, the bright-eyed “Sunny Day” and the pared-back “You and I Alone”, are straightforward and lovely, but elsewhere dense lyrics and production push into odder territory.

Having Daphne & Celeste sing lines such as “You extemporise/We’re too busy getting idolised” on the stompy robot-electro of “Taking Notes”, apparently a commentary on 21^st-century media, or meditate on the disappearance of a post-acid house pop star on “Whatever Happened to Yazz?”, is intriguing but doesn’t always work musically. Well, not as catchy pop, anyway. And the subject matter veers from the “vascular component” of plant-life on “Song to a Succulent” to an ace takedown of Ed Sheeran and his ilk on “BB” (“Three chords and a minor key/An exercise in mediocrity”!). On extended listening, it’s a surprisingly complex album.

Like Matthew Herbert’s production of Róisín Murphy's debut solo album, Save the World is often more cerebrally interesting than engaging. I was never in danger of falling in love with it, but at its best it boasts a post-modern novelty that’s both bemusing and fascinating.

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Overleaf: Watch the video for "You & I Alone" by Daphne & Celeste

The death of “world music” is a wonderfully reassuring thing. That is to say, with every year that passes, it becomes less and less possible for media and consumers to bracket together music from outside the US and Europe as a single thing, and easier and easier for us to understand specific talents and currents within global culture for what they are. Obviously the fact I need to even say this means there's a good way to go. But talents like Baloji, the Congolese-born, Belgian-raised singer-songwriter, are blasting away the simplistic distinctions.

Jack White isn’t one to shy away from a challenge. Whether it’s launching a record player into space to play Carl Sagan’s “A Glorious Dawn”, or embarking on seemingly unlikely collaborations with Beyoncé or hip hop act A Tribe Called Quest, he seems to be a game sort. It’s this ambition (with a small "a" – for "artistic") that we see writ large over Boarding House Reach, his third solo LP and the first he’s released in four years.