In February 1983, New Musical Express ran a cover feature categorising what it termed “positive punk”. Bands co-opted into this ostensibly new trend were Blood & Roses, Brigandage, Danse Society, Rubella Ballet, Sex Gang Children, Southern Death Cult, The Specimen, UK Decay and The Virgin Prunes.

Peter Perrett is one of the most underrated songwriters. If people have heard of him, it’s down to The Only Ones’ classic, “Another Girl, Another Planet”, but The Only Ones made three albums (and an odds’n’ends collection) as the Seventies turned to the Eighties, all peppered with gems. Perrett also surfaced in the mid-Nineties as The One, with another album, Woke Up Sticky. However, since then, despite multiple false starts and an Only Ones reunion (teasing fans with unreleased new song “Black Operations”), there’s been no sign of new material until now.

Perrett’s career was famously derailed by drug use but, in his mid-sixties, he’s finally clean. Accompanied by his sons, Jamie (guitar) and Peter Jr (bass), he’s relaunching, and has a sturdy independent, Domino, behind him. The cheering news is that How The West Was Won is a good album, if not a great one. Much of it is, appropriately, devoted to loss and regret and, especially, his feelings for his wife, Xena, his partner in crime through thick and thin since they ran away together as teenagers.

“Epic Story” and “C Voyeurger” are heart-on-sleeve, almost teenage-sounding gushes of love, containing heart-wrenching contrition. He stares mortality in the face with a shrug on “Sweet Endeavour”, while “Hard to Say No” and “Something in My Brain” lay out wryly observed perspectives on addiction. The title track is incongruous but rather good, a wordy jam taking a poke at American cultural and imperial dominance (“We started out as a beacon of hope/But the dream of liberty quickly turned into a joke/The Indians and Mexicans were the first to feel the rope”). Jamie Perrett learnt guitar at the knee of Only Ones virtuoso John Perry, and he musters impressive work on the six-and-a-half minute “Troika” and others.

It’s an album that shows Peter Perrett’s unique voice on fine form, and his lyrical abilities undiminished since his prime. The shortfall is in memorable tunes, with only moving closer “Take Me Home” up there with his very greatest work. But that is, admittedly, a ridiculously high benchmark. As he sings, “At least I’m now capable of one last defiant breath,” I can only hope he has many more than that. There’s energized creativity here and it’s great to have him back.

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Overleaf: Watch the video for Peter Perrett "How The West Was Won"

This Anarchy Arias consists of 13 operatic covers of British punk rock classics from the late Seventies and early Eighties, and it’s almost all skin-crawlingly horrific. Clearly, then, this review is going to be a predictable reaction, from a writer who rates the original versions moaning about how their ultimate mainstream co-option robs them of bite, fury and authenticity. Why, for instance, couldn’t I take a step back and listen from a broader perspective, observing the post-modern nuance, the skill involved and the “sense of fun”?

The fact is, smirkers completely numbed by this century’s quest to achieve meaninglessness via irony might enjoy it but, for anyone familiar with the songs and their wider cultural cache, it’s a bombastic torrent of ear-bilge. It’s feasible one of these songs could be used effectively as juxtaposition in a feature film, and that the more light-hearted tunes, such as Plastic Bertrand’s “Ca Plane Pour Moi” and The Member’s “Sound of the Suburbs” suffer far less, since they were only a giggle to begin with. As for the rest…

The Anarchy Arias involves Sex Pistol Glen Matlock and opens with “Pretty Vacant”, whose pompous massed choruses set the tone. Punk has been effectively covered many ways, many times – such as the brilliant Gallic easy-listening of Nouvelle Vague’s first album – but part of the grotesqueness of The Anarchy Arias is the way lead baritone Stephen Gadd renders the words. A factor in punk’s power was its visceral, mangled enunciation whereas Gadd’s crisp, jaunty rendition of lines such as “Forget it, brother, you can go it alone” (from “London Calling”) vaporise all potency and meaning. “No More Heroes”, indeed, turns The Stranglers' spray-gun ire into a simpering fart suitable for entertaining the Bullingdon Club over dinner.

“Teenage Kicks” is no longer teenage. It’s a middle-aged man having a gloating wank over someone he hated long ago. X-Ray Spex’ allegorical rage on “Oh Bondage Up Yours!” becomes a joyless TV evening sucking off Simon Cowell to entertain Britain’s Got Talent. And, as for what they’ve done to The Ruts’ peerless “Babylon’s Burning” – it’s quite simply the sound of dreams dying. And so on. In short, one of the worst albums ever made.

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Overleaf: Anarchy Arias' terrifying version of The Stranglers "No More Heroes" perfomed on The One Show

Wow! An unconventional opening for a book review maybe, but ‘“wow!” nonetheless.

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.

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

Instead of resting on the laurels of the great music they made some 40 years ago, Blondie - still led by original members Debbie Harry and Chris Stein - are back with an album that tries to channel their past chart-toppers while also keeping in touch with modern pop, as filtered via collaborations with Sia, Charlie XCX and The Strokes’ Nick Valensi. Unfortunately for them, Pollinator reminds more of the Sonic Heroes videogame soundtrack than Parallel Lines.

The singles “Fun” and “Long Time” are overflowing with squawking keyboards, uplifting vocal lines, and overly metronomic (as in, dull) drums. “Fun” especially sounds like TV advert music. Whether it’d be better suited to soundtracking a Volkswagen driving past the Grand Canyon or people drinking Smirnoff in a club is, perhaps, its most engaging aspect.

“Too Much” draws as much on Journey’s abominable “Don’t Stop Believing” as it does Rebecca Black’s “Friday”; far too sugary and Glee-like to be enjoyable. “When I Gave Up on You” is four minutes of tuneless country ballad. Pollinator almost makes you wish Blondie were one of those bands who just do exactly what they’ve done before. After all, what was wrong with the edge and smoky haze of “Rapture”?

The album does have redeeming moments. The Johnny Marr-penned “My Monster” has Harry’s best vocal performance of the album,:quivering and melancholic, she sounds like a wizened rock’n’roller lamenting the mistakes she’s made, not least on the beautifully crooned opening line “Human beings are stupid things when we’re young”.

I really, really, really wanted to love this album but that just makes disliking it all the worse. Blondie by numbers? If only...

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Overleaf: listen to "My Monster" by Blondie