Sleaford Mods are not just those two sweary guys with a laptop from Nottingham. Their unique mix of acerbic, politically conscious lyrics and lo-fi earworm loops have rightfully earned them a growing and devoted following across the country. Indeed, the audience at Manchester Academy is packed with moody 20-somethings and middle-aged punks. Rather than appearing intimidating, however, the atmosphere is full of camaraderie and childish excitement, as everyone waits for these de facto voices of the disaffected to take to the stage.

First up, though, is Nachthexen, an all-female four piece whose guitar-less new wave takes as much from early synth-pop as it does from Gang of Four et al. It’s easy to see why they’ve been picked as support for Sleaford Mods. There’s something no-nonsense about their music, which lets the monotonously despairing vocals (think The Cure’s first album) soar above them. “Have You Seen The State” perhaps most perfectly unites the hard drums, cosmic keyboard, and guttural bass underneath the singer’s bleak vision. Their new single “Disco Creep” is similarly indebted to synth music. It wouldn’t sound out of place alongside early LCD Soundsystem or the darker side of Bronski Beat.

They’re smiling because Williamson is confronting an important issue head-on

After Nachthexen finish, we’re treated to a playlist of Eighties power ballads, dad-rock, and oddness, seemingly created by someone who’s never heard what the headline band sound like (Joe Esposito’s “You’re the Best”, anyone?), until Sleaford Mods enter to an atmosphere nearer to that of a football stadium than your average gig venue. Singer Jason Williamson greets the audience with a chipper “Awight?”, before beats programmer-cum-nodding dance icon Andrew Fearn, in his trademark snapback, quickly triggers the first track on his laptop. The noodling bassline of “I Feel So Wrong” starts winding its way through the audience, and everyone begins to move.

With the set largely consisting of songs from 2017’s English Tapas, Williamson’s energy is such that he seems to fizz and pop with spit, tics, and fury, strutting around the stage between songs like a peacock. The contrast between the wit of “The angel of the Midlands has flown away, probably south” and the frequent raspberries made into the mic are part of what makes them so much fun live. There are also singalongs a-plenty. From the marching “Army Nights” to the dance-punk tinged “Jolly Fucker”, the crowd is behind Sleaford Mods the whole way.

The band’s’s enduring centrepiece, “Jobseeker”, kicks off the encore and whips the audience into a frenzy. The joy on every face chanting, “I’m a mess, desperately clutching onto a leaflet on depression supplied to me by the NHS”, initially seems odd, until you realise that they’re smiling because Williamson is confronting an important issue head-on. They fly through the driving “Tied Up In Nottz” and finish on the twisted choral demon that is “Tweet Tweet Tweet”. 

The night is best summed up by Williamson himself in one of his pre-song titbits: “I know there’s a lot of fucks and cunts, but really it’s all about love.” It’s comforting to know that there are still bands like Sleaford Mods with something to say that matters.

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Overleaf: Watch Sleaford Mods live on Seattle radio station KEXP

British singer-songwriter Nick Mulvey’s new album, Wake Up Now, is one of the year’s finest. However, there’s a moment on the single “Myela”, a heartfelt Afro-Latin stomper protesting the plight of refugees, which can grate. The song suddenly stops and female backing singers begin a nursery rhyme chant of “I am your neighbour, you are my neighbour”. On record it seems trite; however, in concert at this eye-pleasing, airy Bexhill-on-Sea venue, it’s transformative. Mulvey and his five-piece band use the sequence as a launch pad for a cosmic jam, before settling into a brief snippet of Gary Clail & On-U Sound System’s “Rumours” (“of war”).

The song is one of this concert’s highlights and Mulvey introduces it by deadpanning, understatedly, that “truth is not rampant” in the world in 2017. His music, by contrast, is fervent in its truth-seeking. It seems to be aiming towards a higher purpose and, at its best, achieves elevation. He may look quite ordinary in his jeans, black shirt, beanie hat and dark beard, but his skill with a guitar is revelatory, and his quiet demeanour is belied by moments when the music takes off to somewhere else. In a funny sort of way – and not musically – there’s something of the Grateful Dead about it all, but Mulvey and co. have not yet reached the place where four-hour jams are de rigeur.

The set runs through most of the new album, dips into his first album, and even includes an unreleased song called “The Doing Is Done” which effectively combines drone harmonics with an African chant aesthetic. His sound is very WOMAD, a stew of global styles, built around his voracious appetite for learning new guitar techniques from across the world. His band is there every step of the way, notably his wife Isadora on ukulele and backing vocals, his multi-instrumentalist sidesman Frederico Bruno, and, most visual of all (including the frontman!), the striking, blond-maned valkyrie Fifi Dewey on synth and scorching electric guitar solos.

The band leaves the stage to allow for a rather tentative campfire-style audience sing-along to Mulvey’s most recognisable song, “Cucurucu”, which he has to restart due to a cough, but is there to add texture to quiet beautiful songs such as “We Are Never Apart” and the new album’s stunning meditation on death, “When the Body Is Gone”. They don’t play one of Mulvey’s most popuar older songs, "Nitrous”, but they get away with it because there’s enough potency to keep everyone happy in new songs such as “Unconditional” and the encore-opening, enthneogenic ballad “Infinite Trees” ("Seems to me a galaxy is calling us/Calling us on and on/Calling us into its infinity”).

If I had a quibble, it would be that there’s sometimes a solemnity which adds occasional unfunky weight when this band make music that's elastic, wide-eyed and lighter than air. This could just be because it’s the last night of the tour and, in any case, it’s nit-picking. It’s a great gig, and it climaxes with the second best song of this year, “Mountain to Move”, so we’re sent off onto the wildly windswept seafront singing its ecstatic chorus, “Wake up now!”, an anthem for our times.

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Overleaf: watch the video for Nick Mulvey "Mountain to Move"

80 Aching Orphans ought to be hard work. A four-CD, 80-track, 274-minute overview chronicling 45 years of one of pop’s most wilful bands should be a challenging listen. The Residents have never made records which are straightforward or were meant to be, and have never made records conforming to prevailing trends.

Marilyn Manson, the man and the band, have maintained impressive global success for over two decades. Their albums – this is the band’s 10th - continue to shift by the bucket-load, and they can still sell out a worldwide stadium tour. Partly, their appeal is tribal. In the age of the beige hoodie and jeans, they don’t kowtow but continue to offer a studded, debauched black-splatter of Hollywoodised punk-goth kitsch. In recent years they’ve also undergone something of a musical renaissance. This continues on Heaven Upside Down.

As with 2015’s The Pale Emperor, film composer Tyler Bates is co-producer. Bates’s sense of drama and the epic, honed on Zack Snyder’s films and the Guardians of the Galaxy series, fits well with Marilyn Manson’s OTT sensibilities. This time round, though, after the bluesy theatre of their previous album, the band return to the attack of earlier works, but with the wannabe-Nine Inch Nails traits polished into something slicker and larger.

It doesn’t always work but there’s plenty to enjoy for both fans and newbies. “WE KNOW WHERE YOU FUCKING LIVE” has a doom-funk pulse that propels its hammy punk fury along, “Saturnalia” contains guitar work that truly sneers, as well as a cracking chorus, and the closing slow-stomper “Threats of Romance” sounds like something The Sweet might have written for a musical, which turns out to be no bad thing.

The band’s eponymous singer-lyricist still has a way with words, ever-ready to kick up a stink, notably with the catchy “KILL4ME” and its chorus “Would you kill, kill, kill for me?”. However satirically this is intended, it’s bound to cause raised eyebrows, appearing so soon after the Las Vegas massacre. Manson has, after all, been blamed by tabloid fools for gun atrocities before. More entertaining are the opening lines of “JE$U$ CRI$IS” where he claims he writes songs to fuck and fight to, then offers the listener out for both.

Entertaining is the word. Marilyn Manson still deliver on the promise of their look and attitude. Heaven Upside Down is not quite in the league of its surprise swamp-rockin’ predecessor, but the best of it belts out of the traps with a pop-industrial panache that’s unarguable.

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Overleaf: Watch the video for Marilyn Manson "WE KNOW WHERE YOU FUCKING LIVE"

September and October see a deluge of new releases. Everybody and their aunt puts out an album as autumn hits, so theartsdesk on Vinyl appears this month (and next) in a slightly expanded edition. As ever, the fare on offer is as diverse as possible, from black metal to Afro-funk via film and TV soundtracks. All musical life is here, ripe and waiting.

VINYL OF THE MONTH

Luciferian Towers, the third album since Canadian oddballs Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s 2011 reunion, is an instrumental psychedelic masterpiece that reflects our times without resorting to political bluster. Indeed, with two of its four tracks almost touching a quarter of an hour long, it’s also an album to sink into and absorb rather than a likely source of any radio hits.

Gary Numan famously has a devoted fanbase. For this album he had a live video feed that allowed them, for a small fee, to watch him in the studio, working on it from conception to completion. Unlike any of his peers from the post-punk years, he draws new young fans to his contemporary releases. His 21^st century career has seen him growing more and more gothic, heading far into industrial-electronic Nine Inch Nails territory, albeit with his own twist. He is many leagues away from the pristine synth-pop that made his name circa 1979-81.

Numan’s last few albums have grown progressively more and more morose, sacrificing his pop sensibilities at the altar of gloom’n’doom. The last one, Splinter (Songs From a Broken Mind), was unremittingly dirge-like. Savage, however, has an unlikely bounce, and is the best thing he’s done in at least a decade. It’s a concept piece, imagining a future world where resources are gone, all is desert, where “human kindness and decency are just a dim and distant memory”. Numan always had a thing for sci-fi. Indeed, post-apocalypyic Mad Max imagery influenced one of his less successful mid-Eighties looks. Savage is, then, as gloomy as ever, overlaid with Numan’s ongoing focus on biblical imagery and the perils of Christian dogma. What makes it is the sound, which is amped, widescreen, techno and adventurous.

Co-producer Ade Fenton has long been Numan’s partner in the studio, and he excels himself here. Songs such as “Ghost Nation” and “My Name Is Ruin” have a crunchy, granular electronic feel, but are also epic. And for fans of “the old stuff” there are even hints of the minor key synth riffs that originally made Numan’s name (especially on “What God Intended”). Numan moved to LA a few years ago and it’s as if the hugeness of the landscape has filtered into his music.  

From “Bed of Thorns” to Vangelis-like closer “Broken”, there’s also a heavy Middle Eastern flavour to the album’s melodic make-up, a muezzin wail translated to stadium electronics. The lyrics, of course, run along the lines of “I’ll show you ruin/I’ll show you heartbreak/I’ll show you loving/And sorrow and darkness”, but this time he’s unafraid of a big chorus. You can imagine “When the World Comes Apart” being sung en masse by fans.

Gary Numan’s latest album surprises by taking what he’s been steadily doing for a decade and a half, and reinventing it, boosting it, increasing its vibrancy and electronic power.

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Overleaf: watch the video for Gary Numan "My Name is Ruin"

It’s telling that, on their 2014 debut LP, Ballad of the Ice, Dori Sadovnik and Niv Arzi covered Bauhaus’ epic proto-gothic ode “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”. The 1979 single, with its incessant shuffle, dubbed-out tape delay and post-punk guitars, straddled the worlds of rock and dance with perfect balance and fine judgment.

The brass band/electronica interface is not a seam which musicians have previously mined regularly. Or, for that matter, at all. Mary Casio: Journey to Cassiopeia is probably – nothing else springs to mind – the only album teaming pulsing analogue synths with trombones, trumpets and tubas. Add in its creator Hannah Peel’s ploy of adopting the alter-ego Mary Casio, an elderly, small-town, north of England stargazer who travels to Cassiopeia, and it’s clear this is a high-concept album.

Across their 17-year career, Liars have become renowned for both their genre-jumping and for making good music wherever their stylistic tent is pitched. With founding member Aaron Hemphill leaving the Los Angeles band on amicable terms earlier this year, sole Liar Angus Andrew was left with the task of maintaining their momentum, and with TFCF, he’s made a uniquely strange album that encompasses this stripped-down band in both its music and its production.