For over 30 years, Melvins have been flagbearers for a kind of foundational American underground rock. Monstrously psychedelic, heavy as lead, mischievous and angry, they are part of a lineage that connects to squarepeg counterculture forefathers like Beefheart and The Fugs, share swathes of DNA with heavy metal and particularly Black Sabbath, and are particularly impervious to outside cultural shifts. Though they were fleetingly affiliated by the media with grunge, thanks to founder Buzz Osborne's musical and personal relationship to Kurt Cobain, they were something else.

In 1990, Ride were in the first wave of the Shoegazing scene to get out of the blocks and into the studio to record their iconic debut EP. Four albums and a sack load of EPs and singles later, however, they called it a day and the four lads from Oxford slouched off to join Oasis, the Jesus and Mary Chain, put out solo records and, in bassist Steve Queralt’s case, to take up a career in retail at Habitat. And that seemingly was that. However, in 2015 fate intervened and the Coachella Festival came calling with the offer to get back together in front of a crowd of 70,000.

Fat cigar at hand, Jim Morrison is pondering the future of music. “Maybe it might rely heavily on electronics, tapes,” he says. “I can envision maybe one person with a lot of machines, tapes and electronic set ups, singing or speaking and using machines.” When that prediction was first broadcast in late June 1969, what he described may have seemed outlandish but it came to pass. He can’t be held responsible for Howard Jones, but whole genres of music evolved which revolved around solo artists utilising, indeed, machines, tapes and electronic set ups.

Hoyt Axton’s songs were heard most widely when recorded by others. Steppenwolf recorded his “The Pusher” in 1967. It featured on their early 1968 debut album but was most pervasive in summer 1969 after it was included on the soundtrack of Easy Rider. Axton himself didn’t release a version until 1971, when “The Pusher” appeared on his Joy to the World album. The title track, another of his best-known compositions, had charted earlier that year for Three Dog Night. Back in early 1963 "Greenback Dollar", which Axton had co-written, was a US hit for The Kingston Trio.

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.

 “Electronic music, feedback, imaginative identification with colours and art and unique sounds is our art-from. We feel we are contributing to the new ‘total sound culture.’ This culture will take its place in the world just as the Renaissance and Picasso’s blue period has.”

The September 1966 press release accompanying The Creation’s second single “Painter Man” wasn’t shy. Its front page declared “We see our music as colours – it’s purple with red flashes.” If all that weren’t enough, the quote was attributed to Creation 1 v ii, as if the bible was being quoted.

This sounds like Slowdive. That, in a sense, is all you need to know: the Reading-formed band’s first album in 22 years has all the elements that made them musical misfits during their brief career, but over the years an ever-bigger cult.

As 1967 ended, The Beatles’ “Hello Goodbye” sat at the top of the British singles chart and Billboard’s Hot 100 in America. Musically trite – “blandly catchy”, declared the writer Ian MacDonald – the single’s banal lyrics pitched opposites against each other: yes, no; stop, go; goodbye, hello. Although Paul McCartney was saying little with the song, he was playing a game with inversion.

Soundtrack work may have been seen as a respectable sideline for veterans of the punk era for a while but it has taken 40 years for Paul Weller to join the likes of Nick Cave and Barry Adamson and strike out in this genre.