The real test of whether an album stands apart from everything else is not whether it’s well crafted, moves a genre forward, is thrillingly original or is searingly confessional. The list could go on. The measure is whether it invites revisiting. Repeatedly. There’ve been many magnificent releases this year, but The Echo Show by Paris duo Yeti Lane is the one which has to be heard more than any other - again, again and again. This seductive swoon of an album has a rare beauty transcending the styles it’s rooted in.

End of year lists are, of course, wildly arbitrary – based on what raddled writers can scrape from their memory-barrels come deadline day, with half an eye on what we think our colleagues are going to pick so our choices will end up in aggregated lists too.

John Carpenter: Halloween II/Halloween III

Kieron Tyler

Being told that Magical Mystery Tour was a home movie is bit tiring. Self-evidently, The Beatles’ filmic response to the psychedelic experience was not that. They tried, and failed, to hire Shepperton Studios. Known artists like Ivor Cutler and The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band were brought on board. Gavrik Losey, then hot from being an assistant director on Modesty Blaise, worked on it. Masses of extras were employed. Although a self-originated vanity project, none of this points to it being a home movie.

B B King: Ladies & Gentlemen…Mr B.B. King

Kieron Tyler

Despite the fact that this month marks the 50th anniversary of the release of The Beatles’ first single, the focus on the Fabs right now is as much on their 1967 psychedelic folly Magical Mystery Tour. The arrival of Tame Impala’s second album seems appropriate as it’s a modern psychedelia which knows all about the detachment brought by mind expansion – the distant vocals on opening cut “Be Above it” echo John Lennon’s on “Strawberry Fields Forever”.

R.E.M.: Document 25th Anniversary Edition

Kieron Tyler

Shields leaves standing everything Grizzly Bear have done previously. Four albums in, the Brooklyn quartet move forward with their most focused, most cohesive album yet. The folk influence remains, as do traces of their love of The Beach Boys, but Shields is – mostly – so confident it could be a debut album. It’s also the first time all the songwriting has been credited to the entire band.

Nine albums and almost 10 years in, Animal Collective show no signs of smoothing the edges from their herky-jerk, ADHD psyche-pop. Vocals carry a melody, but everything else in the mix counters that – pinging sounds, Afro-inspired percussion, bloops, stabs of synth. Beyond Animal Collective, only a bear with a sore head could make psychedelia this twitchy.

Welcome to another show, in which Joe guides us around some of the weirder, smokier corners of the broad church of hip hop, and discussion returns to how far genre can stretch and where originality can reside in a multi-channel, everything-available-at-once world. We also take a listen to more and less authentic sounds of South America courtesy of a Brit-in-Colombia, a Colombian Brit, and a legend of British underground sounds turning Colombian sounds into house music. There's some neo-psychedelia and neo-folk thrown into the mix for good measure.