Sophomore records are never easy, especially when your debut was as acclaimed and beloved as french artist Melody Prochet’s first outing as Melody’s Echo Chamber, and this follow-up has had its fair share of bumps in the road. Prochet first announced Bon Voyage in April last year, on her 30th birthday; a new song was released, and a string of tour dates to go with it. But shortly after, Prochet was hospitalised following a serious accident that left her with broken vertebrae in her neck and spine, and a brain aneurysm.

For a decade now, Li Lykke Timotej Zachrisson – Lykke Li – has been a poster girl for the Scandinavian, and particularly Swedish, ability to find the highest common factors between high gloss pop and introspective indie/alternative music, and to make it into something that hides emotional heft behind glossy surfaces and impeccable poise

For the past decade, Victoria Park in east London has been host to the Field Day and Lovebox festivals, both homegrown and both still growing in size and influence. Last year’s headliners included rare appearances from Aphex Twin (Field Day) and Frank Ocean (Lovebox), bringing huge crowds to this vast and beautiful Victorian lung.

Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s four albums all centre around off-kilter pop and flirtations with distortion; their latest LP, Sex & Food, carries this tradition forwards in a more laid-back manner. Their current European tour in support of the album seems to have lined up nicely with the schedules of American acts Deerhunter, Black Lips and Sam Evian (as well as much-hyped British act Boy Azooga), with all five artists descending on the Albert Hall in Manchester for the six-hour Strange Waves III.

Few bands divide opinion quite like Snow Patrol. Their fans see their slow, intense anthems as cathartic friends. Others - myself included - tend to regard their music as an insidious, dreary presence. As Nicky Wire (of the Manics) once put it, "the same drab little thing, over and over". Wildness, their first album in seven years, is being billed as being something completely different - more passionate, and with a lighter touch.

Apparently, the shift in musical direction is down to various changes in the band members' lives. Singer Gary Lightbody has given up drinking. He's also been writing for Taylor Swift. Guitarist Johnny McDaid has been composing for the likes of Ed Sheeran and P!nk. But while evidence of these personal and musical developments can, indeed, be seen on Wildness, it's only on a few tracks

The best is the album's opener, "Life on Earth", a spritely tune full of Turin Brakes-style guitars and subtle harmonies. The arrangement is bright and catchy. Then there's "Heal Me", continues the acoustic-pop-rock vibe with hints of Alanis Morissette. Finally, "Wild Horses" is an honest-to-God stripped back, indie track.

Unfortunately, the rest of the LP is simply business as usual. "Empress" is full of Lightbody's trademark over-dramatic, breathy vocals. "Don't Give In" features lyrics that sound like they should be meaningful but aren't. The album's limpest moments are "What If This Is All The Love You Ever Get?" and "Life and Death". The former sounds like Coldplay on Valium. The latter whimpers like a wounded animal.

Of course, some will say that I'm missing the point; that some of the album's themes - like drugs, alcohol and depression - require a certain weight. I'm not buying any of that. In fact, quite the opposite. If Wildness demonstrates anything, it's that Snow Patrol are actually capable of creating perfectly enjoyable AOR rock once they stop writing songs that feel like swimming through porridge.

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Overleaf: Watch Snow Patrols video for "What If This Is All The Love You Ever Get?"

When bands move to the US, some find themselves drawn into the commercial machine; when Scottish band Chvrches crossed the Atlantic, they were targeting direct assimilation from the start. Recorded with mega-producer Greg Kurstin, the band are aiming to be more direct than ever; perhaps a wise move considering they’ve always leaned heavily on the pop side of electro.

The press ad for Spirit’s debut album wasn’t shy. “Five came together for a purpose: to blow the sum of man’s musical experience apart and bring it together in more universal forms. They became a single musical being: Spirit. It happens in the first album.” Of the band’s bassist Mark Andes, it declared “the strings are his nerve endings”. Drummer Ed Cassidy apparently “hears tomorrow and he plays it now”.

There are good musical reasons why it might never have occurred to you to wonder how Lady Gaga would sound if adapted by Duke Ellington; Radiohead by Sidney Bechet; or Bruce Springsteen by Frank Sinatra.

That Erasure have stuck to the tonalities of electropop – and not just electropop, but the extra gay hi-NRG flavour thereof, with Andy Bell's theatrical voice cartwheeling off Vince Clarke's fizzing beats – for seventeeen albums now makes them a gloriously reassuring musical presence. It also means that they are often not treated with the seriousness which they absolutely deserve.

There was a hint of what was to come in Gwenno Saunders’ debut, Y Dydd Olaf. It was, for the most part, a Welsh-language affair, save for the closing track “Amser”, a song sung in Cornish and the album’s dizzying slow dazzle. For her follow-up, Le Kov, Gwenno has chosen to record an entire album in this Brythonic language that has, in recent times, gamely rallied itself from UNESCO-declared death.

Le Kov, then, exists as a document of a living language, albeit one that the majority of listeners will have no working knowledge of. In order to make real sense of the songs, we have to do the reading as well as the listening – we’ve been dropped off in the middle of nowhere and asked to find our way home with a book and a map rather than a Sat Nav app.

This is, in some ways, a more assured album than its predecessor

That’s not to say that Le Kov is hard work – far from it. The sonic landscapes that these story songs inhabit are accessible: new, but posessed of a faint familiarity. It all makes sense when one realizes that the translation of the album’s title is “the place of memory”.

This is, in some ways, a more assured album than its predecessor. While there are still shared reference points with the likes of Broadcast and the Soundcarriers, there is also rare sophistication and scope at play. Opener “Hi a Skoellyas Liv a Dhagrow” (“She Shed a Flood of Tears”) boasts the sort of perfectly picked bass playing and soaring strings that one would expect of a vintage Vannier/Gainsbourg production, while the subtle shifts in “Herdhya” (“Pushing”) posses a delicate, electronic refinement.

The more propulsive moments are equally as impressive. “Eus Keus?” is glorious pop, with chiming, chourused guitars and a joyus refrain, while the melody of “Tir Ha Mor” (“Land And Sea”) positively surges, rising and falling with palpable emotional weight. “Daromres y’n Howl” (“Traffic In The Sun”), which sees Super Furry Animals’ Gruff Rhys joining for vocal duties, is another quirky pop masterpiece: mid-paced, but as far from middle-of-the-road as it’s possible to be.

At a time when we’re headed towards post-Brexit cultural hegemony, Le Kov is a wonderful celebration of a rich and diverse culture. Gwenno carefully frames the unfamiliar and, in doing so, shows us how stories can be told in different tongues, and yet be steeped in a shared language.

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@jahshabby

Overleaf: watch the video for "Tir Ha Mor"