New Starts – ‘Under The Striplights’ (from ‘More Break-Up Songs’ LP)

When not making exquisite paintings of houses and funfairs in the nighttime, 21st Century Renaissance artist Darren Hayman wrote a batch of songs and formed a new beat combo to record them. After a series of more pared back records in recent years that perhaps were more obviously informed by folk traditions (and deliciously so), ‘More Break-Up Songs’ sounds like Hayman taking two steps backwards for a great leap forward. Here there is more of a (whisper it) early Hefner-esque excitable movement to the sound, a degree of the dervish offset by a lyrical tone that is more mature, certainly, but still fuelled by glorious observational bemusement. “Kiss me like I forgot your birthday today”. Marvellous. New (Stop) Starts indeed.

Peter Perrett – ‘Art Is A Disease’ (from ‘The Cleansing’ LP)

Three albums into the 21st Century’s most unlikely ‘comeback’ from Cult (Punk) Rock obscurity and Peter Perrett again makes what might be the most barren, beaten yet surprisingly uplifting record of the year. ‘The Cleansing’ is a wilful mess of contradictions, at once full of sneering barbs at Modern Life and profound declarations of Love In Spite Of It All. One gets the feeling that Perrett has lived enough and seen so much that he understands it is not necessary to agree in order to empathise; that the emotions filtering through all are universal even if our triggers are individual. Certainly one does not need to get what he sings about here in order to feel what he is singing about.

Death And The Maiden – ‘Ceramic’ (from ‘Uneven Ground’ LP)

‘Uneven Ground’ is the third album by New Zealand’s Death And The Maiden and it’s their most obviously pop orientated outing yet. The gothic underpinnings of their previous two records remain intact, which is no bad thing, but here they get just a touch more colour to the eyeshadow; a blush more rouge to the cheek. Detached and a shade defiant, ‘Uneven Ground’ is the sound of everyday trauma slowly unwinding; a mass of memory, dream, regret and confusion meshing together in a heavenly nightmare of DoomDisco introspection. Songs of a lost world for those of us too perverse to listen to a new Cure album.

Isobel Campbell – ‘Saturday’s Son’ (from ‘Bow to Love’ LP)

Wrapping the delicate bewilderment of her vocal delivery within a soft psychedelic pop blanket, in ‘Bow To Love’ Isobel Campbell has made an album that revels in the treasure afforded by the application of restraint. This is a mature work, where the echoes of those terrific collaborations with Mark Lanegan (is it really nearly two decades since those started?) continue to linger in the form of a ghostly Americana frayed at the edges and dissolving in discarded glasses of rye whisky. With this record Campbell asks us to bow not only to love but to the tenderness and vulnerability that come with it. An assured and delicate delight.

Alula Down – ‘DELPHI’ (from ‘The Leyline’ LP)

Interspersed with field recordings, Alula Down’s ‘The Leyline’ contains seven longer pieces that are mesmerising meditations on landscape and transitional experience, made in response to a journey from Delos in the Aegean Sea, across mainland Greece, up the length of Italy and across France to Mont St Michel. This 2022 journey followed the Michael/Apollo Leyline, but one certainly does not need to believe in Alfred Watkins’ theories to appreciate the album, for the sounds it contains transcend the concept, as all the best conceptual art does. This is necessarily the sound of simplicity, whilst being far from simple. It is the sound of inhaling earth energy and exhaling a contemplation of our own impermanence.