Like a fleeing convict whose survival demands constant movement, Mark Lanegan has lent his life-scarred blues-rock growl to various causes in recent years. But none of his hired-gun gigs – Isobel Campbell, Greg Dulli, Soulsavers – holds a candle to his first solo album since 2004’s Bubblegum. Blues Funeral deepens his pitch while exhibiting a range and grace beyond his death’s-head profile: you wouldn’t mistake it for anyone else, but its intoxicating potency and surprise swerves elude concerns that his outlaw front might calcify in cliché.

A new Field Music album is always a delicious proposition – and this, the band's fourth, offers much to sate the appetite. Off-kilter song structures, a rhythm section reminiscent of the kitchen drawer being emptied at the top of the stairs, and frequent homage paid to the protagonists of new wave all characterise the approach of Sunderland brothers Peter and David Brewis throughout Plumb.

Hans-Peter Lindstrøm isn’t all that sure about the record he’s just made. "I think this album might be hard for my label," he demurred in a recent interview. "I think I’ve gone further out than before, but I’m not sure if it’s for the best."

It’s an alarmingly frank confession from a man whose last solo release’s first track ran to a whopping 29 minutes in length. But, to be fair, the Norwegian producer’s been a sound judge of quality over the course of a decade-long career that began almost by accident.

A classic black-and-white short, silent film by revered French director Georges Méliès from 1902, Le Voyage Dans La Lune (A Trip to the Moon) is rightfully considered one of the most important pieces in cinema history, itself inspired by HG Wells and Jules Verne. In the years since its unveiling, the film has influenced (read: been nicked by) a whole range of talented artists and musicians… and The Mighty Boosh.

Compare, for a moment, Poison Idea to many of the well-groomed and immaculately-tattooed punks strutting their safe ‘n’ sanitised stuff today. Here was a band that was fat, ugly, ill-kempt and proudly degenerate. You’d never find them in a gym or their posters plastered on the bedroom walls of teenage girls, and their music represented an adequate enough summation of the bleak, brutal reality they inhabited: raw, belligerent and yet, for all its many sins, comfortable in its own sallow, pock-marked skin.

Maybe he changed his number. Maybe his pager’s not working or his Facebook account’s been hacked. Whatever the explanation, lithe southern gent Dan Sartain certainly didn’t get the memo to let him know that once you’re done with your youthful thrashings and ‘progress’ beyond punk, it’s generally not the done thing to revisit the misspent days of one’s callow, carefree youth.

"I’ve got no need for open roads / ‘Cause all I own fits on my back / I see the world from rusted trains / And always know I won’t be back." These lines, from the track Ghosts Towns, perhaps perfectly encapsulate this second LP from Florida native Ben Cooper, aka Radical Face. It’s a collection of lost-and-founds, sounds from artists already experienced given life anew by a singer whose M.O. is, simply, to inhabit these arrangements with a defined personality that presents the end products as wholly new discoveries.

When Leonard Cohen astonished his fans by deigning to visit the UK for a brace of shows in the summer of 2008, at least in London the loudest cheer of a night almost idolatrous in its appreciation came with the delivery of two lines from Tower of Song. "I was born like this, I had no choice," sang the then 73-year-old Quebecer, "I was born with the gift of a golden voice." With the clock hands now pointing at a quarter to 80, if anything the old boy’s voice has become more gravely resonant than it ever did. At certain points during Old Ideas it’s not difficult to imagine whales and dolphins surging out to deeper waters in fear of an earthquake.

The critical success of Errors’ gloomy, pulsating 2008 debut LP, It's Not Something But It Is Like Whatever, could have been the catalyst for the Scottish electro-indie ("post-electro," says Wikipedia) four-piece to unleash a rapid-fire succession of releases exploiting the bubbling momentum surrounding them. But rather than rest on their laurels, Errors pressed on with furthering their sound and, following a touring schedule that’d punish the most wanderlust-possessed act, the rich ambition of Come Down With Me arrived. A vindication of Rock Action’s patient support, and of the band’s own convictions, Come Down With Me is now followed by a third long-play set – and anticipation has been rightly brewing.

If you only afford The Twilight Sad’s third full-length a quick glance – and I won’t deny that immersing yourself in the Scottish trio’s bleak world requires effort – you might perceive a kind of dark, twisted Editors. Popularised by Interpol, this strain of brooding indie-rock isn’t much in vogue these days; those seeking quick success have moved on, busy mining other quarries. In a way that suits No One Can Ever Know down to the ground, as it implies a band left behind, isolated.

Begone, indie-is-dead doom-mongers! As east London-based, Edinburgh-formed four-piece Django Django prove on this thrilling debut long-play platter, there’s life in the old dogged-by-disdain genre yet. Smart but not showy, clever but never at the expense of a catchy hook, this is ‘indie’ par excellence: guitars that ring through the mix like a clarion call from the inspired to take up arms against the dunderheaded legions of lad-rockers; buzzing synths that swirl around like a cloud of friendly wasps; lyrics delivered in mantras, summoning forth similar sermons to those once purveyed by the mighty Beta Band.

The Guardian’s recent claim that indie rock is suffering a slow and painful death (underlined by Official Charts Company figures showing that pop albums just outsold rock albums for the first time in seven years) at least makes a change from the Rock Is Dead debate that reappears with comet-style regularity. But when you’re not Radiohead (and at a pinch, the retro-themed Horrors), there’s enough evidence that few guitar bands have reinvention on the agenda. A case in point: New York trio Nada Surf’s sixth album (not including 2010’s covers project If I Had A Hi-Fi). It’s been four years since Lucky, which as usual sat somewhere between R.E.M. and Hüsker Dü, without the distinct charisma of either but as capable of euphoric uplift with hearts hanging out on sleeves. But it might as well be four minutes for all the change The Stars Are Indifferent to Astronomy heralds. Perhaps the album should be named Bands Are Indifferent to Change.