When we are all stuck inside, We Travel Time goes beyond our doors and windows out to coasts and coves, waterways and woodland, homes from home.

A personal travelogue of the human spirit’s destructive tendencies and romantic / physical desires set to some really good music? Close enough.

This is a work of collaboration and co-operation at its purest and finest, and perfect for a time when such gatherings of talent and ideas are currently the stuff of mere memory.

Where the world is seeming to shrink, this record expands. Where we become more isolated, this album both empathises and reaches out to include.

A genuinely whole new way to listen to Mark Lanegan

Gleefully bridging the neon and the otherworldly to provide something unique and – yes – fun

Alain sees and hears that which others cannot, and he also has an incredible multi-instrumental skill with which to bring his visions and ideas to life.

Deftly combining East, West and Middle in a heady procession of the electronic and the orchestral, calm and urgency that goes beyond the merely cinematic.

It’s a labour of love evident in the song choices and performance and if it sometimes feels a bit indulgent, then good.

at first glance it may well feel a bit strange to want to take in a lonely series of instrumentals documenting an incredibly dark period of history.  But there is light in here also.

If you’re skating around the edges and want to know what the fuss is all about then this serves both as a gentle introduction and a sampler for the wider universe that is Duke Garwood’s music

This is a mostly brutal yet surprisingly often touching look back to a time about which he’s never previously felt like talking about before, and probably with good reason.

Their characteristic melancholy is bolstered by a harder edge that is a progression from their more “recent” material (ie, about 5 years ago – they’ve been away a while)

Sometimes frightening, sometimes frightened, sometimes joyous, it matches the universe’s own predisposition for creating patterns and sense within a vast space.

Its very nature ensures that everything on here is a labour of love so even the most unfamiliar tracks from games you may well hate come across with the biggest heart.

It’s OK to feel loss, anguish and love here, because that’s what everyone else is doing.

Hopefully this is part of a longer journey between the two artists as Downwelling creates a calmly psychedelic world well worth revisiting.

Nastie Band certainly live up to their Art-Doom epithet by easily managing to be both, usually at the same time.

It is certainly not a jazz record, but in taking those sensibilities, rhythms, instrumentation and execution it’s perhaps forgivable to say that it might be – or at least might have been at some point.

Pretty much everyone who will buy into Bananas will feel an understanding and a kinship in here, thanks to an overarching warmth and a welcoming space in which to empathise, clap along to, or just sing along with the sweary bits. 

Things that felt closer, stronger and warmer in Summer now feel distant, fragile and colder.  But there is also more time and different stars in the sky to bring about contemplation instead of urgency, calm instead of passion and a whole different sort of beauty and joy to be found wherever you look.  This is all displayed perfectly within this record.