May: 18 albums you need to hear this month

Diagrams 'Dorothy' (Bookshop)

If anyone was going to make an album with a 90-year-old poet living on an island in the far Pacific Northwest of the USA, it was Sam Genders. Since founding Tunng in the early-00s he’s taken a strange and winding path, making very beautiful records with The Accidental, Throws and Diagrams, always with a gently visionary slant to the lyrics. Two years ago, he discovered poet Dorothy Trogdon, with the pair corresponding before meeting in person. As a result, Diagrams now have ‘Dorothy’, an album full of gorgeous electronic folk and psych-pop, with Trogdon’s observations of the minutiae of life, love and nature (“the kindness of rain”; “everything on its way to being something else”) sitting perfectly in the mix. And it’s great.

8/10

Scarper 'Warmer Squares' (Plexus)

Scarper’s new album is strictly UK business. Drenched in blissful colours, alternating tempos, ambient textures and scattered rhythms, ‘Warmer Squares’ feels like an ode to the M25 area, circa 1991. ‘Twisty’ is probably the most dancefloor-ready cut, but the solid broken grooves dancing around acid bass lines and bleeps on each of these nine thumping tracks could work any room at the right moment. The two ambient outros, meanwhile, provide a welcome break and boast arguably the best production found on the LP. Towards the end of the excellent ‘Fellow Munk’, a vocal sample from Kraftwerk reminds us that “music itself is a non-static phenomena” – a philosophy Scarper clearly abides by.

8/10

Carl Craig 'Versus' (InFiné)

Take dance music visionary Carl Craig, add a prodigious pianist, a pioneer of dub techno and an orchestra, and you get ‘Versus’: an album of dramatic neo-classical reinterpretations of some of Craig’s best-known work. A decade in the making, he leads his collaborators (a list which includes Basic Channel, Moritz von Oswald and Francesco Tristano) through an album full of grand themes. Passages of pummeling grooves, emotional strings and delicate piano are impressively tied together by Craig’s dancefloor expertise. His remix of Maurizio’s ‘Domina’ is transformed into a Lalo Schifrin-style thriller soundtrack, while ‘At Les’ morphs from sleepy orchestral ambience to growling tech rave-up at the flick of a baton.

8/10

Juana Molina 'Halo' (Crammed Discs)

Is there a cooler Argentinian than Juana Molina? She’s spent the last two decades constructing her own magical world with experimentalist electronica as her base – a kind of aural version of the Latin American hyperrealism of author Gabriel García Márquez and director Guillermo del Toro. ‘Halo’ smooches around in the same territory: beats flutter with hummingbird-wing intensity and elegant guitars flit in and out. As on the swirling psych-hop of ‘Sin Dones’, she often leaves a layer of the song unvarnished, scuzzing it up with electronic interference. Then there’s her voice, sweet and breathy, uttering lyrics that are always in Spanish, yet sometimes content just to form unfamiliar, onomatopoeic sounds. It’s endlessly bewitching.

7/10

Jamiroquai 'Automaton' (Virgin EMI)

Let’s get straight into it: ‘Automaton’ is Jay Kay’s biggest pop moment since 2005’s ‘Feels Just Like It Should.’ Its electronic confidence is thanks in part to keyboardist Matt Johnson, as well as a general rethink after 2010’s slightly underwhelming ‘Rock Dust Light Star’. ‘Cloud 9’, for example, is quintessential 90s Jamiroquai (which is a good thing), but ‘Shake It Off’ is a production in search of a proper chorus that only suffers further next to ‘Automaton’, which immediately heads for the stars. ‘Superfresh’ is less than the sum of its disco parts, though, while the less said about ‘Hot Property’ the better. But it picks up with ‘Something About You’ and ‘Summer Girl’, while ‘Carla’ is an electro-funk classic.

7/10

Calibre 'The Deep' (Signature Recordings)

The relentlessly prolific Dominick Martin follows up downtempo masterpiece ‘Grow’ with his most important d’n’b record in over a decade. This is the LP that knits together the sonic strains of his previously separate downtempo material and his signature liquid-funk arias: a delicious hinterland of ghosting electronica, Thom Yorke-esque psych-blues vocal tracks and monogrammed 170bpm snare textures. In particular, it’s his vocals that have hit new heights: he filters his own falsetto into sublime angelic shapes on ‘No One Gets You’, and nails a murmurming Yorke-like croon on trilling bluesy shuffler ‘Mr Natural’. Card-carrying Calibre fans will still slurp greedily at the traditional sonic watermarks – glacial piano arpeggios on ‘Complain’; the jungle-flecked briskness of ‘Echoes’ – but they’ll also float away on the lucid brilliance of the untied electronic immersions. With ‘The Deep’, Calibre seems to have finally unlocked all the secrets at once. Lord help us!

9/10