Benjamin Shaw has been a relatively prolific recording artist over the past ten years, releasing a number of albums which flit between bedroom lo-fi and glitchy ambience (check out Goodbye, Cagoule World and Guppy for a good cross section). He's not one for the relentless touring life though, and earlier this year he performed his first concert in 5 years at donaufestival in Austria (all the more random as Shaw lives in Melbourne, Australia these days).

Wild Nature! is Ivan The Tolerable's 4th record of 2019, and seemingly his 32nd release since 2011 (kudos to whoever is managing to keep track). It's the follow up to Rations, a mammoth, over blown full band affair which took the Ivan the Tolerable name into uncharted territories. But where that album revelled in excess, this one is the antithesis, moving back to basics whilst Oli Heffernan himself has reverted back to doing it all himself - playing, writing, sleeve designing, mixing, mastering and releasing via his own Ack! Ack! Ack! label.

A new album from Frog is always something to celebrate, but this latest effort sees the band in a time of flux. The flux being the loss of a member. And when your band only has two members to begin with that's a pretty big deal. So whilst Tom White departed the combo and moved to the UK, Danny Bateman was left in the US without a drummer or a job. A 1979 MX5050 tape machine seemed to be the answer to this predicament, which Bateman used to piece together this "solo" record (but one which is still under the Frog banner).

Seven years have now passed since the release of Imperial Teen's massively under-valued Feel the Sound album. That record was one of my favourites from that year, a textbook example of contemporary pop, and one which seemed to puncture the bubble of gloomy indie and rock which was the zeitgeist. They've finally returned with a new album, Now We Are Timeless, which firmly re-establishes them as trail blazers of this intelligent, but fun electro sound.