Back catalogue: Coldwave/Synth

Review: When Marie Davidson announced last year that she would be, "retiring from club music", many wondered what she'd do next. Renegade Breakdown, her first album recorded with a full band (L'Oeil Nu), answers that question. It sees the Canadian artist and her new collaborators deliver suitably arresting, personal and ear-catching songs built on mixing and matching a surprisingly wide variety of musical inspirations, from Blondie, classic disco and mutilated heavy metal guitars, to Kraftwerk, Billie Holiday, Fleetwood Mac and Daft Punk. It's a big shift for the previously highly experimental artist, but thanks to her skill as both a a producer and performer, one that works magnificently well.

Review: Reissued over two decades since its original release, the second full-length from Liverpool's Ladytron still thrums with the same sharp-edged futurism that made it such a cult touchpoint. Tracks like 'Seventeen' and 'Evil' captured a tension between robotic detachment and raw emotional charge, anchored in the band's icy synth palette and minimal, deadpan vocals. While 'Blue Jeans' flirts with glammy melancholy, 'Turn It On' and 'Fire' dial up the menace, tapping into something more volatile. There's something surgical about the sequencing tooi'Cracked LCD', 'NuHorizons' and 'Cease2exist' stretch into more abstract terrain, before folding back into hook-laced electro-pop with the closing title track and 'The Reason'. With Daniel Hunt and Mickey Petralia co-producing, the album took shape in Los Angeles but never lost the European chill that defined their sound. It's a record that helped redraw the map for synth-pop in the early 2000sineither retro-futurist pastiche nor pure nostalgia, but something sleek, cinematic and entirely their own.

Review: Liaisons Dangereuses self-titled debut album was not an immediate success on its' release in 1981, but its' influence would spread far and wide. Almost entirely made up of synthesized rhythms, chords and melodies - with the addition of stylish vocals from all three band members - it would help define the "electronic body music sound". It quickly became a big record in both Detroit and Chicago, inadvertently helping to inspire the nascent techno and house scenes. Listening again to this reissue, it's amazing how well the music as aged. While heavy on stylish posturing, it still sounds thrillingly futuristic and alien. It should be an essential purchase for anyone with even the smallest interest in the history and development of electronic music.

Review: On The Screen: an LP from the Belgian band Linear Movement originally slated for release in 1983. Linear Movement is mastermind Peter Bonne (A Split-Second, Twilight Ritual, Autumn) joined by Peter Koutstaal, and Lieve Van Steerteghem on vocals for several tracks. Some tracks appear on the exquisite Pulse Music cassette while the rest are previously unreleased. Linear Movement was featured on V/A The Lost Tapes compilation LP with their highly acclaimed The Game, described as an "unstoppable pop song". Linear Movement have been called "a more primitive, cold wave Visage", and have been compared to the Human League. Peter differentiated LM from his other projects TR and Aut by the distinct sound of the compositions: they were poppier.