There is a huge amount of top quality releases out this Monday with 2012's best week yet for new music.

Living legend Lenoard Cohen is back with an excellent brand new LP after 8 years while Django Django release what we think is one of the best debut albums in a long time.

The Errors are back with their best album to date, The Field releases a new project under the 'Loops of Your Heart' moniker and there are two stunning new albums from Rise favourites The Portico Quartet and Andy Sheppard.

Gretchen Peters, Lana Del Rey, Crippled Black Phoenix and Charlotte Giansbourg all have new albums out also.

Django Django Django Django (Because Music)

Out on CD and LP Jan 30th

Those worried that British guitar music has lost its ability to refresh old forms should pay heed to Django Django, whose debut album posits an updated psychedelia that beguiles and delights. Their foundations are a rickety, minimal take on the music of the immediate pre-psychedelic era - Hail Bop employs heavily tremeloed surf guitar; Default takes Bo Diddley's shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits beat and bolts on a jerky R&B guitar line - over which are laid skittering electronics and bleached, vibratoless harmonies, as if Django Django's four members were supplicants worshipping the desert sunrise. Yet it's also an exercise in clever restraint: drummer and band mastermind David Maclean often eschews everything bar his kick drum, floor tom, cymbals and tambourines, creating an amniotic throb. Even as the effects pile on, Django Django sound refreshingly minimal. That's the right choice, because the songwriting here is routinely top-notch, the album gaining impact as it plays and the moods shift imperceptibly.

Leonard Cohen Old Ideas

Out on CD and LP Jan 30th

In modern music it is commonplace for ageing performers to attempt to prove that they have a lust for life capable of defying gravity's pull. But one of the striking things about this always striking album is just how unvarnished is the sound of its creator's relative fragility: "I love to speak with Leonard, he's a sportsman and shepherd," sings the narrator on Going Home, before adding, "He's a lazy bastard living in a suit." On the second line Cohen's voice cracks with such emphasis as to suggest this suit might be one of the last he wears. For a man with a gleam in his eye of such impishness as to make Sir Les Patterson seem decorous, this is startling stuff indeed.

As with any album to which Leonard Cohen puts his name, Old Ideas is a work which displays great finesse. The music presented is gentle, even fragile, with backing vocals and instrumentation similar to that heard during his brace of UK concerts four years ago. But as ever, it is the author's sense of poetic balance that renders this release as being a work of art. It is said that for every verse that makes it onto the lyric sheet, a further 10 make it to the floor. Such prudence bears dividend throughout this album. On the mysterious Banjo, he sings of an object of dread floating on "a dark infested sea": "It's coming for me darling, no matter where I go / Its duty is to harm me, my duty is to know." - A quite brilliant release from an unmissable artist.

Gretchen Peters Hello Cruel World

Out on CD Jan 30th

The title of Gretchen Peters' new Hello Cruel World is a pun on the famed exit line — a joke that, like the lovely melodies and deliciously textured arrangements framing these 11 songs - sweetens this captivating music spun from a year of turmoil. The Grammy-nominated singer songwriter from Nashville calls Hello Cruel World her "most close-to-the-bone work, written at a time when I felt absolutely fearless about telling the truth." Peters and her guest Rodney Crowell sing, "life is still a beautiful disaster," on "Dark Angel." But Peters keeps the accent on the "beautiful" throughout her ninth disc, with both her poetic language and the spare, evocative sounds she created in the studio to support her organic story-telling. Ultimately Hello Cruel World details the sheer trium ph of survival and of finding strength, joy and growth in everyday life despite the challenges of our increasingly complex times. Her characters, like the broken-hearted narrator of Natural Disaster and the human target of Woman On the Wheel don't just search for fulfillment. They take risks to find it. And none, as the album's title implies, are ready to either surrender or, to quote the poet Dylan Thomas, "go gentle into that good night." Peters' warm honey voice softens the edge of desperation in numbers like the character study "Camille," where a gently blown muted trumpet offers shadings of cool jazz, and in The Matador the earthy maturity of her phrasing injects empathy - a quality that makes all of Peters' songs ring consistently true - into a tale about the dark underbelly of love.