Album: Laurie Anderson Homeland (Nonesuch)

As the title suggests, Homeland sees Laurie Anderson returning to the familiar territory of her opus magnum United States I-IV, with a series of ruminations and observations upon her native land, in which unashamed intellectualism – references to Kierkegaard, Thomas Paine, etc – is balanced by her dry wit and ironic delivery.

The first four tracks ooze by in a haze of wistful, elegiac bliss, before "Only an Expert" brings a more tart, sardonic edge to Anderson's critique, emboldened by Lou Reed's strangulated guitar and Kieran "4 Tet" Hebden's electro-bricolage groove. The album's centrepiece is the 11-minute "Another Day in America", in which Anderson's baritone-voiced alter-ego cover star Fenway Bergamot calls Dickens's bluff: "Will it be the best of times? Will it be the worst of times? Or will it just be another one of those times?"

DOWNLOAD THIS Transitory Life; Another Day in America; Only an Expert; Bodies in Motion