Only After Dark by Nick Rhodes and John Taylor

For decades, we have accepted the orthodoxy that 1976 was rock music's Year Zero; that the rise of the Sex Pistols was the defining moment in modern rock history; that punk rock is the musical and ethical measure against which every new band and movement must be compared.

But, clearly, this is bollocks. The first wave of punk bands had a brutal revolutionary energy, but, between them, the Pistols, The Damned and The Clash produced barely a handful of enduring tunes. The wider punk movement, meanwhile, lapsed into the selfparody of Generation X and Sham 69.

Axis Bold As Love by Jimi Hendrix

While it’s hardly an obscurity (it does, after all, feature Jimi Fucking Hendrix), there’s a commonly held view that the second of the three Jimi Hendrix Experience albums is the least remarkable. ‘Are You Experienced?’ has the advantage of being the album on which the world met The Greatest Guitarist Ever, while the last, the sprawling, expansive 'Electric Ladyland’
is held up as The Masterpiece; one of the defining records of the psychedelic era and one that people with more time on their hands than you and I have written entire books on. But ‘Axis: Bold As Love’? Well, it’s neither as furiously in yer face as its predecessor, nor as out there as its follow up. It’s seen by many as a mid-point; a transitional phase

Afterlife by Jody Wildgoose

Jody wildgoose is a man dedicated to music. He's supported Pulp at the age of 13 (in the appallingly named various Vegetables), busked in a Sheffield underpass for years and spent his 20s holed up in an attic with a four track learning every instrument under the sun. Such devotion to his art has rewarded him handsmoely with a quirky second album that combines Badly Drawn balladry, Beck-ettian instrumentation and Flaming Lips eccentricity. Unfortunately it's also left him approaching it as more of a science. He's prone to over egging his pudding and obsessing over every last detail, which makes it too studied. Lyrically it's just as introspective and academic (phrases like “rockmusic can set you free" and “pop music will swallow you” pepper the album). Wildgoose needs to cut down on the music theory or his pop might well go and eat itself.