The compilation album has a shabby reputation, and usually deserves it: a hurried shuffle of old favourites, a couple of scraps to tempt the completists, a contractual obligation with a sleeve. *Elf* is a different animal. Its title is German for "eleven", the number of tracks Roland Wälzlein, who records as Fish And Scale, has chosen from his musical journey so far and set beside brand-new pieces. He has hung them the way a good curator hangs a retrospective, so the older work looks freshly lit and the new work looks as though it has always lived there. The result is cohesive, atmospheric and, not to put too fine a point on it, rather wonderful.

Most Civil War songs end where the bugles stop. Foxy Leopard starts there. "Children of the War," the flagship single from the forthcoming album *After*, arrives once the armies have gone home, the flags are folded and the speeches made, and it turns its gaze on the people those speeches forgot. It is a song about the long afterwards, and it may be the finest thing this Quebec project has yet put its name to.

Most songs about a mob let you watch from the hill. "Burn the Witch" hands you a place in the crowd. Your neighbour is being killed by common consent, you know her, and you do nothing. The scenario is barely dressed up, and its cruelty is that the song never tells you what you would have done. It only makes you notice how quickly you begin to work out an excuse.

Some bands are formed in rehearsal rooms. TrixxStarr appear to have been assembled at the kitchen table. What began as the solo project of Dusty Starr, of Chihuahua and Les Biches, has grown into a family firm, with brothers Heli, C.C. and Darc pulling up chairs. On "Enough" the result is a band asking the question the rest of us dodge at parties: when do we stop chasing the things we've been told should make us happy? They ask it without a finger wagged and without a sermon in sight.

There's a moment, roughly ninety seconds into "The Hammer Goes Click," where Marcus Christ stops performing menace and starts embodying it — and that's the moment you realise Compton's newest disciple of dread has actually got something to say. This is not another straight-faced diss record dressed up in gun-metal bravado. It's something stranger, more theological, more genuinely unsettling: a track that begins as a challenge flung at the mic and ends up sounding like a sermon delivered from somewhere considerably hotter than the pulpit.

Melbourne has produced its share of pub-rock chancers and shoegaze introverts, but rarely has it handed us a rapper this unwilling to flinch. Noone's "C'est La Vie" arrives less like a single and more like a confession dragged into daylight after half a decade sealed in a drawer — and the delay, remarkably, has done it no harm at all.

Tulsa doesn't get much credit as a breeding ground for existential dread set to a 170-BPM click track, but themindwillnotletgo has quietly built a case for the city's home studios as some of the most dangerous rooms in American rock. *burnout*, the nine-track record dropping September 4th, is a wall-of-sound séance conducted entirely by one person — writer, player, engineer, mixer — and it sounds less like a solo project than a controlled implosion.

Thirteen is an odd age to hand someone a guitar-shaped microphone and ask them to say something true. Most who try it hide behind borrowed phrases, safe choruses, the sound of an artist rehearsing adulthood rather than living inside it. Peter Melodist does something more interesting on "Fear": he sounds like a kid who has already worked out that rock music was invented for exactly this — for turning the unnameable stuff in your chest into something you can play loud.