For the second time on this run through, I am breaking a cardinal sin of this list. Rules are important because without rules there is no meaning. There is no structure, just an infinite void in which everything falls in with everything else.

In the almost 20 years of me doing this list, I have stuck rigidly to the rules: no E.P’s, no live albums and no compilations of any kind. The latter includes the most heinous of commercial get-outs, the re-record of past material. I usually view it as a creatively bankrupt and backwards-looking move, deserving of nothing but contempt and cantankerous statements.

Then this turns up. Crippled Black Phoenix have changed beyond recognition from when they first emerged twenty years ago. This is therefore (and I’m trying to justify myself here) not a re-record but a complete reimagining of their very early material. They take the bones of the songs as they were in the noughties and then mould them into completely different beasts. It is a wondrous album. Full of haunting ethereal beauty and liberally doused in the anthemic but also simultaneously restrained school of songwriting that Crippled Black Phoenix absolutely excel in. For once I can look beyond the rules because this album is just so so good.

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