Londoner Ayman Rostom has been around the block and then some. For some 25 years he’s been a hip hop producer as Dr Zygote, for the past decade he’s made wiry and weird house music as The Maghreban – both of these aliases are still, it seems, fully functioning. Before that still he made jungle and drum’n’bass in the initial 90s boom. And now he’s got a new alias to write, as you may guess by the album title, some very sad songs.

VINYL OF THE MONTH

Hannah Scott Absence of Doubt (Fancourt Music)

The Smile’s second album Wall of Eyes, released in January, is a thrillingly discomfiting album by Radiohead alumni Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood and Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner. It has a coherent mood and flow, a great screw-the-musicbiz rock song in “Read the Room”, and a scintillator for all seasons in “Bending Hectic”.

White Roses, My God isn’t a Low album. It couldn’t be. Mimi Parker, Alan Sparhawk’s wife and partner in Low, died in November 2022. And despite Low’s many musical twists and turns, Sparhawk’s public return to music sounds nothing like any of Low’s outings across their 13 studio albums, the first of which was issued in 1994.

Sometimes a gig suddenly and completely elevates. Such is the case tonight when Moby, on his first UK tour in 12 years, plays “Extreme Ways”, his 2002 anthem for hedonism and its desperate consequences. What has been an adequately entertaining night blossoms into something more riveting. The 20,000-strong O2 crowd, previously mostly seated, rise en masse, move and sing along. The place is a-buzz.

I made a terrible mistake when I first got this LP: I played it on my laptop speakers. That’s not the straight up foolishness you might think, mind – after downloading something for review I’ll often play it quietly in the background while I catch up on admin, because it can be a good way of getting the general shape of an album, an overview as it were, before properly diving into it. But for this album in particular that really didn’t work.

As a live sensation, Fat Dog have been the talk of the year. The London five-piece offer a dementedly energized night out. Performative concerts, tight as zip-wire but hedonistic and loose round the edges. They’ve developed a solid rep for sending audiences nuts. Consequently, there’s a hungry new fan-base salivating for their debut album, WOOF. Coming in at just over half-an-hour, it captures their battering zing; short, sharp and ballistic.

When the first solo album by Tangerines Dream’s Peter Baumann was released in the US in 1977, its promotion was striking. Press advertising (pictured below left) said “he possesses the infinite vision that has made his group one of the most important contributors to mystagogic lore.”

Jon Hopkins is on a journey, and we’re fortunate that he feels he can share the trip with us. His latest offering takes the listener beyond the paths opened up in Singularity (2018) and Music for Psychedelic Therapy (2021).

The music of Brit alt-rocker Cassy Brooking, AKA Cassyette, comes from the emo school of pop-metal. Her 2021 debut single was, appropriately, called “Dear Goth”, she’s much-hyped by Kerrang, and has been tour support for both Bring Me the Horizon and My Chemical Romance. All these are apt reference points for the music on her debut album which is feisty, occasionally spicy, and – contradictorily – very precisely produced to suggest a gnarly aesthetic.