Album: Tom Odell - Monsters

★★★ TOM ODELL - MONSTERS Growing singer-songwriter seeks depression's roots

Growing singer-songwriter seeks depression's roots

It can be hard to separate this century’s male British troubadours, these children of Thom Yorke with their frail quavers, uniformly insisting on sensitivity, but too often sounding like entitled bleats. Maybe, as James Blake has defensively indicated, they simply reveal an epidemic of depression. In a desperate decade, mild yearning, not rage, anyway remains this genre’s default.

Blu-ray: West 11

A Notting Hill noir - Michael Winner's breakthrough is flawed but fascinating

The first 10 minutes of West 11 are arresting, with a sweeping crane shot over an ungentrified West London and a zoom in through an attic bedsit window. The credits reveal that the screenplay is by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall, from a once-influential novel by Laura Del-Rivo. There’s a catchy, moody score by the great Stanley Black.

Album: Stone Giants - West Coast Love Stories

★★★★ STONE GIANTS - WEST COAST LOVE STORIES Tripping Brazilian electronics

Brazilian electronic musician and producer Amon Tobin gently trips out

Amon Tobin has released plenty of music under quite a number of pseudonyms over his 25-year career. Using his given name and aliases like Cujo and Two Fingers he has taken on trip hop, break beat, drum and bass, as well as film and videogame soundtracks.

Album: Emma-Jean Thackray - Yellow

★★★★★ EMMA-JEAN THACKRAY - YELLOW Leeds via London, audaciously cosmic jazz

Leeds via London jazz of the most audaciously cosmic kind

Emma-Jean Thackray is not lacking in audaciousness. This is, after all, a white woman from Leeds barely into her thirties, raised on bassline house and indie rock, making music whose most obvious comparisons are with some of the most revered (in the most literal sense) black musicians in modern history: Fela Kuti, Sun Ra, Alice Coltrane, Stevie Wonder, J Dilla and more.

Album: Bobby Gillespie and Jehnny Beth - Utopian Ashes

★★★★ BOBBY GILLESPIE AND JEHNNY BETH - UTOPIAN ASHES Doomed love ruefully dissected by an appealing odd couple

Doomed love ruefully dissected by an appealing odd couple

Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra’s “Some Velvet Morning” is a clichéd indie-rock odd couple touchstone, and after an initial duet on Suicide’s “Dream Baby Dream” during the latter’s chaotic 2015 Barbican swansong, Bobby Gillespie and Jehnny Beth tried on Lee and Nancy’s threads the next year.

Album: Kevin Richard Martin - Return to Solaris

The Bug’s mainman takes an unsettling trip into outer space

It takes a brave musician who thinks that he or she can do a better job than the combined talents of Russian electronica trailblazer Eduard Artemyev and Johann Sebastian Bach. However, Kevin Martin, also known as The Bug and a prime mover for such sonic experimentalists as King Midas Sound, Zonal and Techno Animal, is clearly not someone who lacks either artistic ambition or confidence.

Album: Jack Savoretti - Europiana

★★★ JACK SAVORETTI - EUROPIANA Sun, sand and synth pop

Sun, sand and synth pop

“Dance like its ’76”, Jack Savoretti (born 1983) sings on “Too Much History”, one of many upbeat synth-driven tracks on his new album Europiana. 1976: a sweltering summer when the charts included “Happy to Be On an Island in the Sun”, a slice of Europop by Demis Roussos, who would shortly become the unseen star of Abigail’s Party.

Album: The Grid & Robert Fripp - Leviathan

The veteran Balearic dance popsters and the one-man guitar orchestra have a whale of a time

With his band King Crimson laid up, the only chance to check out Robert Fripp's guitar prowess lately has been in the Robert & Toyah's Sunday Lunch videos that husband and wife post on YouTube. Their popular weekly assaults on classic rock hits are a game mix of the heroic and the cringeworthy. Toyah Willcox is someone to whom the label “shy and retiring” has never knowingly been attached.