Norwegian singer Solveig Slettahjell has a feeling for slow. Her 2001 debut album was called Slow Motion Orchestra, and in the years since then she has turned her very fine sense of how to convey the essence and the meaning of songs at a very measured pace into her calling card.

She has explained what draws her to slowness: “When I slow down the tempo, I can hear the sound in the words, there are so many little details when you play and sing slowly. These little details fascinate me.”

It’s quite unusual for the extras on a DVD release to talk down the main attraction. But that appears to be the case with the BFI’s package for Equus, Sidney Lumet’s 1977 adaptation of Peter Shaffer’s acclaimed stage play. 

“I didn’t like it,” mumbles actor Peter Firth of the film (in a new audio interview), having originated the part of disturbed youngster Alan Strang on stage in London, before taking the play to Broadway, then onto screen. And even Lumet, in a 1981 Guardian lecture, dismisses his work as a “brave attempt that should never have been made”.

During the first decade of this century Conor Oberst was critically anointed as a successor to the likes of Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Leonard Cohen. It didn’t seem to make him very happy. His project Bright Eyes, with musical prodigies Nate Walcott and Mike Moggis, twisted and turned through varying musical styles, as if purposefully evading easy definition, while Oberst’s lyrics became increasingly bleak and opaque. Bright Eyes now return, after nine years of absence. Oberst is no happier, but his cryptic, committed, broken-voiced melancholy is a good fit for these times.

There’ve been plenty of global breakout successes from Nigeria in the past decade; D’banj, Davido, Wizkid and more – but by far the most recognisable to the international audience is Damini Ogulu aka Burna Boy. And doesn’t he know it.

Together for over 20 years and with a string of incredibly successful albums, the Scottish trio return with a ninth release that offers more of the relatively sophisticated bombast they've consistently delivered, not least in perfectly-paced audience-pleasing festival performances.

One of the most evocative tracks on James Dean Bradfield’s second solo album is hardly his at all. The Manic Street Preacher takes “La Partida”, a haunting, finger-picked melody by the Chilean musician Victor Jara, and blows it up to the size of an arena, its central refrain echoed back by a stadium’s worth of voices.

It’s exciting to come to an album with no preconceptions and no context and find you fall immediately in love with it. Tanya Donelly is probably less well-known in Britain than she deserves to be: she last toured here in 2014 with Throwing Muses, one of two bands she co-founded (the other was The Breeders) before founding and fronting Belly, finally going solo in the mid-'90s.

Every great artist can have an off day, and the the best moments in Eureka’s latest collection of Buster Keaton features are good enough to make one forgive the patchier stretches. Keaton’s first feature length comedy was the 1923 DW Griffith spoof Three Ages, deliberately structured into three self-contained acts so that the film could be cut into separate shorts if audiences stayed away. Its success allowed Keaton to make Our Hospitality later the same year, the first film in which he was able to exercise much greater creative control.

After 2016’s A Shot in the Light, DJ, producer and Disco Halal labelrunner Chen Moscovici has leaned full-tilt into synth-pop and, with Time Slips Away, has created a collection that’s both carefully placed and cleverly paced.

That Deep Purple are still putting out albums over 50 years since they first got together and still have three members of their early Seventies classic line-up on the payroll is quite a feat. That they are also still looking for new ways to express themselves and have resisted the temptation to spend their time knocking out pale imitations of “Highway Star” and “Smoke on the Water” is even more impressive.