Lord love a duck, Elsie, music ’all’s ’avin a bleedin’, whatchamacallit, comeback, innit? The release of Joe Jackson’s 19th studio album Joe Jackson Presents Max Champion in What a Racket! a week after Madness’s Theatre of the Absurd Presents C’est la Vie might prove the full extent of this revival. 

Abigail Lapell is a singer feted and given awards in her homeland of Canada, but who has yet to reach far outside it. Folk is her metier but only insofar as it’s Joni Mitchell’s.

Five albums into her career, inspired by COVID lockdown-induced insomnia, she gives us a short set of lullabies from around the world, alongside a sole new song of her own. It is a hazily gentle and often lovely thing.

Released in 1965, Pearls of the Deep (Perličky na dně) is that rare beast, a successful portmanteau movie. Five young Czech film makers each directed a segment, with two more contributions excised for reasons of length and later released separately.

Back to Moon Beach is a collection of new, reworked and covered songs that feels like a gift from Kurt Vile for his fans to dissect. He jokingly refers to the EP, which is just under an hour long, as “a KV comp”, an appropriate description given the varied history of the tracks.

It’s not long before the first single “Another Good Year for the Roses” is momentarily forgotten in favour of Vile’s take on Bob Dylan’s Christmas song “It Must Be Santa”, which in turn is left behind for the reworked version of his 2022 track “Cool Water”.

I usually find it useful to listen to the music before I tackle the often bile-inducing press release that generally taints each launch. Admittedly, it's a hard job to sell music without veering into hyperbole and very few achieve it. Why am I telling you this? Because, if I had have read the accompanying notes, rather than thinking "this is very good but it does sound like background music", I would have known it was, in actual fact, background music.

When Dolly Parton was nominated for induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, she requested that her name be withdrawn.

That's What Remained is the aural equivalent of being pulled into a maelstrom and then surrendering to this powerful natural force. Initially, it does not seem safe. But it soon becomes apparent that submission isn’t a problem. It will be fine. Emerging from this experience is accompanied by a shakiness. But that’s OK too.

Madness are an English institution due to deathless, jolly hits such as “House of Fun”, “Baggy Trousers” and “One Step Beyond”, but there’s always been another side to them.

The KLF are endlessly fascinating. There’s never been a “pop group” like them. From the late Eighties into the early Nineties, they treated music, especially electronic dance music, as a laboratory for lunatic experiment. Unlike most avant-garde thinkers in pop, though, they made a glorious and highly unlikely commercial success of it, via a series of globally successful singles (and, to some degree, the album, The White Room).

Carried in Sound is Chichester alt-folkies Smoke Fairies’ sixth album and first since 2020’s Darkness Brings Wonders Home. A relatively lo-fi piece that was largely recorded at home during the pandemic, it is intimate and warm yet largely deals with the not exactly uplifting subject matter of failed relationships, aging and loss.