In 2012 Dexys returned with their fourth album, and first in 27 years, One Day I’m Going to Soar. It was a concept piece, original and funny, chewing over the volatility of love, containing wonderful set-pieces, most especially a trio of songs at its centre (“I’m Thinking of You”, “I’m Always Going to Love You” and “Incapable of Love”) which humorously excoriated the fickleness of romance.

This album promises to be an expansion of the sound and ideas of its 2021 predecessor Heart Shaped Scars, and boy does it deliver. HSS was the Scottish singer-songwriter Dot Allison’s first album in some nine years, and only her seventh in the 28 years since she first appeared with the space-dub-country-torch-song trio One Dove.

Blackbox Life Recorder 21f may have been originally touted as a mini-album but, in reality, it’s an EP with four tunes spread over just under a quarter of an hour and one of those is a remix of the title track. However, it is also the first new material released by Richard James, under his Aphex Twin moniker in five years.

There are scores of films set in and around circuses. Aravindan Govindan’s bewitching Thamp̄ (The Circus Tent) isn’t like any of them, though I was fleetingly reminded of Jacques Tati’s largely plotless Jour de fête – which also opens and closes with a big top being assembled then dismantled in a small rural community.

After his death in 1867, it didn’t take long for Charles Baudelaire’s poems to be set to music. Composer Henri Duparc did so in 1870, but Claude Debussy’s late 1880s framing of five of the Symbolist pioneer’s verses confirmed this as more than a one-off fascination for the musical world.

Subsequently, Baudelaire’s words have stimulated myriads of performers: Celtic Frost, The Cure, Serge Gainsbourg, Diamanda Galas and Tyler the Creator amongst them. In France, chanson legend Léo Férre devoted three albums to Baudelaire.

For someone predominantly poised at her kit, the mononymous music producer’s return is surprisingly devoid of live drums. Daughter of Leftfield cofounder Neil Barnes, Georgia has made a name for herself as the drummer for artists such as Kwes and Kae Tempest. Her 2019 release Seeking Thrills was “a hymn to British hedonism” with a hefty slice of Robyn-esque pop panache. Last year saw Georgia embrace these stadium-sized singalongs as tour support for LA sister trio Haim.

Some country music cosies up as close as possible to pop, in hopes of dragging more listeners in, smoothing away the raw backwoods feel. The most famed exemplar of this route is, of course, Taylor Swift, at least in her early career. Other country music resonates with American folk history, emanating the vastness of the American south, its roots sounds and narratives.

The broken beat movement, centred on West London around the turn of the millennium, wasn’t super press friendly. Its complex rhythms were eclipsed in the populism stakes by its close cousin UK garage, and serious commentators didn’t really know what to do with a broadly working class, multicultural scene that was aspirational and privileged virtuosic production and musicianship. Indeed there was a distinct inverted snobbery in the refusal refusal to treat it with the respect afforded other electronic music which fit into a scholarly vs “street” dichotomy.

Full disclosure. I actively dislike Blur and always have. Don’t get me started on why. That would last seven times as long as this review.

Early editions of Swiss novelist Friedrich Dürrenmatt's 1958 novel The Pledge carried the subtitle “Requiem for the Detective Novel”, the writer’s point being that murder cases can take years to solve (if at all) and that those doing the investigating make mistakes. The story has been filmed several times before, Sean Penn’s starrily-cast version (released in 2001 with a weather-beaten Jack Nicholson in one of his last decent roles) the best known.