Isobel Campbell has maintained a consistent career on the fringes of popular music for three decades. She's made a home in the area where indie, folk, rock and BBC 6Music merge. Aside from her 1990s involvement with Belle and Sebastian, she’s best-known for her trio of albums with the late Mark Lanegan, her gracefulness and crafted precision working well against his gruff world weariness.

The final track of Samana’s third album is titled “The Preselis,” after the west Welsh mountain range – the place antiquarians suggested as the source of Stonehenge’s blue stones. The song’s opening lyrics are “The blue stones, they grow over me, Carved into mountains, the blood of need.” Later, the words “anima” and “animus” are repeated before the song ends with the recurring refrain “Lay the body down.”

Original pressings of Love And Poetry sell for up to £2,800. Copies of the August 1969 debut album by Andwellas Dream can sometimes also be found for £700, a relative bargain in the context of the upper limit of the prices the collector’s market has settled on.

This is a reviewer’s nightmare: it’s literally just Khruangbin doing what Khruangbin do. As ever, the Texan trio are rolling out laid-back psychedelic spaghetti western Tex-Mex country-soul-funk groove after laid-back psychedelic spaghetti western Tex-Mex country-soul-funk groove, all drenched in the usual hazy reverb that practically demand you start drawing for adjectives like “sun-bleached” and talk about big skies and desert landscapes. The instrumentation is, as ever, all super-trad too.

“So Ends Another Life” is strange. Very strange. The song’s dolefulness is immediately set up with a strummed guitar along the lines of the intro to The Bee Gees’ “New York Mining Disaster.” “In a world of agitation, there’s no time for compassion” are the opening lyrics.

Crashing chords are followed by a spindly, untrammelled solo guitar. After this subsides, the singer lays out the issue: “I try, I cry, I just can't see why. It's clear, she's near, the sights and sounds I hear.” He’s distressed, his anguish palpable, All the while, slabs of guitar squall get ever-more edgy, increasingly wigged out. There are more solos which aren’t far from those of The Velvet Underground’s “I Heard Her Call my Name.”

VINYL OF THE MONTH

Mito y Comadre Guajirando (ZZK)

Musically, the assured Focus on Nature knows exactly what it is. Fuzzy, psychedelic-leaning, folk-aware pop-rock with an emphasis on guitars about captures it. And what tunes – this 75-minute double album’s 19 songs are immediate, instantly memorable and stick, limpet-like, in the head. Even during “A Mirror’s” backwards guitar coda the song’s melody is still to the fore.

It must be kind of unreal living in the Stereolab universe.

A band of geeky introverts, beloved of the type of hairclip-and-satchel indie ultras a friend of mine used to call “the Scooby Gang” for their tendency to resemble Shaggy and Velma, over the past three decades they also became cool enough in fashion and celebrity circles to get multiple mentions in Bret Easton Ellis’s Glamorama, and etched into the very fabric of hip hop via fans like The Neptunes, J Dilla, Timbaland and Tyler, The Creator. 

The dolefulness of the title Loss of Life is reflected by what’s in the grooves. The lyrics of the Todd Rundgren/Queen-esque fifth track “Bubblegum Dog” include the line “None of this seems like fun but maybe that’s the point, man.” Further in, “Nothing Changes” seems to be about wanting to be rescued from an enervating stasis.