The Prettiest Curse is the third album by Spain’s indie-foursome Hinds and sees them take a substantial step up from the lo-fi, C86/Pastels’ like sound of their previous discs Leave Me Alone and I Don’t Run. Now they have embraced considerably more expansive production values, as well as additional instruments and a noticeable influence from their native culture, and it’s all for the good.

As news bulletins compare events in America to 1968, the mental jukebox spins almost inevitably to “Abraham, Martin and John”, first recorded by Dion – the price of a new record contract after he‘d got clean and split from The Belmonts. It’s not the best known version (that’s Marvin Gaye’s) but it made No 4 on the US charts and relaunched Dion’s career.

For better or worse, the lockdown may be easing in the UK but there’s no sign of any gig action, even on the far distant horizon. So it’s back to our screens for all that, and here’s the latest, liveliest selection of concerts, conversations and virtual festival action for the coming week! Dive in!

The Other Songs/Brit School Festival

Will Westerman is not afraid of sounding retro. It's clear his influences are diverse, from jazz fusion to the bedroom proto-house experiments of Arthur Russell. But in their final form, his high gloss production, highly literate songs and fretless bass sound like something out of a creatively leftfield but megabucks studio-produced mid Eighties record: the likes of Talk Talk, Kate Bush, Roxy Music's Avalon and above all The Blue Nile loom large.

Experiencing All Things Being Equal is akin to taking a trip through The Time Tunnel. Although the songs and the recordings on the new solo album from former Spacemen 3 man Pete Kember aka Sonic Boom are recent, they could have been lifted from his first (and last) solo album, 1989’s Spectrum, and Spacemen 3’s final set, 1991’s Recurring.

Ghana was visited by two British musicians in the early Eighties. One was Mick Fleetwood, who recorded the Visitor album in Accra during January and February 1981. The other was Brian Eno, who came to the country in late 1980 to attend the National Festival of Arts and Culture (NAFAC). While in Ghana, he also produced The Pace Setters, the first and only album by local band Edikanfo.

Bab L’Bluz are a Franco-Moroccan band, They’re the latest in a succession of musicians - going back to the pioneers Nass El Ghiwane, and the recently departed Rachid Taha - to have created a vibrant fusion of traditional sounds from the Maghreb with the energy of rock.

Lady Gaga proclaimed by Tweet that her sixth album represents her “absolute love of electronic music”. Chromatica features EDM names such as Axwell from Swedish House Mafia, French DJ-producers Tchami and Madeon, bro’step superstar Skillex, as well as a good few more.

From the biggest man band of all time to a rising Doncaster DJ, from the lofts of New York to the garage studios rooms of Scotland, the best of current musical lockdown life is here. Dive in!

Take That/Robbie Williams: Meerkat Music Concert

Joe Casey is the final refugee from the Detroit garage-rock scene which spawned The White Stripes. He has led this otherwise young band for five albums now, every one of which feels like an indignant last stand. Feeling under the baleful influence of unspecified, pre-Covid sickness, and unsure if the source lay in his body or an increasingly depressing world, he conceived this record as a raging epitaph, “last words...while I still had breath to say them”.