After C19 delays theartsdesk on Vinyl is back. My initial policy, reckoning that new vinyl would dry up under COVID conditions, was to do regular lockdown mini-editions with the material already set aside here, until it ran out. That didn’t work out. The vinyl, to my surprise, kept on coming. Global crisis be damned! A backlog grew! Thus, theartsdesk on Vinyl 57 is a catch-up on the past couple of months. Due to these factors, a few more records I’d like to have covered were missed and a couple I should have covered this time are held back until June.

What a joy. I Love the New Sky opens with the most un-Stones-like “Empathy For the Devil”. Rolling piano, see-sawing violin and snatches of bubbling synth course through a propulsive pop nugget with cascading harmonies and a McCartney-esque melody. Next up, the chugging “Sweetheart Mercury” is top-drawer art-rock with a similarly winning melody. After this, the album continues in equally fine style.

This is an extremely impressive undertaking. how i'm feeling now was conceived, written and recorded in under two months, in isolation, with Charli XCX sourcing beats and artwork from a sprawling collective of regular collaborators and fans. The tracklist was finalised only in the last week or so, and even two days before release date, only “work in progress” promos were available, signalling that it was still in flux.

A singer-songwriter of somewhat mystical bent, originally from a forested island in the US Pacific Northwest, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith really came into her own when she discovered vintage synthesizers. In particular, her masterpiece, 2016's EARS, saw her vocals merging into the rich flows of bubbling tones, melodies channelling folk traditions from various corners of the world, creating an unmistakably utopian sound.

As the music industry slips into the rhythm of lockdown, so the spigot slowly becomes untapped and events, livestreams and similar start to flow more steadily. This week a host of big names are up to a bunch of different stuff, all worth checking. Dive in!

A Theatre for Dreamers/Von Trapped Family Livestream + Dave Gilmour Live at Pompeii

The day that Little Richard’s death was announced, my friend the soul singer PP Arnold wrote on her Instagram feed, of a “sanctified boogie-woogie piano style that was just electric”. She went on, recalling first hearing the man’s undiluted craziness: “I loved it when he did that "ooo" thing after the “Tutti Frutti aw Rudi” bit that sounded like one of the high soprano sisters in church”.

Moses Sumney’s second album is a double, and splits and nuances in gender, sexuality and identity define its fluid nature. A 28-year-old Ghanaian-American who grew up as an outsider in both countries, Sumney is most interested in removing masculinity’s hard shell, and touching the tenderness beneath.

Like his friend the late John Prine, Jason Isbell is a master storyteller. His skill, like Prine’s, is to inhabit the characters he sings about so fully, and with such empathy, that it can be difficult to tell where the songwriter ends and the story begins.

“Like mellotrons before them, synthesisers could project a strange and deep emotion – something in the wiring had an inherent melancholy. Previous generations had often disparaged synths as dehumanising machines but, at the turn of the 80s, a new generation of musicians appeared who could coax them into creating modern and decidedly moving music.

The Yorkshire metal veterans Paradise Lost have been around for more than three decades. The name of the band has become synonymous with a distinct sound combining gothic, death and doom to deliver a layered, wonderful type of darkness. Their 16th studio album, Obsidian will very much please serious metal fans who have followed the band throughout, presenting a natural continuation of The Plague Within (2015) and Medusa (2017).