The latest edition of theartsdesk on Vinyl combines the best new sounds on plastic with the vinyl reissues that are pressing buttons. Ranging from heavy rockin’ book-style boxsets to the funkiest summertime 7”s, all musical life is here. Dive in.

VINYL OF THE MONTH

This Is The Deep The Best Is Yet To Come (Part 1) (B3)

While recognisably a John Grant album, Boy From Michigan brings on board something new and unprecedented – an outside producer. Welcome, Cate Le Bon. Among her previous production credits are Deerhoof and Tim Presley, whom she’s collaborated with on an album. As these and her own releases attest, she’s not going to steer anyone towards the mainstream.

Dungen’s October 2005 appearance on Late Night With Conan O'Brien was incongruous. Here was a Swedish band on an independent label, singing in their native language, playing live on coast-to-coast mainstream US TV. The show’s host making a great play in his intro of trying to pronounce their name compounded the sense that this was a band of outsiders which had been mistakenly invited to the banquet.

Broken Hearts and Beauty Sleep has been five years coming. It’s only a mini-album but is spiced with a range of guests, and offers an array of musical styles, the whole sound ably built with alt-tronic producer FaltyDL. The press release tells us Blanco has recently come out of a calming three year relationship, but the album is neither morose nor studiedly reflective. It feels more like a sequel to the playful 2016 debut Mykki.

After listening to Miracle on repeat, the impression which lingers is that its creator has assimilated a lot of music. First and third album Big Star, Magnetic Fields, The Left Banke, the non-rock side of Abbey Road, Nilsson, Lloyd Cole, Plush, Emitt Rhodes, the poppy side of Field Music, a smidge of Elliott Smith, the swoon of Brian Wilson. Yet the result is a coherent song cycle with its own flavour. Classic, yet fresh. Familiar, but different.

At no point in their near-30-year career have “shy” or “retiring” been adjectives you could apply to Garbage - and yet, on this their seventh record, the Scottish-American rockers go to places that they never have before.

The latest album from Marina Diamandis, her fifth, is a startling explosion of vim and attitude. It mingles speeding, wordy, indie-tinted dance-pop bangers, tilting at all manner of contemporary ills, with sudden moments of broken-hearted piano-led contemplation. When she last appeared two years ago, it was with the lengthy Love + Fear album, Paloma Faith-ish songs whose tastefulness masked real character.

When Wolf Alice appeared a decade ago, you’d have to have been a soothsayer of Merlin-like proportions to predict the career trajectory they’ve had since. Certainly, prior to their debut album, this writer took them for just another female-fronted London indie guitar band, following the same old formula.

“All the best bits of Dylan and the Velvets with a post-punk Eighties edge to it.” That’s how Alan McGee described The Loft to NME in November 1984. Their first single, “Why Does the Rain”, had come out on his Creation label that September. Their next, “Up the Hill and Down the Slope”, arrived in April 1985.

INTERLUDE 1: INVALID CODE-AGEDDON

6.45 PM on Saturday 22^nd May and all is well. Like tens of thousands of others across the UK (or maybe even more?) my wall flatscreen is tuned to Glastonbury’s livestream. Prior to the event itself promos for Water Aid and the like roll by, the kind usually on the huge screens beside the Pyramid Stage at the festival.