Dev Hynes's path of artistic development is one of the most pleasing in 21st century music. The flamboyant black indie-kid risking life and limb to ride the local buses growing up in Hackney, who channeled his frustration at the lack of a place for him in the world through the awkward, aggro, occasionally inspiring but awfully named early 2000s electro-punk trio Test Icicles, has since then through sheer force of will carved out a space within the music world where he can be himself.

Brenda Holloway: The Artistry of Brenda Holloway / Various Artists: ERA Records Northern Soul

“We grew up like animals,” says FAME Studios’ founder Rick Hall of his upbringing. “That made me better… I wanted to be somebody.” He did become somebody, and in the process put Alabama’s Muscle Shoals on the map. This film tells the story of how a small city birthed some of the greatest American music of the 20th century, and of the ripples which subsequently spread. The Rolling Stones recorded there in 1969. Five years earlier they had released their version of Arthur Alexander’s “You Better Move On”. Hall was behind the original, his first production.

"We got 42 years of music to lay on you" is an audacious opening statement for any live band, but when the speaker is Phillip Bailey, lead singer in the current reincarnation of the legendary Earth, Wind & Fire, it is a statement of intent. Playing at the palatial Albert Hall in support of their new album Now, Then & Forever, the current line-up of young session players, complementing the core trio of Bailey, bassist Verdine White and drummer Ralph Johnson, proved without a shadow of a doubt that they still have the energy and skill to hold a crowd enraptured.

The setting is Dublin. We're talking modern-day and down-at-heel in this major new musical which has a deliberately scruffy look – with a launderette glowing in the dark and a concrete, four-storey housing block hulking upstage. The adaptation is by Roddy Doyle himself, based on his 1987 comic novel.

Various Artists: Classroom Projects

Gregory Porter's Blue Note debut provides one of the biggest sugar rushes of auditory pleasure you'll hear this year. Grounded in jazz but heavily seasoned with the blues, gospel and soul, it's a superbly paced album, ranging from the poetic tableaux of ballad “When Love Was King” to the unstoppable, hand clapping moto perpetuo of the title track.

Sly & the Family Stone: Higher!

This is an incredibly hard album to work out. One major clue comes, though, with its second track, “Maxim's 1”, the backing for which is a dead ringer for a lost track from Cocteau Twins's 1990 Heaven or Las Vegas album. Not that any of the rest of the album sounds like Cocteau Twins, but it does hit a very similar magic formula.

R Stevie Moore: Personal Appeal