There will be two theartsdesk on Vinyls this week. The first is here, an epic 11,000 words on a multitude of new releases in every genre, from reissues of classics to spanking new strangeness. There’s something for everyone. On Thursday we’ll have a special edition in honour of Record Store Day this coming Saturday, so watch out for that too. For now, though, dive in!

VINYL OF THE MONTH

Elsa Bergman Playon Crayon (B.Inspelningar)

It’s hard to think of an album that’s simultaneously as dramatic and as restrained as this. But then Dave Okumu has always put his music and ideas out into the world in the subtlest of ways.

One of the greatest things a musical artist can achieve is world building. That is, creating a distinctive type of environment, language and coordinates for everything they do such that the listener is forced to come into the musical world, and to engage with it on its own terms rather than by comparison. It’s something that musicians as diverse as Prince, Kate Bush and Wu-Tang Clan achieve have achieved, likewise plenty of more underground creators too.

Colombian-American singer Kali Uchis knocked it out of the park with the vibrant, eclectic global pop of debut Isolation, one of the best albums of 2018.

Ambient is everywhere now. After a quiet (lol) 2000s, when it rather disappeared into the cracks, perhaps tarred with the sense that the more cosmic sides of the Nineties rave experience were passé, beatless music steadily rose in profile through the 2010s – aided by the rise of “post-classical”, increased accustomisation to home cinema and immersive gaming soundtracks, the wellness movement.

Let me start by being pretentious and self-referential, spending ages doing that rather than reviewing the album. My theory is that most male music journalists aged between 45-65, like me, don’t PROPERLY love the music of 21^st century female pop stars – Gaga, Dua Lipa, Beyoncé, Britney, MØ, Kesha, whoever – for reasons that are idiomatic. In fact, possibly most males of that age, full stop (and a good few women too).

It’s Friday night and I’ve finally arrived at 43-year-old French music festival institution Trans Musicales. Due to some dreadful nonsense, it’s taken a 12-hour train journey, two baguettes, one short Stephen King novel, six large beers, a tumbler of Bourbon, and one shuttlebus to place me at the Parc Expo, a series of giant airport hangars that house the majority of musical activity (although there’s a smattering of earlier events in Rennes itself).

In 2016’s abrasive album opener, "Dead Weight", frontwoman Mish Barber-Way laments over multiple miscarriages as her biological clock ticks away like a malevolent metronome.

There’s been a quiet storm of critical approval building around Weyes Blood. American singer Natalie Mering has been releasing music for over a decade but, during the last two or three years a tailwind of positive verbiage has blown her faster forward. Her last album, Titanic Rising, the first of a loose trilogy, of which this is the second part, made low level inroads to commercial success on both sides of the Atlantic.

The chorus to Working Men’s Club’s song “Money is Mine” usually runs, “Endless depression, it’s time/Suicide is yours when the money is mine.” Presented as the penultimate song of their set, frontman Syd Minksy-Sargeant distils this. Grim-faced, his hand twisting about under his tee-shirt as if suffering from an untenable itch, he spits “endless depression” and “suicide” into the mic on a jarring loop, backed up every inch by harsh, dark, techno-adjacent battering. It’s a moment that sums the night up.