Mirah - "Generosity". Mirah has again learned to prowl. (A)Spera is a great album, years late. Elsewhere there's kora and mbira, vocal twists that recall the Cocteau Twins, but on "Generosity" it's simple building blocks: drums, strings, electric guitar, cloud voices. Acknowledgement and refusal. Trees growing leaves and losing them, levees filling and breaking and being re-laid, faces cracking open into tears & smiles. [buy]

Roxy Music "Pyjamarama". A long-distance love-song that doesn't sound like one, that sounds like running down a spiral staircase together, your pockets full of peaches. And peaches don't fit very well in pockets, so there'd be lots of laughs and trips and falls. Oh if only more music like this came in tins, flatpacks like sardines, no expiry date, easy to throw into your luggage and crack open at lonely times - sitting by the hotel-room window with sun streaming in, no one to trip down a fire-escape with. [buy]

(photo by David Stewart)