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2013 album. Lord Huron have an uncommon talent for creating songs that offer the very essence of what it is to be human - embracing wonder, finding love, fighting death, cherishing honour - while granting them an almost heroic beauty extracted from the mountains, valleys, forests, deserts and lakes that have blessed mankind with their beauty for ages. Ends of the Earth' opens the album with a spirited harmony that could rank alongside Robin Pecknold's best. First single 'Time to Run' may be idyllic folk with world music influences, but its hook is as radio-ready as anything off Peter Gabriel's iconic So or Paul Simon's Graceland.

Sorie Kondi, Chief Boima (INTL BLK) and Will LV join forces once more for another essential dose of Freetown freestyle.Following on from their ‘Salone’ album in 2016 and the massive single ‘Yeanoh’, the new recordings further hone the group’s unique fusions of Sorie Kondi’s inimitable vocals and the kondi thumb piano with intricate dancefloor electronics. The album was gradually recorded over a period of four years with Sorie on the road in Belgium, Spain and Canary Islands with the main production collaboration between Boima in Los Angeles and Will in London. The result is a varied and colourful set of tracks infusing Boima and Will’s wide-ranging dancefloor influences. Infectious first single ‘She Doesn’t Love You’ features guest vocalist Mariama Jalloh speaking home truths about rejection while future 4/4 dancefloor anthem ‘It’s God’s World..’ features a mighty bassline from prolific L.A. musician / producer Sweatson Klank. ‘The Sweetness Is Gone’ ramps up the dub and sound system energy while ‘How Will It Be For Me In This World’ sparkles on a bed of electronic textures and kondi lines.

Hurray for the Riff Raff's latest album The Navigator is the follow up to the landmark 2014 release Small Town Heroes on ATO Records. It's a concept album largely about gentrification and its protagonist's navigation of "her gender identity, her sexual identity, class, and race and culture and everything" as her community begins to disappear. Like a song-cycle from an imaginary Off-Broadway musical, The Navigator rises from the ashes of loneliness and striving, honky tonks and long walks by the river of urban dreams. From the wistful melancholy of Life to Save, to the stubborn resignation of Nothing’s Gonna Change That Girl, Segarra’s voice speaks with a husky weariness that coexists with a naïve curiosity. It’s the voice of a rebel who wanted everyone to think she was so tough, and nobody could take her down, but at the same time was yearning for love and magic, some kind of an awakening. With its 12 tracks and its Travelers, Sages, and Sirens, The Navigator comes straight at you from the intersection of apocalypse and hope. This album rides Patti Smith’s high horse while straddling Chrissie Hynde’s thin line between love and hate.

MELODIES RECORD CLUB 002: BEN UFO SELECTS BY LAURIE SPIEGEL/OLOF DREIJERBen UFO is up next for volume two in melodies's new series of DJ and Artist curated 12” mini compilations, Here we have two tracks which have been staples in Ben’s DJ sets at different times, but neither were originally produced with a club setting in mind, which is why they’ve never been available in this format before. The first press comes with a folded A2 insert with words from and about the Artists.On one side, we have “Drums” from Laurie Spiegel’s 1980 experimental electronics album “The Expanding Universe”, a collection of tracks produced between 1974 and 1976 using a computer playing the actual sounds by controlling analog synthesis equipment under control of the GROOVE hybrid system developed by Max Matthews and F.R. Moore at Bell Labs. Drums is a percussive seven minute computer generated workout inspired by Laurie’s interest in African and Indian musics, and which brings to mind the most far out kosmiche music of the period to modern day techno. A connection Ben has tried to make explicit by including it in his first BBC essential mix back in 2013.On the flip we have a track by Olof Dreijer from the Swedish band the Knife who’s work you might also be familiar with under the moniker Oni Ayhun. Back in 2009 his artist friend Adnan Yildiz curated an exhibition called “THERE IS NO AUDIENCE” in Montethermoso, dedicated to public imagination. Adnan commissioned a single piece from Olof called “Echoes from Mamori”, that played on loop during the exhibition and was subsequently released only on CD. A contemporary piece more clearly indebted to house music, Olof built the track around arpeggios generated using sounds of frogs he recorded in the Amazon and birds around Berlin, fed into a sampler.

Never before reissued, this legendary 1968 EMI recording is a revered Indian jazz rarity, a collectors' holy grail. Raga Jazz Style is an original Indian excursion into Indo-jazz fusion. A one-away recording from the almost unknown Bombay jazz scene, it is among the few jazz LPs to hail from the subcontinent.Closely contemporary with the UK-based explorations of Amancio D'Silva, John Mayer and Joe Harriott, Raga Jazz Style takes the melodic, scale-based raga system of Indian classical music and marries it with a swinging jazz rhythm section assembled by Bollywood's most highly acclaimed musical directors, the soundtrack composing duo Shankar Singh and Jaikishan Panchal.Singh and Panchal were a dominant force in Hindi film music from the late 1940s onwards. Shankar had been trained in classical tabla, while Jaikishan was an expert harmonium player. They worked together on well over a hundred films, and their innovative compositions and orchestral scoring revolutionised the music of the nascent Bollywood industry. Central to their sound was regular collaborator Sebastian D'Souza. From 1952 onwards, D'Souza would work on every Shankar Jaikishan soundtrack, eventually becoming Bollywood's most coveted musical arranger.Originally from Goa, D'Souza had cut his teeth in the dance-band era, arranging and playing with his uncle's jazz bands in Lahore and Quetta. After Partition, he had moved to Bombay to follow the reliable work provided by the film industry, where Goan musicians had become the mainstay of Bollywood's film studio orchestras. Goans were also the core of Bombay's thriving dance-hall and hotel-based jazz scene, with artists including saxophonist Braz Gonsalves, guitarist Amancio D'Silva and trumpeter Chic Chocolate all working in the city during the post-war years.The team assembled for Raga Jazz Style were drawn from this inventive and forward-thinking milieu. Pianist Lucilla Pacheco, saxophonist Manohari Singh and guitarist Anibal Castro were all fixtures on the Bombay jazz circuit, while drummer Leslie Godinho is reputed to have taught Joe Morello the 5/4 'Take Five' beat when they jammed together during Dave Brubeck's State Department tour of India. To this jazz backbone was added the sitar of Ustad Rais Khan, scion of long line of classical instrumentalists, and nephew of the renowned sitarist Ustad Vilayat Khan. Bombay's jazz modernists had been experimenting with the fusion of ragas and jazz since the 1950s, long before American or British jazz musicians had tuned in to Indian classical music. But very little of this exciting scene was ever captured on record. Raga Jazz Style offers a rare chance to hear the innovative sounds of the Indian jazz scene, as peerless composers Shankar Jaikishan and arranging supremo D'Souza join with veteran Bombay jazzers to explore classical themes in a jazz setting — eleven ragas to a swinging beat!This is a highly impressive inaugural salvo by Outernational Sounds, using original masters and beautifully rendered facsimile artwork, with 180g vinyl pressed at Pallas, in Germany.