Three minutes and eleven seconds: that is the whole of the ask, and Winnipeg's CAR287 spend every one of them as though the bar were closing and the jukebox had one coin left. Among streaming-age running times that bloat and songs that outstay their welcome, "End Of The Day" amounts to a public service.

Solo piano records now arrive by the thousand, most of them built to sit politely behind a spreadsheet or a sleeping child. The default setting of the genre is a pleasant fog: a few unhurried chords, a wash of reverb, a title that hints at rain. Niel Lian's debut album declines the fog. It is quiet, and it keeps its voice low, but it wants to be listened to rather than tolerated. It repays that attention with something rarer than prettiness: the sense of a mind at work.

Ten years is a long time to carry a song around. Most of us can't keep a gym membership going for ten months. Yet Franxie, the Wollongong singer-songwriter and producer, has hauled "Stone" through nearly a decade of gigs, voice memos and abandoned demos, and the wait has done what waiting rarely does. It has ripened the song rather than staled it.

Heartbreak is rock'n'roll's most reliable landlord. It collects the rent in bruises and never stops knocking. Laji George, a New Yorker who has spent years fronting the alt-rock band Pseutopia, now steps out alone with *Out of Line*, his debut solo album. Its lead calling card, "Washed Away", takes the oldest wound in the book and asks the question Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry posed in *Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind*. If you could delete the person you loved and the grief along with them, would you?

Odysseus had himself lashed to the ship's mast and stuffed his crew's ears with beeswax, which says a good deal about how the ancient world regarded the seductive song: a hazard to navigation. Horologica, the Milwaukee-born, London-based singer-songwriter, has fashioned a hazard of his own, and Siren Lullaby, out on 21 August, is the most alluring thing he has released. Nobody listening will be reaching for the beeswax.

Concept albums usually arrive draped in a cape, with a gatefold sleeve the size of a paving slab and a sleeve note that reads like a tax return. Fabian Starr shows up in wraparound shades that glow the blue of a science-fiction fridge, a leather jacket zipped to the chin, and an infinity symbol lit on his chest like a warning light on the dashboard of eternity. The cover says he is doing this, and that he won't be apologising.

The compilation album has a shabby reputation, and usually deserves it: a hurried shuffle of old favourites, a couple of scraps to tempt the completists, a contractual obligation with a sleeve. *Elf* is a different animal. Its title is German for "eleven", the number of tracks Roland Wälzlein, who records as Fish And Scale, has chosen from his musical journey so far and set beside brand-new pieces. He has hung them the way a good curator hangs a retrospective, so the older work looks freshly lit and the new work looks as though it has always lived there. The result is cohesive, atmospheric and, not to put too fine a point on it, rather wonderful.

Most Civil War songs end where the bugles stop. Foxy Leopard starts there. "Children of the War," the flagship single from the forthcoming album *After*, arrives once the armies have gone home, the flags are folded and the speeches made, and it turns its gaze on the people those speeches forgot. It is a song about the long afterwards, and it may be the finest thing this Quebec project has yet put its name to.

Most songs about a mob let you watch from the hill. "Burn the Witch" hands you a place in the crowd. Your neighbour is being killed by common consent, you know her, and you do nothing. The scenario is barely dressed up, and its cruelty is that the song never tells you what you would have done. It only makes you notice how quickly you begin to work out an excuse.

Some bands are formed in rehearsal rooms. TrixxStarr appear to have been assembled at the kitchen table. What began as the solo project of Dusty Starr, of Chihuahua and Les Biches, has grown into a family firm, with brothers Heli, C.C. and Darc pulling up chairs. On "Enough" the result is a band asking the question the rest of us dodge at parties: when do we stop chasing the things we've been told should make us happy? They ask it without a finger wagged and without a sermon in sight.