Twenty-one years is a long time to be a secret. Josh Orange, a Sydney folk-rock band, have spent that stretch writing, recording and playing for the faithful few, and their sixth album, *The Fire & The Call*, finally gives that patience somewhere to land. It runs to ten songs and thirty-nine minutes, with nothing wasted, nothing padded and nothing apologised for. It is the sound of a band who know exactly who they are.

Rock and roll has a habit of attracting people who want to talk about it more than play it. Pennan Brae, a Vancouver singer-songwriter who writes his own songs and scores independent films, belongs to the other camp. *Studio*, his latest album, is a record made by someone who has spent a great deal of time in a room with amplifiers and wants you to hear what happens when they are switched on.

Britpop was always an act of imagination before it was an act of geography. Damon Albarn never lived in a Cockney music-hall song, Jarvis Cocker watched the English from the edge of the party, and half of Oasis's mythology was built from a Manchester that sounded bigger on record than it was in life. So it makes a certain sense that one of the warmest tributes to the genre in years arrives from Seoul, from a bedroom-scale operation whose maker goes by appetiteapple and credits no one else because no one else was in the room.

Wade Easy has now made three albums in under a year, which in the current climate of careful, focus-grouped rollout strategies is practically an act of insurrection. Most musicians agonise for half a decade over a record nobody asked for. Easy simply sits in a room in Morgantown, West Virginia, plugs in, hits record and lets the fog roll in. *Honey Venom* is the third dispatch from that room, and it is the best yet.

There is a particular kind of record that arrives not so much to be reviewed as to be survived, in the best sense. *EMA*, the seventh full-length from Kyoto-born, Oslo-dwelling Sienná, is one such object: nine pieces of music that treat the listener's attention as something to be gently confiscated and returned, subtly altered, an hour later.

A home studio with a view of the garden is not, on paper, where one expects swagger to be manufactured. The image is of lawn and shed and a kettle on the boil. Yet Lyndo Jaco, singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and sole occupant of the control room, has made an EP in that tranquil setting that carries itself like a band who've spent years in the back of a van and emerged with their tempers and their tunes intact.

Grief albums usually arrive hushed, draped in reverb and piano, asking the listener to tiptoe. The Bastas Project, a family band from Woodstock, Georgia, have made one you can sweat to. *The Lighthouse in the Dust* is a record about the loss of Nadine Basta, wife and mother, and it refuses the sickroom hush. It puts the kick drum where the sob would normally go and dares you to move.

Country music has always been a music of passports and pedigrees, of who gets to claim the dirt road and the dusty hat. Erick Oscar answers the question with a title: *Two Flags, One Heart*. It is a statement of residence and of loyalty, delivered by a man who has spent thirty-odd years with an acoustic guitar in his lap and thirty-four of them as an American, having been born in Panamá and posted across nearly every Latin American country that work could find for him. He calls himself "an American with Panamanian Heritage." The record is that sentence stretched over ten songs, and it is a great deal more persuasive than any manifesto.

Debut albums tend to arrive in one of two states: overdressed or underprepared. Erick Oscar's nine-song first record manages to be neither, and the reason is almost embarrassingly simple. He has been playing acoustic guitar for more than thirty years, and it shows in the one place that matters, which is the way every song sounds as though it was written by somebody who needed to write it.

There is a particular species of pop miracle that occurs when a man who has spent fifty years behind a drum kit is finally told by his son to come out from behind it. Not literally, mind you. Barry KuKes remains, by his own admission, a back-of-the-stage creature, more comfortable keeping time for his cover bands than stalking the footlights. But with *Songs for Bryan*, released this week, the Port Orange, Florida veteran has done something altogether more daring. He has made a dance record, and it is a thoroughly disarming one.