There is a particular kind of record that arrives not with a bang but with a held breath, and Chris Beckett's latest, released under his HMS Beckett banner, is exactly that. It is the sound of a man finally opening a door he has kept shut for three decades, and discovering, to his evident surprise and our enormous benefit, that the garden on the other side is still alive.

Kieran E Scott was handed a Kodak Retina with no film in it and a guitar at around ten years old, and he has been trying to make one art form do the work of the other ever since. His brother Paul took the other guitar and went on to found Pop Mechanix, one of the 1980s' iconic New Zealand indie bands. Kieran left his own brief stint alongside Jordan Luck, in the band that became Dance Exponents, for London and a photography degree. A career in editorial photography followed, telling stories about how people live. *Air and Twigs*, released under the name Agneu, is what happens when those stories finally demand a different medium.

Confession, as any pub bore or Sunday-paper columnist will tell you, is cheap. Dignified confession, the kind that tidies nothing and still leaves the listener feeling looked after, is a rarer commodity. James Crowley, a London songwriter who has spent years in the quieter corners of the indie-folk scene, delivers it across four songs on *Imprint*, an EP that opens its ribcage without ever begging for sympathy.

There is a particular kind of songwriter England keeps producing, usually in a spare room or a shed, who has spent decades listening to Lennon, Simon, Newman, Dylan and Springsteen and concluded that the trick was never the tune but the telling. Music by Jeremy, a Banbury-based writer who works from a small studio in the Oxfordshire heartland, belongs to that lineage. *Side Two*, the second quarter of a 24-track double album released in four monthly instalments, suggests he has earned his place in it.

Detroit has never been short of people who can make a racket. It gave us the Stooges, the MC5 and the White Stripes, and it has a long habit of exporting noise with a point to it. Lyons Lane, five young men with a Little Richard fixation and a horn section, are something stranger and more welcome. They have made a debut EP that swings like a saloon door in a gale and still manages to sound like it was cut last Thursday.

Euripides gave us a woman who burns her own house down and dares the audience to look away. Flame, an Edinburgh band barely two years into their existence, have borrowed her name for a debut live EP, and the gamble is a bold one. To invoke Medea is to promise fury, intelligence and a refusal to apologise. Happily, these six tracks, captured in a rehearsal studio in the middle of the city, keep that promise with room to spare.

Grief rarely makes for tidy art. It arrives without warning, rearranges the furniture of a life, and leaves behind a silence that some people fill with noise. Innocent Darkness, a producer working from the same Ekeren home he has occupied for 52 years, fills his with reverb. *VOIDWALKER*, released just days after the fungal rave-nightmare of *The Dark Fungus*, is the sound of a man losing both parents within twelve months and choosing, with remarkable stubbornness, to make something beautiful out of the wreckage.

Ekeren is not a place one associates with the end of the world. It is a quiet, unglamorous district on the northern edge of Antwerp, all suburban hedges and tram lines, and yet from a home studio there comes *The Dark Fungus*, an EP that imagines civilisation dissolving into mycelium and dancing itself to oblivion. It is a preposterous conceit. It is also, against every reasonable expectation, a triumph.

Concept albums have a reputation for grandiosity. They tend to arrive wrapped in gatefold sleeves and self-importance, ready to explain the cosmos to a public that only wanted a decent tune. Massimo Donelli and Paolo Rossi have made something far rarer: a concept album with a beating heart and a conscience, and, best of all, restraint. *Adorati Spiriti* asks large questions in a quiet voice, and it is all the more persuasive for it.

Twenty-two albums in, a songwriter either repeats himself into oblivion or finds a way to make repetition itself the joke. Hersey has chosen the latter path, and *Quixote* is the sound of a man who has finally admitted that the windmill was never going to fall, and decided to enjoy the tilting anyway.