Let us be honest about what the dancefloor has been quietly mourning. Not the death of energy — there is plenty of that, poured into tracks that mistake relentlessness for vitality — but the death of consideration. The careful thought that says: here is a space between notes, and it matters. Here is a bassline that breathes. Here is four minutes and something seconds of music that actually trusts you to feel it rather than demanding you submit to it. "Rock With Ya," the new single from MVPZ — the collaborative project of DJ and producer The Gaff and Zion I luminary Amp Live — lands with the confidence of a record that understands this distinction entirely.

Grief, when it arrives properly, has a way of reorganising everything — the furniture of the self shifted overnight so that you keep walking into doorframes you'd navigated for years. What meelu has managed with *candlelight* is the rarer, harder thing: not merely to document that disorientation, but to find — painstakingly, honestly — the exact moment when loss begins its slow negotiation with living.

**Somewhere between Birmingham and the earth's lower crust, two people have figured something out.** The history of rock and roll is, when you strip away the mythology and the merchandise, a history of reduction. Take away what isn't needed until only the essential remains — the nerve ending, the blunt instrument, the thing that makes the neighbours complain. The Velvet Underground knew it. The White Stripes knew it. And now, lurking in a garage somewhere in the West Midlands with nothing more than drums, a Bass VI and two voices that sound like they've been gargling gravel soaked in righteous fury, dredge — lower case, thank you — know it too.

**By the time the saxophone announces itself — bold, unashamed, gloriously alive — you already know this band plays by nobody's rulebook but their own.** Don't Look Now arrive from Windsor like a splendidly awkward party guest who somehow ends up being the most interesting person in the room. "Second Time Around," their debut single released January 2003, is the calling card of a band who have clearly spent years absorbing the best of British pop and then, rather brilliantly, decided to do precisely what they pleased with it.

**The sky has always been the limit. Mark Heffernan just built a machine to measure it.** A cyanometer, for those who've never thumbed through the more eccentric corners of scientific history, is an instrument — invented by the Swiss physicist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure in 1789 — designed to measure the precise blueness of the sky. Fifty-three gradations of blue on a paper wheel, held aloft against the heavens. The audacity of the thing. The doomed, magnificent, quintessentially Romantic ambition of attempting to quantify wonder.

Rock music music, when it earns its keep, has always been less about virtuosity than about weight — the specific, unignorable gravity of a sound that plants itself in your chest and refuses, politely but absolutely, to leave. Foxy Leopard's *Cotton Fields* understands this with the quiet authority of a man who has no particular interest in explaining himself to you. That is, to put it plainly, a rather rare and wonderful thing.

Wes Carroll has the audacity to name his EP after a geological epoch that hasn't quite happened yet — or rather, one that is happening right now, all around us, in the receipts and the algorithms and the quiet despair of the checkout queue. It's a bold conceptual gambit, the sort of thing that could easily collapse under its own self-importance. That it doesn't is down to the fact that Carroll and his Confabulation are, first and foremost, musicians of considerable craft, and only second — a very close second, mind — are they polemicists.