Nobody enjoys being told how to live, and almost nobody is told only once. Unsolicited opinion arrives in relays: the raised eyebrow across the dinner table, the "just saying" that is never just saying, the acquaintance with firm views on your choices. Lisac's "Nobody Asked You" takes this most ordinary of irritations and elevates it to art without raising its voice once.

Breakups are rarely as tidy as pop songs pretend. They fray, and they linger in the hallway with one arm in a coat, unsure whether to leave. The most interesting thing a dance record can do with that limbo is stay in it long enough to be honest, then open a window. That is the trick AVRION pulls off on *Free*, the second single from an independent producer who builds a catalogue with more patience than the genre's louder names can manage.

Most musicians pick an apartment and furnish it. Alexander Nantschev has spent more than forty years on the balcony between two. At one end, in a Vienna flat, his father, the violinist and instrument dealer Nikolaj, kept Vivaldi, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich and Schoenberg in the air. At the other, his brother's studio hummed with synthesizers, samplers, tape machines and Beatles records. The boy who wandered between them fell hard for "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and "Within You Without You", two songs in which pop first dared to lie down on a Persian rug and wonder what else the orchestra might be hiding. That balcony is the architecture of his new album, and he still hasn't chosen a side.

Records made by friends in a room tend to sound either like a warm hug or a hostage negotiation. *Bass River Sessions*, cut over several sittings on a Massachusetts street and named for it, sounds like three men who have spent years arguing productively about guitars finally being allowed to leave the amps switched on.

Gospel music has always known that the most interesting hour of the soul is the one before the miracle. Noel Johnson NDJ, a one-man congregation from Birmingham (the American one), has built a single around that hour. It is a hymn sung by someone unsure the hymn will be answered, and it is a fine, unsettling piece of work.