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.

Proxima b is a long way from the nearest kitchen table, which makes it an improbable setting for the most tender single of Vela Jones's career. Yet she has gone to the far edge of human settlement and come back with something rarer than a silver jumpsuit and a slogan: a song about missing your mother.

Desire is usually pop's loudest subject, and restraint is usually its most neglected. Aurealis has built a whole single around the second. "Exquisite" is glossy, cinematic synth-pop about a man who finds himself devastated by an attraction he has no intention of acting upon. It is a love song in which nobody touches anybody, and it is thrilling for exactly that reason.

Releasing a song about September 11th on its twenty-fifth anniversary invites disaster. The risk is easy to name: mawkishness, opportunism, the hand-on-heart bombast that turns grief into a product. The Real Anthem walk straight into that minefield and emerge with their dignity, and their nerve, intact.