Roadside shrines, rain-slicked tarmac and weeping pianos have furnished the tragedy song since the days of the teenage death disc, and most of them move the listener about as much as a cold cup of tea. So it is to Elias Dream's credit that "Goodbye, My Love", released on 13 August, arrives with a pulse, a plot and a conscience.

Techno has a patience problem. Too many producers treat the seven-minute mark as a dare, stuffing it with drops, risers and fake-outs, as though the dancefloor might leave if it got bored for half a bar. Fede Micioni has never seemed worried about that. On "SYNTEZI", his third single for Big Doings, he trusts the room, the pulse and the listener, and the trust pays off handsomely.

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.

Bowie decamped to Berlin and Reed claimed New York, while INXS took themselves to Prague to cut "Never Tear Us Apart". Now a schoolteacher from Vila Nova de Gaia has followed them there, and has come home with a single that deserves a good deal more attention than a bedroom-recorded release usually gets.

Cynicism is the default setting of the professional listener. We are paid to be unmoved, to hear a sincere chorus and reach for the nearest raised eyebrow. So it is with some embarrassment that I report "Make My Heart Smile," the debut single from Denver's Ravenheart, got past my defences in roughly the time it takes to boil a kettle.

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.

Anyone who has stood at the edge of a new romance knows the peculiar physics of it: the lungs forget their one job, the sentence dies halfway out of the mouth, and the floor tilts a few degrees. Most pop songs about this condition describe it from a safe distance, like a nature documentary narrated by someone who has never been wet. "Breathless", the debut single from Colorado Springs five-piece Aurora Bloom, goes in up to the neck.

The title is a lie, and that's the whole point. Nobody who sings "we're much better people now" has arrived anywhere near it. They're a few drinks into a long evening of self-assessment, and they know it. Michael Waters has built his new single on that gap between what we claim and what we feel, and it is the most quietly devastating thing he has put his name to.

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.