Grief albums usually arrive hushed, draped in reverb and piano, asking the listener to tiptoe. The Bastas Project, a family band from Woodstock, Georgia, have made one you can sweat to. *The Lighthouse in the Dust* is a record about the loss of Nadine Basta, wife and mother, and it refuses the sickroom hush. It puts the kick drum where the sob would normally go and dares you to move.

Rock music has a long and honourable history of going abroad to find itself, and the best of it comes home changed. FORRM, the Paris-based project of artist and filmmaker Firouz FarmanFarmaian, goes to Venice. The result, "PALAZZO", is a single of rare poise: ambitious without being pompous, atmospheric without dissolving into mood-board mush, and thoroughly alive as a piece of rock music.

Country music has always been a music of passports and pedigrees, of who gets to claim the dirt road and the dusty hat. Erick Oscar answers the question with a title: *Two Flags, One Heart*. It is a statement of residence and of loyalty, delivered by a man who has spent thirty-odd years with an acoustic guitar in his lap and thirty-four of them as an American, having been born in Panamá and posted across nearly every Latin American country that work could find for him. He calls himself "an American with Panamanian Heritage." The record is that sentence stretched over ten songs, and it is a great deal more persuasive than any manifesto.