It begins with unease. A background of dark, uncertain colour seeps out of the speakers, the sort of sound that makes you check whether someone has come into the room behind you. Over it, a crackling rhythm starts to fizz and spit like a fuse working its way through the dark, restless and slightly put out, like a landlord who has come about the rent. Within thirty seconds Conchis has dragged you into a room you didn't know you'd entered and can't imagine leaving. "It Will Only Hurt Once" is the third single from *Gravity*, and it is the most physically commanding thing she has done.

Dawn is rock music's oldest trick, and the genre has been squinting into it since the first amplifier warmed up. Canadian singer-songwriter JF Roy, born in Atlantic Canada and now settled in Alberta, takes it on with "The Morning Light". He does so with a lack of irony that is almost radical, and the result is a rousing, big-hearted record that leaves a rather better mood behind than most of its more fashionable neighbours.

There is a particular kind of record that arrives not so much to be reviewed as to be survived, in the best sense. *EMA*, the seventh full-length from Kyoto-born, Oslo-dwelling Sienná, is one such object: nine pieces of music that treat the listener's attention as something to be gently confiscated and returned, subtly altered, an hour later.

Dan Whitehouse has built a career on the unvarnished confession, and his new single is the most naked thing he has put his name to. It is a piano, a voice and a room, with no overdubs and no studio sleight of hand to dim the lights. Pianist David O'Brien sits opposite him, and the two play the song as it happens. Whatever you hear is what occurred.

A home studio with a view of the garden is not, on paper, where one expects swagger to be manufactured. The image is of lawn and shed and a kettle on the boil. Yet Lyndo Jaco, singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and sole occupant of the control room, has made an EP in that tranquil setting that carries itself like a band who've spent years in the back of a van and emerged with their tempers and their tunes intact.