Bristol has a long record of producing music that sounds as though it were made in a damp basement by someone who has seen through everything. Lucian Lacewing makes his in a bedroom, a smaller room with a better view of the ceiling, and this four-track mini-album is the sound of a man lying on his back and watching the plaster turn into weather.

Twenty years is a long time to leave a song waiting, and most songs would have sulked. Tarita, the solo project of Chennai-based psychologist Dr Sindhuja Sankaran, wrote "The Death of Peter Pan" at 21 and released it at 41. In between it lived on an old IBM laptop, unproduced and unheard, losing a stanza somewhere along the way like a sock in a launderette. That the wait has produced something this tender, rather than something merely nostalgic, is to everyone's credit.

Most songs about emotional difficulty are in a tearing hurry to resolve it. A key change arrives to heal the wound, and a chorus swells to announce that everything is fine now. Brian Kovacs, a Chicago-area bassist with 33 years in the trade, declines the transaction. "Holding Space" is a song about sitting with what cannot yet be mended, and it has the nerve to sound exactly like that: unhurried, low-slung and quietly stubborn.

Somewhere in downtown Miami, in a studio apartment the artist cheerfully calls tiny, a sculptor who never quite stopped being a sculptor has been chiselling sound. No marble, no mallet: the raw material was a singing bowl, a handful of bells and a set of wind chimes, and the chisel was a computer screen on which each tone was rendered as a waveform to be studied, nudged and polished. It sounds like the premise of a gallery installation that would make you check your watch. The result is a record that makes you check your hips instead.

Anthony Wayne Langston has chosen a stage name that sounds like a hedgerow philosopher, and the record behind it has the same unhurried, weathered wisdom. *Still, the World*, ten songs released on April Fools' Day with no foolery in sight, is the work of a Californian who understands that a good melody needs no apology and that a plain feeling, plainly sung, can hit harder than any amount of cleverness.

Somewhere in Dublin, behind a door nobody has been invited through, a person or persons unknown are bashing a lump of metal into submission. The result is "Nail The Noise," a single that arrives at the pulse of a pub brawl and the posture of a seminar, and which settles every argument it starts by getting the whole room to dance.