Pete Meaney has made a record that sounds like it was recorded in the room next to yours, by a man who has just put the kettle on and wants to tell you something that matters. "Walk You to the Altar" arrives from Plymouth with no glossy sheen and no stadium-sized chorus. It has a guitar, a voice, a few walls, and a father's reckoning with the speed of the calendar.

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.

Twenty-one years is a long time to be a secret. Josh Orange, a Sydney folk-rock band, have spent that stretch writing, recording and playing for the faithful few, and their sixth album, *The Fire & The Call*, finally gives that patience somewhere to land. It runs to ten songs and thirty-nine minutes, with nothing wasted, nothing padded and nothing apologised for. It is the sound of a band who know exactly who they are.

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.

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.

Gospel music has always known that the most interesting hour of the soul is the one before the miracle. Noel Johnson NDJ, a one-man congregation from Birmingham (the American one), has built a single around that hour. It is a hymn sung by someone unsure the hymn will be answered, and it is a fine, unsettling piece of work.

Seattle guards its reputation jealously, and that reputation was not built on good manners. London Bridge Studios still seems to hum with Mother Love Bone's swagger, Soundgarden's thunder and Pearl Jam's ten-ton yearning. Booking the room takes nerve, and walking out with a song that amounts to a firm handshake and a sturdy pair of boots takes more. Pete Keating has that nerve. "Louder" uses the room's hallowed acoustics to make a point rather than a racket.

Grief rarely announces itself with drama. More often it arrives as a kind of administrative oddity — the chair still pulled out at the same angle, the mug still hanging on its hook, the world stubbornly refusing to redecorate itself around a hole that's just appeared in it. Koen Ruiter, the Utrecht-trained songwriter who records as Koentakhinte, understands this instinctively, and "When You're Not Here" is built entirely from that understanding.

Folk-rock built for optimists doesn't come along often enough, and when it does, it tends to arrive wrapped in irony, as if genuine cheerfulness were somehow embarrassing. Paul Martin refuses that particular hedge. On "A Beautiful Thing," the New Zealand songwriter commits fully to warmth, and the record is all the sturdier for it.

Texas has produced its share of cautionary tales set to a two-step rhythm, but few arrive with the clear-eyed candour Eric Osterhout brings to "Green Eyed Angel." This is a song that knows exactly what it is doing to you before you do, and that self-awareness is precisely what elevates it above the standard country confessional.