Various Artists – Singles & EPs

It takes a musical education to do what Matt Winkworth does, and it takes some skills to keep up with him as The Winkworthers Originals do (their grandfathers’ delicious butter candy notwithstanding). It’s a jazz-operatic, literary, nonsensical, funny, serious, harmonically sophisticated, melodramatic oom-pah sort of a thing, delivered with lashings of vaudevillian relish. As you may have inferred from the cover art and the use of ‘brillig’ in the title, one of the songs is a setting of a certain Mr. Dodgson’s famous poem ‘Jabberwocky’…

Tall Poppies – All The Rave (indie-pop)

I’ll call these pop songs, largely because they’re not rock songs, or folk songs, or Balinese wedding songs, but that doesn’t really cover it. These are literate, witty, intelligent and playful songs, and they are pop songs in the same way that Art Spiegelman’s Maus (to pick an utterly inappropriate example at lazy random) is a comic book, or Zaha Hadid’s Chanel Mobile Art Pavilion is a building: because they are, but not because they conform to any of the prejudices you may harbour regarding that extraordinarily broad church.