VINYL OF THE MONTH

Frank From Blue Velvet I Am Frank (Property of the Lost) + Column258 Interloper (The Workshop Sessions, Volume One) (Property of the Lost)

“Theirs is truly rock in extremis, a précis of the youthful impetuosity and cathartic chaos at the heart of real rock ’n roll.”

I first had a conversation about Benson Boone without realising it was him we were talking about. It went something like: “Did you see that horrifying moment at Coachella when Brian May got onstage with some American guy, and no one knew who he was? HOW DO THEY NOT KNOW?!” We berated youth culture, blinked – and suddenly, Boone had released a second album.

After the evening’s second song “The Last of England,” Patrick Wolf cautions “I’ve got nothing left to say.” During the shows leading up to this outing promoting his new album Crying the Neck, he says he felt “like I’ve been drag-queen story hour” and, in Kingston, “a preacher.” He’s talked out. All that there is to say has been said.

If you walked into a bar in the US, say in one of the southern states, and Bonnie Raitt and her band were playing, you’d have the best night of your life. They are the kind of purely American rhythm’n’blues experience, tempered with FM radio balladry, that somehow works best, and perhaps only, on those endless highways and dusty plains.

"When I was your age, I worked in a corrugated cardboard factory!" is a phrase my father was fond of telling me as a teenager, presumably in an attempt to extol the virtues of a good Presbyterian work ethic.

Jarvis Cocker is proudly holding the No 1 trophy handed to him on the day Pulp topped the album chart for the first time in 27 years with More, their first album in almost as long. “It’s nice they’ve got something to do when they’re getting on a bit,” Cocker says, acidly imagining the response. “Fuck that!”

Had a passer-by from outwith Newcastle been asked to guess what was taking place at St James' Park, football would have been the likely answer. It felt like nearly every person walking to see Sam Fender was clad in a replica top, bearing the name of club legends past and present or, most commonly, the official kit released to mark Fender's newest album.

"It was really strange. Really quite conflicting, the sort of thing most bands didn't have to deal with. At the front, we'd have the kids who'd come along to scream and at the back were the people who'd come along to hear the music. We didn't know whether to talk to the kids at the front or to speak over their heads to the other people.”

Although Mary Halvorson leads the sextet Amaryllis on About Ghosts, instrumentally, she does not place her guitar to the fore. The first time her playing really leaps out on her new album is during second cut “Carved Form,” where it weaves through the arrangement. A guitar solo arrives just over a minute in: precise yet slippery, it complements the early space-age feel of the Pocket Piano synthesiser she also contributes to the track.