Here’s an uplifting burst of spontaneity and joyous sound to start your Friday morning: The Drums, by… Spontaneous Music. It’s just dropped on the International Anthems label.

As ever with most things musically that are inspiring me right now, this came via the always excellent Late Junction. Even an experimental late night radio show would struggle to squeeze in the 24 minutes or so of jump around noise.

I was hooked in by the Late Junction snippet. A quick online shifty later and soon I had the full glorious 24 minutes at my disposal.

It was the perfect working partner for the early morning Friday shift. Five minutes in and I was grinning. Come the full 24 minutes later and I was buzzing off me tits.

Disclaimer: That might have been something to do with the five cups of tea I managed to down before 7:30 a.m.

Never judge an album by its cover, etc. The Bandcamp image suggests some scary Ginger Baker style drum-off shit. But that’s not the case as the track emerges.

I’m no musicologist but there are plenty of blowy things being blown all over the bloody place. The crashing drums hold it all together.

I bloody love how this type of music is so instantly available to you these days. Three decades ago and sure you could have heard this on the radio, but then it would have taken a real effort IRL to seek it out and take a punt on it in the analogue world.

I don’t want to work, I want to bang on my drum all day, as the song goes.

You’d struggle to describe or even define what type of music Tom Waits makes. Pretty much like The Fall or even Ivor Cutler, he’s completely unclassifiable. Tom Waits is a one-off, a unique sound that either you adore or he gets on your tits. I fall in the former category.

Small Change sees him raconteuring at his finest. I’ve still no idea what he’s banging on about, but I love the cut of his jib and the way that he is just able to reel off endless words. They somehow all hang together without giving me an overall narrative. The late night jazz vibes help. You can almost smell the nicotine rising above you from some dingy basement club just by listening to this.

I often get the feeling he’s taking the piss, both out of himself and the audience, but I don’t care. It’s outsider music that no one else is making

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Pleasant but not the masterpiece I was expecting. I was very familiar with the title track, with it being the lead song on a jazz compilation that I used to rinse back in the day. I was hoping for more of the same. Maybe it’s because I’m over familiar with Moanin, but I thought the rest of the album would follow in a similar direction. It kind of does but it loses that late night vibe and particular atmospheric that Moanin generates. I’d certainly play this again, probably as background music when I want to get things done. It’s uplifting, often venturing a little into the jazz over excitable territory. That’s not really where I want to be. I want the Moanin laid back vibes.

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I find it hard to write anything meaningful about a jazz album. I’m still very new to this, I’m still learning. Brilliant Corners is just that. It’s a fantastic record that takes you along different paths. That sounds like arsey jazz wank crap, but the music is so intoxicating and still feels fresh and modern.

Broad sweeping statement alert: I was struggling with music in recent years. I was looking for something new yet couldn’t find it. Reggae kind of filled the gap. I still return to this every now and then but I think jazz is what I was looking for.

I want something which I can listen to whilst working away and being engaged elsewhere, yet still appreciating the power that music can have. Brilliant Corners is just the latest in a long line of recent jazz findings that pretty much hit the spot for me.

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Stuttering, staccato funk music at its best. You can see how Talking Heads soaked up all that was happening around them in NY during this period and then stole the best bits to create Speaking in Tongues. This album is so rhythmic with its various chants and mantras. It’s the perfect dance music for white men who can’t dance, as the Stop Making Sense film so perfectly demonstrated.

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At some stage Teenage Fanclub managed to transition from being Creation indie darlings to pretty much inventing a new scene: indie country. It really shouldn’t work but the endless melodies and west coast throwbacks colliding with a little bit of indie jingle jangle leads to a very warm feeling.

The Fannies are the great Creation survivors. Songs from Northern Britain was kicking back against all the Britpop sensibilities at the time. You couldn’t wish for an album that had less bravado than its contemporaries. It still stands up today, mainly because of the quality of the songs. Gawd bless the Fannies.

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Kaiso Power: Sound Revolution in Trinidad is an absolute joy. It’s a compilation that has just dropped on the Soundway label. It came via the always excellent Late Junction, as most things do these days.

The title may suggest something revolutionary involving Trinidadian music. That’s not far off the mark but it’s also so much more.

At the heart of this is the rhythm and the dance. Revolutions are always the better if they involve some dancing.

There’s so many styles on offer here, all colliding and building up a sense of change, movement and just having a bloody good time whilst you’re at it.

There’s ska, some afro beat and even some Latin rhythms thrown in. It’s the perfect antidote that I should turn to after being served up some dull rock shite as part of the daily album routine.

The closing track, More Weight by Abdul Malik de Coteau, is a bit of a variation from the rest of album. It’s also the standout track.

The story follows that More Weight is a game that the young Abdul played back in Trinidad, involving his school friends having basically a pile on to add more weight.

He then moved to Brixton and the More Weight now becomes a metaphor for the pressures growing up around him.

It’s a thoughtful way to close an album that tries to raise awareness but often takes you down a different path with your dancing shoes.

My kind of music.

Quite a mixed bag, but then actually two albums that share something of the same ethos.

First we have Todd Rungrun’s Something/Anything? double album. I know very little about Todd apart from the Drum song. I’m increasingly being drawn to his back catalogue.

This has been on my wishlist for a number of months now after it was served up on the 1001 albums list.

It’s absolutely bonkers, as you would expect from most early 70s double albums. I suspect strong drugs were involved in the recording.

What I like is how Todd manages to mix up the pure pop with tracks such as I Saw The Light and then slowly, slowly drag you into something a lot more deeper and fucked up.

I think he’s an artist I should really explore a lot more and dive deeper into his back catalogue. It looks like there’s quite a treasure trove there.

How the fuck did I get into early 70s prog?

Fast forward twenty years or so and we come to Edwyn Collins' masterpiece Gorgeous George.

This completely passed me by at the time. All that I knew was, of course, the lead out track A Girl Like You, which had endless radio play during the Britpop years.

I think time and money simply stopped me from buying the album first time round. It’s been a pleasure catching up with it two decades on. It still stands up and shows what a wonderful songwriter Edwyn is.

Crime of the Century? Talk about nominative determinism. This is basically pop Pink Floyd. I’m all for prog and certain elements of pop, but it’s a most unlikely alliance of genres trying to be welded together. I’d rather listen to this than what pop troubles the charts these days, but that’s just the old man shaking his fist at a cloud. Dreamer almost gets me having a little jig, but that’s about the best that it gets.

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Far Out Magazine recently did a comparison between Tom Petty and Elvis Costello. It made the case for their careers being played out in parallel on different sides of the Atlantic. I had never made the connection before. I always thought of Petty as being pure Americana whilst Costello was the twisted, bitter Englishman.

I’ve been wanting an excuse to dive into early Tom Petty for some time. I can now see the point Far Out was making. This could quite easily be early 80’s Costello but with a slight American twist.

He knows how to craft a song but more importantly he knows how to add a twist to the lyric, leaving the songs to mean something else entirely. There’s also more than a hat tip to early Springsteen. Petty is great at crafting mini soap operas around his characters. This is a very worthy album.

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