Stephin Merritt

"Texan singer-novelist Nanci Griffith doesn't compromise with her audience. I once heard her reverse-heckle a fan shouting out requests, retorting in her Tweety-Bird voice, "I don't come to where you work and yell at you!" Like all her first several albums this one is lyrics-heavy, with folk-country accompaniment (Dobros, lap steel, Bela Fleck's banjo), and the stories take precedence over the genre, to the point where she actually criticises country. The black housewife narrating 'Mary & Omie' reports "And I thank my Omie for taking me out of the South." Take that, Stephen Foster! Like the very different Mother Fist, this 1986 album is dedicated to Truman Capote (among others), and every song is a story song, full of car-jumping daredevils, lovelorn young widows, and of course touring musicians bored in buses, staring out into the endless falling snow. "

"The seizure-prone should avoid listening to this particular album while driving. H.P. Lovecraft's "muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes" could be a record review (instead of the music of the blind idiot god Azathoth), and there is also strange sinister chanting in an eldritch tongue (Maghrebi). But if the CD reissue is to be trusted (which is a subject of much controversy), they are chanting sentiments no more sinister than "Your Eyes Are Like a Cup of Tea." Partly because the major local crop is marijuana, many Western visitors have discovered and rediscovered Jajouka and its remarkable music, which is considered trance-enhancing and therefore an aid to meditation (and self-medication). Phasing and echo effects added by Brian Jones pointedly undermine the expectation of field-recording authenticity."

"The aural equivalent of a Tom of Finland tattoo, this gayest possible album is dedicated to Truman Capote. With no electronics, prominent guitars or snare drums, its genre is kept vague, so there are sort-of accordion chanties and sort-of disco hits whose lead instrument is yang t'chin (Chinese zither). Released in 1986 only two years after the breakup of Soft Cell, this was Marc's third solo album (fifth if you count Marc & the Mambas), on top of which he was releasing 12" EPs longer than many albums, burning his crimson candle at both ends with, according to his memoir, a £26,000 monthly party habit. The literate lyrics are populated by hustlers, boxers, and Yma Sumac, and set in rundown motels, downtown Barcelona, and "the backrooms where soiled goods are sold." Makes a great gift for a confused teenager, along with some Jean Genet and John Rechy."

"Half a century ago in 1967 there were two Kaleidoscopes, one in the US and one in the UK. Both were wonderful, but the UK band sang endearing lines such as "My god! The spiders are everywhere!" so I'll just write about them for now. Probably the tinniest band of the 60s, they never achieved mass popularity but psychedelic fan lists rate them higher than the era's supposed classics, due to their ecstatic melodies and gleefully oblique lyrics. "Strawberry monkeys are smiling for Julie, with pearl button eyes that reflect velvet clouds. Can you hear them smiling?" They changed their name to the Fairfield Parlour and stayed just as great. Now that the competition is quickly disappearing, they should get back together and be the most popular pop-psych band in the world, instead of merely the best. If they're missing some members, they can just take them from Kaleidoscope USA. "

"Not lovely at all is the music of the Edwardses, who are always at least slightly off. Cynics say the pair are really actual jazz superstars Jo Stafford and Paul Weston, but I choose to believe there is really a woman who was born to sing 'You're Blasé; as if she were hanging upside down and swinging back and forth like a drunken pendulum, and a man who plays the piano as though he were also juggling. Hailing from Trenton, NJ, the couple tripped onto the world stage in 1957 – twelve years before the Shaggs – and off again in 1982 after five albums and five singles, some of which are pretty hard to find, so the two volumes of Greatest Hits are a good start. (Misleadingly, the Complete Original Albums compilation contains only the first two albums.) Now that I have publicly come out as a fan, I guess I have to buy all the albums. Excuse me for a moment. Okay, I'm back. "

"This wild ride was released in 1959. John Cage reads 90 one-minute texts, while David Tudor creates inventive cacophony in another room, out of hearing; so that any relation between voice and accompaniment is purely accidental, as Cage says in the liner notes, "to suggest that all things – stories, incidental sounds from the environment, and by extension, beings – are related, and that this complexity is more evident when it is not oversimplified by an idea of relationship in one person's mind." Cage's preoccupations include music, mushrooms, and Merce Cunningham; personal anecdotes, Zen proverbs and monk jokes, and lots of modernist name dropping. Tudor's palette includes prepared piano, springs, radios, and existing music, notably Cage's 1958 Fontana Mix. Cage complains that at his readings inevitably "someone comes up afterwards and insists that the continuity was a planned one, in spite of the ideas that are expressed regarding purposelessness, emptiness, chaos, etc." Planned, schmanned! "

" The ten-year, ten-album career of Felt divides neatly in halves: with rococo lead guitarist Maurice Deebank and without. This is his last album with the band, and the first with equally hyperactive organist Martin Duffy (probably not a coincidence). The effect is like Yes if Steve Howe and Rick Wakeman just kept soloing, under and over the vocals and each other. And, the album is produced by Cocteau Twin Robin Guthrie, who flanges almost everything, hard, almost all the time. The centerpiece is the inscrutable and euphoric 'Primitive Painters'; on it there are two lead vocals (generally undecipherable), an ever-soloing guitarist, a usually soloing organist, all swimming in flangers, and then the bassist starts soloing too, and it's probably the best pop single of the 80s."

"Probably the most famous countertenor of the 20th century – unless you count Frankie Valli – was the wonderful Alfred Deller, a major figure in the revival of original performance techniques for early and Baroque music. When I was a child we had this album,so I grew up thinking everyone knew and loved 'Where The Bee Sucks' and 'We Be Soldiers Three'. The liner notes, at least on the CD version, are woefully inadequate (who wrote what? when? for which play? Did Henry VIII really write 'Greensleeves'?) but the music is lovely. "