Catkins

We have always fought
Now we are on the same side
Catkin and Dogkin

Lightning, Windmill

The old mill still stands
Stones blackened by storm’s fury
Tattered sails turning

In A Silent Way by Miles Davis

My usual routine with these albums is to start listening with my morning coffee as I potter round the house and continue as I go out for a walk before work. Sometimes I’ll listen again as I’m jotting down my thoughts. Once in a (kind of) blue moon an album will go on repeat for the whole day. This is one of those.

This album marks the transition from modal jazz to the fusion sound that was to be fully realised in Bitches Brew a year later. The electric piano sounds of Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock dance around the funky electric guitar of John McLaughlin in as radical a departure from trad jazz as Dylan going electric a few years earlier.

The two sides of the album comprise two works, each made up of an introduction, a development of the theme and a reprise that returns to the start. I genuinely listened all day, finding new things each time and never tiring of them, sometimes zoning out and sometimes focusing on one instrument for a while.

A genuinely seminal album.

Post Orgasmic Chill by Skunk Anansie

It really shouldn’t be a matter of note to find a band fronted by a woman on this list, let alone a hard rock band fronted by a woman of colour, but well, here we are, with a sexist and patriarchal music biz that is stubbornly refusing to change at any rate faster than a concussed snail.

Front woman Skin has an arresting voice, and the music is equally good - mostly hard rock with overtones of drum and bass and some nice string arrangements for good measure. I really wish that the editors of this list would drop the endless parade of tired, old white men in favour of more bands like this.

Five stars, no question.

Maple, Misty

Ms Misty Maple
Solving murders with Barbie
Ken not included

Foggy, Beach

The crashing of waves
On a salty shingle shore
Muffled by the fog

The Age Of The Understatement by The Last Shadow Puppets

I’m a big fan of the Arctic Monkeys - not really surprising, as they’re from just up the road from where I live in Sheffield, and their raucous rock certainly caught the zeitgeist in the early years of this century. It was something of a surprise (for some fans at least) when frontman Alex Turner released this side project channeling the 60s vibe of Scott Walker.

It opens with a glorious galloping track that could be a soundtrack to an arty spaghetti western, quickly followed by more effortlessly cool songs in a nouvelle vague style with lush string arrangements. This is a fantastic album, and pointed the way to how the Arctic Monkeys sound would evolve on their 2018 Tranquility Base Hotel.

Boff-tastic!