It's a safe bet to expect the unexpected in regards to any new Lambchop effort, but the cryptically titled (and beautifully packaged) What Another Man Spills is the band's most consistently surprising and deliriously eclectic outing to date, with new twists around every corner. While it's their loveliest record since How I Quit Smoking, that album's countrypolitan gauze is largely a thing of the past, replaced here by a dreamy, jazz-like patina which proves a remarkably versatile backdrop not only for Kurt Wagner's originals but for a vast range of covers, from Dump's "It's Not Alright" to Curtis Mayfield's "Give Me Your Love (Love Song)." The latter is easily the most jaw-dropping track on What Another Man Spills, with the group easily slipping into the song's soulful groove without a hint of irony, not even in Wagner's amazingly Prince-like falsetto; a later cover of the Frederick Knight smash "I've Been Lonely for So Long," while less surprising, is no less engaging, further solidifying Lambchop's growing debt to the Stax/Volt sound.

Collectors Edition of Richard Hawley, recorded live at The Devil’s Arse Cave, Derbyshire, on 28th April 2017 and only available via Richard and Rough Trade.

Today, Tindersticks release the four-song See My Girls EP, along with a video for the title track which was created by the Tindersticks’ Stuart A Staples and Sidonie Osborne Staples. The four song EP features a radio edit of “See My Girls,” an instrumental dub version of the track and two new songs - the David Boulter penned instrumental “A Street Walker’s Carol” and “Blood And Bone,” with Sidonie on lead vocals. The EP is a companion to Tindersticks’ 2019 release No Treasure but Hope. The See My Girls EP will be available as a 12” on February 7th in the UK and March 20th in the U.S.

Berlin-dwelling Dane Agnes Obel has been racking up the accolades throughout mainland Europe since her platinum-selling 2011 debut, Philharmonics. With the beguiling Citizen of Glass, her third studio long-player, she looks poised to enchant the rest of the world with her dark charms. A classically trained pianist with an elegant and elastic voice, Obel's melancholic chamber pop invokes names like Goldfrapp, Bat for Lashes, and Anna Calvi, but with a succinct aura of Scandinavian refinery. Where her relatively austere prior outings relied largely on piano and strings, Citizen of Glass revels in ghostly electronics and voice modulation, even going so far as to bring in a temperamental, late-'20s monophonic synthesizer called a Trautonium. The string arrangements are more ambitious and the composition style is a bit more opaque, but the ten-track set is unequivocally Obel-esque. Taking its name from the German concept of the gläserner berger, which translates roughly to the glass citizen, Obel explores the idea of transparency in the overshare-heavy digital age.

Michael Head, former frontman of the Pale Fountains and current co-leader along with his brother John – who is also a Strand – of Brit pop outfit Shack, turns in a stellar chamber pop performance with Magical World of the Strands. Head, who is no stranger to either classy, baroque pop or neo-psychedelia, has composed an album of gorgeously illustrated songs that are lushly orchestrated by a standard rock quartet augmented by a flutist (Leslie Roberts) and a string quartet. The result is an album that, while little known, is a classic, a masterpiece of modern chamber pop.

I Trawl the Megahertz is an album originally released as a Paddy McAloon solo album in May 2003 on Liberty Records. It was later reissued in February 2019 on Sony Music under the Prefab Sprout name, as originally intended, with new artwork. After McAloon was rendered almost blind for a period in 1999 due to detached retinas, he was left housebound, and found comfort in listening to shortwave radio transmissions such as chat shows, phone-in programs and documentaries. He recorded conversations from these programs and fragmented them, adding in new words and lines from other sources, providing him source material for the album.

Tindersticks are a band whose music is defined by a mood as much as a style, and if anyone is looking for proof to that theory, 2021's Distractions will do nicely. The lush, expansively orchestrated sound of 2019's No Treasure but Hope was a stellar example of prime Tindersticks, a sprawling canvas composed from an infinity of small details. Distractions, on the other hand, is nearly as powerful while sounding atypically spare, created from what for this group is the bare minimum of elements but still achieving the cool, majestic tone of their most famous work. Tindersticks leader Stuart Staples has said Distractions isn't a lockdown album, but that the isolation imposed on its production by the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 reinforced a creative choice that was already in place, and this music clearly took creative advantage of the limits that outside circumstances imposed on the musicians.