Songs For The Deaf

Brock Van Wey might occupy a niche in the ambient world, but his music comes in all shapes and sizes. He makes sweepingly emotional tracks that can take up entire sides of vinyl or get compressed into small bursts of feeling. He's as good at melodic epics and vocal tracks as he is at drone. With every bvdub release, you have a basic idea of the type of sounds you'll hear - reverb, wistful melodies, dubby delay effects - but how they might come out is less predictable. Epilogues For The End Of The Sky, the first album of the year from the prolific artist, finds him back in epic mode after the fragmented Yours Are Stories Of Sadness. But in its own way, Epilogues For The End Of The Sky is stripped-back. Van Wey simplifies his arrangements, burying feelings beneath a haze of reverb and effects…

In 2002, Mark Lanegan was looking to make some changes in how he approached his music – the Screaming Trees had finally collapsed at the end of the '90s, he'd found a new fan base as a frequent guest vocalist with Queens of the Stone Age, and the spare, blues-leaning solo efforts Lanegan cut for Sub Pop were no longer side projects but the first chapters of a new career. As Lanegan was strategizing his next move, he went to Houston, Texas and in five days recorded a dozen songs with a handful of talented local musicians, including guitarist Ian Moore and longtime Willie Nelson sideman Mickey Raphael on harmonica, with Justice Records founder Randall Jamail as producer. While the sessions were meant to be demos for a stack of songs Lanegan had written for Jamail's publishing house, the finished product sounded good enough to be an album, and in 2015 Lanegan finally released the material under the title Houston: Publishing Demos 2002. The jolly irony is that while these are supposed to be demos, in many respects the performances sound more polished and "commercial" than most of Lanegan's early solo efforts, capturing a laid-back but buoyant mood that's informed by country and blues as much as rock, and Lanegan seems comfortable singing with the group, rather than simply laying his vocals over the top.

A pop music band from California in the sunshine pop genre, The Association are known for their tight vocal harmony. In the 1960s the group had numerous hits at or near the top of the Billboard charts…