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In a new series of regular monthly columns, our team of brilliant writers will be divulging what it is that’s been tweaking their musical interest of late…

Rich Hughes: Jim O’Rourke – The Visitor
I love Jim O’Rourke, or “Big Jim” as I affectionately call him. I love the fact that he’s been accused of “ruining records”. A phrase that I will get on a t-shirt one day. And I also love the way he downplayed The Visitor in a rare interview in the build up to its release saying “pretty much everyone is going to be disappointed”. Of course, he also said that it was more of a song structured album… which it is… unless you count the fact that it’s just ONE 38 minute track. Genius is an over-used word these days, but The Visitor IS a work of genius. A beautiful meandering piece of music that knocks on every door O’Rourke has previously entered musically. It’s just a great shame that he rarely, if ever, plays live any more. If I die never having seen Big Jim perform a solo set, then my life will have lacked meaning.

Andy Johnson: Stevie Wonder – Knocks Me Off My Feet
Everyone likes Stevie, and everyone talks about 1976′s double album explosion of creativity Songs in the Key of Life, but curiously not much is ever said about this gorgeous love song. Drowned out by its longer, more ambitious neighbours on the album, “Knocks Me Off My Feet” is a simple, plaintive, unassuming gem that I’ve fallen in love with recently. Its glorious chorus – “I don’t want to bore you with it / but I love you, I love you, I love you” is absolutely priceless, especially in its last, blossoming iteration. The song is lush despite having a simpler arrangement than much of the album – the ever-talented Wonder played all of the instruments himself.

Matt Poacher: Teeth of the Sea – Orphaned by the Ocean
This record quietly slipped out at the beginning of the year, with seemingly only The Quietus picking up on it. It’s a seething, throbbing thing, based around low ominous guitars, woozy pump organs and great stabs of brass. It’s been labelled as post-rock but in truth it’s less mannered than that. In reality it’s a psych album; but it’s psychedelia fed through a mangler, such as This Heat might have played, or even Talk Talk – brooding, sucked back in on itself. They also have a great line in titles: ‘Swear Blind the Alsatian’s Melting’, ‘Knees Like Knives’. Someone needs to get hold of this – it’s to good to just slip away…

Simon Gurney: Kreng – L’Autopsie Phénoménale De Dieu
This album is a German Expressionism inspired nightmare, dread bursting through every line and curve of sound, and not a little melodrama too (in the sense of mood and emotional intensity taking precedent over any real narrative, you’re just dropped into a black freezing pond.) Which is what the Miasmah label generally specializes in, from Deaf Centre to Jacaszek, a special brand of monochrome machinations. But with L’Autopsie there’s an extra edge added by the movie and vocal samples, something dangerous and awful bubbles away beneath the album’s already grim surface, ‘Meisje In Auto’ slowly staggers through a jazzy arrangement of piano and brush-work percussion, but what really catches you is a woman crying and whimpering in the middle of this, and suddenly the piece takes on an unbearably hard edge, implying some terrible deed. Following that track is ‘in De Berm pt3’ an unsettling contrast of raunchy saxophone and the same sample of a woman in distress, not too long after the track begins a loop of soft orgasmic grunting which replaces the woman’s voice, drums rumble away in the background and it builds into an intense finale. An sample of a man plays, “there it is, all waiting for you/Sorrow will pass, believe me/Life is so unimportant/And from now onwards you will dance/Like nobody ever before”. Just fucking creepy, man. Samples can be found here.

Adam Nelson: Woods – To Clean
Woods’ most recent album was never given a full review on this website, which is a terrible shame, because it’s a blisteringly good fun, warm, lo-fi noisey blanket of a record. The best way to read about Woods is to wear the spectacles of a short-sighted friend, while wrapped in a huge sheepskin coat. Their structure of feedback and tape hiss into meaningful sound, coupled with the freaked-up Beach Boys vocals and melodies is the most inviting sound I’ve heard all year, and this, the opening track from Songs of Shame, is the prime example of that. Don’t those opening indecipherable lyrics just say “this is a band whose party you want to be invited to”?

Jude Clarke: Micropenis – Art As An Investment
Boy-girl electro-brats Micropenis’s EP is available for free streaming or download. The five tracks of gleeful synth-heavy misbehaviour start as the band clearly mean to go on, with the shameless look-at-me agit-pop of The Lonesome Death of Alan McGee. Sample, and indeed, entire lyric: “The lonesome death of Alan McGee / Ha ha, hee hee, ha ha, hee hee”. The (female) vocals are half-spoken, sometimes shrieked, and bring to mind both Lene Lovich and The Slits, all the while underpinned by man-made synthesised noises of the Being-Boiled-era-Human-League ilk. The jaded, sometimes scornful and sometimes ire-filled words are entertaining: “Lines of bastards/ Lines of coke”, Louise declaims with contempt on the title track; while Pregnant in Rejykavik sees the narrator “feeling slightly sick”, and wondering “Oh no, can I get out of this?” – marvellously, cramming as many rhymes with Rejykavik that can be crow-barred into the scenario as possible. Micropenis are, perhaps, an ephemeral thrill – like downing a double vodka-redbull in one, then running down a hill, just for the sheer nasty buzz of it. Sometimes though, damn it, a quick, cheap rush can be the best kind, as long as you are prepared for a lingering sense of malaise and the weird taste in your mouth in the aftermath of consumption.