VINYL OF THE MONTH

Rattle Encircle (Upset! The Rhythm)

Langenu are a black metal band. On stage at Estonia’s Tallinn Music Week, they are fearsome. Blood-vessel-burstingly intense. Tempering their force with twists into progressive, psychedelic-adjacent territory, they are a band any rock fan would dig.

I can’t hear Joan Armatrading without being instantly transported back to Liverpool, and my student digs just around the corner from Penny Lane. I was a first-year music student, writing essays in the late-night glow of an Anglepoise, my radio-cassette player (boomboxes hadn’t yet been invented) tuned to Radio City. “Love and Affection” and “Down to Zero”, from her magnificent self-titled 1976 LP (no CDs either, and certainly no streaming!) were on the playlist of just about every DJ.

The sax-player Kenny Garrett established a reputation as one of Miles Davis’s band in the Amandla (1989) period. He was also a member of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, the launching-pad for scores of talented young musicians.

The titular “lighthouse of glass” is a place where the narrator is “crying into the sun,” in which there is a need to “stand by my solitude.” Choosing isolation and self-determination are themes running throughout Lighthouse of Glass the album and how Sweden’s Sofia Härdig has approached recording these 10 songs. As well as the songwriter, she is the arranger, engineer, producer and main instrumentalist.

Stereo Instrumental Music was recorded in July 1976 and originally issued only on cassette. The release was organised by what was credited as the “Sun Shine Music Shop,” an enterprise which seems to have left no additional imprint. No further “Sun Shine Music Shop” albums are known.

A pizzicato violin opens Song Over Støv. Gradually, other instruments arrive: bowed violin, a fluttering flute, pattering percussion, an ominous double bass. They merge. The climax is furious, intensely rhythmic. Suddenly, it is over.

The sticker on the front cover says “The heaviest proto-metal compilation ever released.” And considering the label behind Yeah Man, It's Bloody Heavy is Rise Above, founded by former Napalm Death and Cathedral frontman Lee Dorrian, this is not idle hubris.

It took until the last song before Lauren Mayberry started to well up onstage, which was good going. The singer had mentioned early on the prospect of a hometown Glasgow gig for her solo career had left her emotional all day, both with joy and fear.

On the cover of her eponymous debut album, the Bolton-raised Toria Wooff reclines on a church pew located in Stanley Palace, a 16th-century mansion in her adopted city of Chester. In her hand, a Celtic Cross. Such imagery implies that what will be heard on the grooves within the sleeve might cleave to forms of gothic-inclined British folk. This, though, is not the case.