Now operational for longer than some of their baldest fans have been alive, Yo La Tengo continue to thump the jukebox of 20th century guitar music on Stuff Like That There, a collection of covers as well as revisions from their own back catalogue. That the band have managed to remain both hip and lovable over the years is perhaps no surprise. The New Jersey trio often feel like two different bands from one track to the next: huge, winding, drone-rock workouts sit happily next to the type of countrified acoustic whispering that peppered all those mixtapes your first boyfriend at university kept producing in earnest.

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For a night that lays claim to “balladeers, hauntologists, super-8 soundtracks, audio-archaeologists, occult circuit-benders” and more, the Heretics’ Folk Club certainly delivers on the unusual. That’s part of the thrill as we fold ourselves into the nooks and crannies of Cafe #9. Aside from a few rather opaque genre signposts, no one really knows what to expect.

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What was most remarkable about Spaces, Nils Frahm’s last LP, was that it sounded like a studio album, right up to the moment that the audience broke into rapturous applause. It remains a strangely disconcerting experience to feel as though the solitude that an ambient or modern classical piece invariably accompanies has been a shared experience after all.

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Everyone seems pretty angry at the establishment these days. By ‘these days’ I mean, of course, all days, across all demographics and every quadrant of the political spectrum. But there sure is a lot of it right now. For the Left, it’s witnessing Reagan and Thatcher’s neoliberalism in full swing, watching in horror as every public institution gets carved up and sold off, while the looming threat of corporate initiatives like the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) seem destined to put even more power in the hands of big business. For the Right, it’s an erosion of free speech through a programme of cultural Marxism, diluting free speech with political correctness. Race riots are tearing America apart. Iraq and Afghanistan are still fresh in the memory. So where are the great protest songs of our generation? Where is our Dylan, our Seeger, our Clash?

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As fictional eulogy to a lost friend, portrait of the closed and the closing towns of post-industrial America, paean to the Bohemian dream of life on the move, collaboration with art collective the Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea, documentary of a DIY raft-building project on the Hudson River, and showcase of Dark Dark Dark’s versatile turns at folk, jazz, Americana and ambient set pieces, Flood Tide is a truly multi-platform endeavour.

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Despite the attention lavished on Roller Trio’s lively eponymous debut, Fracture almost didn’t happen at all. After extensively touring in 2012, the Mercury Prize survivors reluctantly took to crowd funding website Indiegogo, offering the usual bundles of t-shirts, signed albums, unreleased live recordings, and potentially awkward home performances in exchange for the means to record a new album.

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