The “cowboy punks” tag has been following National Photo Committee around, and it fits: all the instrumentation and song structure of a typical Americana band, with the slacker attitude turned up a few notches. The analogue is Tiberius’s farm emo; a genre tag self-applied with enough wink to deflect, accurate enough to stick.

The Chicago four-piece describe themselves on Bandcamp as a band “that sounds like they grew up in Virginia and got kicked out of college in Olympia,” which was enough to make me play the album immediately. The David Berman influence is everywhere, and perhaps it’s just the corner of music I’m currently in, but his ghost is loud right now. You can hear it in Max Bottner’s double entendres and wry lines delivered with a perfectly straight face. At one point a phone goes off mid-song and nobody seems bothered. Bottner’s deep baritone does most of the storytelling. The richness of his voice makes him sound older than his years, and you eagerly sit round and listen to what he has to say.

This sort of thing usually comes across as half-arsed or throwaway. Red Hot Photo Committee is neither. It’s a polished, serious record delivered with a glint in its eye and no small amount of swagger.

Big Long Sun started as Jamie Broughton on his own and is now an eight-piece, though you wouldn’t always guess it from the recordings. Broughton still tracks most of it himself in a Brighton bedroom on a Tascam 244, and the other seven turn up to add detail rather than thicken the mix. love songs and spiritual recollections is their third album in eighteen months, which would normally be cause for suspicion, but the songs don’t sound rushed.

It’s psych-pop with folk-pop instrumentation, and the eight members are used sparingly. ‘heavy (on your mind)’ is a good example: nothing it does is individually complicated, but the song slowly piles up until it sounds full without ever sounding crowded. That restraint runs through most of the record.

The warmth of the playing keeps pulling against the lyrics, which are not warm. Not always dark either: more often aloof and guarded, hinting at something rather than explaining it. Broughton has called one of the singles “a dark, paranoid folk anthem for the spiritually insecure mind,” which gives you the temperature, even when the arrangements are doing their best to disguise it.

I really do like this a lot. About as good as these things get (not intended to be faint praise). Half a star bump.

Cooper’s least showy film and for me his best. The stand-up scenes could have been a vanity exercise for everyone involved; instead they’re the most honest stretch of the film. I’ve enjoyed Arnett’s bluster for years but he’s doing something else here and it suits him. Dern matches him scene for scene and then some, especially in the back half once Tess stops absorbing and starts pushing back. They feel like two people who have actually been married. I really enjoyed this.

Maya Hawke’s voice is imperfect and endearing. Lyrical themes flit between existential whimsy and the kind of self-examination that celebrity tends to provoke. The production keeps things warm and unfussy, which suits her. An impressive folk-pop record from someone who could easily have settled for the day job.

The easy comparison would be Berman or Malkmus relocating to northern California and making a CSNY record. Wry couplets about workplace mediocrity, theologians, fish fingers, all set to a gently rocking country-rock backdrop. But the easy comparison isn’t quite the right one. Mildred are four roughly equal parts—Henry, all sharing vocals and writing—as a result the songs feel passed around the room rather than handed down from a bossy frontman.

Age matters too, perhaps. This is a debut by friends who started living together in their early thirties and ended up writing some songs; what emerged has none of the showy push of a younger band. “Charlie” ambles along on accordion and horn, “Cobwebs” has a brisk motorik thing going underneath some genuinely bleak lines, and “Fish Sticks” lands its chorus with unhurried confidence. The whole thing sounds like it was played live in a room, their interviews suggest that more or less it was.

It’s warm, confident, relaxed, reminiscent of plenty of wonderful things without being in thrall to any of them. The kind of record that turns up on a friend’s stereo and you ask what it is.

A film about storytelling. Incredible to look at. Seems to have been an enormous labour of love; I expect my rating will rise or fall significantly upon a rewatch.

Lo-fi riffs to drone out to? Simultaneously reminiscent of Jeff Buckley’s demos that comprise Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk—particularly “Your Flesh is So Nice”—and Grouper. Sit with it a few times for the structure and melodies to make themselves clear.

Across its run city of careless angels moves through bedroom folk, glitched electronics, lo-fi power pop and something close to ambient rap, which makes for an uneven listen, though it mostly keeps its charm throughout. “Fall Asleep” and “Reason” recall early Alex G a little too closely. “Imaginary Woman” skirts the same line but the composition is strong enough to carry it, and the ooh-and-aah background vocals are the best thing on the record.

I remember this arriving in 1990, though only as a soundtrack and a general early-60s mood; the film itself never registered. Winona Ryder anchors it completely. Charlotte’s neuroses are pitched exactly right, and the voiceover prayers are the best thing here. Ricci, in her first film, is unnervingly assured. Cher is a natural, somehow both warmer and colder than I expected and with less screen time too. She was forty-four playing a woman of about thirty-one, which no amount of presence quite sells, but it matters much less than it should. Bob Hoskins is charm in a cardigan and flat cap. The whole thing is far sweeter and stranger than its reputation suggested to me.

I’d have called myself reasonably well versed in the first wave of punk. Not an expert, but better than the average person who came to it two decades later. La Peste, though, had passed me by entirely. Boston’s first true punk band, as it turns out.

The original lineup managed one single, 1978’s “Better Off Dead”, before a personnel change and the slow fade that followed. Everything else stayed in the vault: practice-room recordings, 4-track loft tapes, and four songs cut by a pre-fame Ric Ocasek. The opener is one of the Ocasek four, and it’s superb, all forward motion from the first bar.

You can hear where Mission of Burma and the Bush Tetras would go next, the angular Boston racket already half-formed here. Hard not to wonder what La Peste might have become with a few more years of their own.

This is the first I’ve heard of Chris Brain, and it’s a quiet, easy record to sit with. Mostly acoustic guitar, picked rather than strummed, with other players filling in around it. There’s pedal steel, clarinet, violin and piano, but never much at once. The songs don’t change a lot as they go. Quite lovely.

Brown Horse are from Norwich, which you would never guess from Total Dive. The guitars are pure Crazy Horse and the pedal steel weeps on cue. A song called “Heart of the Country” arrives with no apparent irony. This is the modern Americana mould—the one Ovven, Ratboys, Florry, Tiberius and a dozen others are working right now, all of them tracing the same lines back through MJ Lenderman to Jason Molina, Lucinda Williams, Silver Jews, the Drive-By Truckers, Wilco, Uncle Tupelo.

The geography is the only misdirection. The other song titles (“Wreck”, “Sadness Reigns”, “Oblivion”) tell you exactly where the lyrics live, and they aren’t wrong.

The standout is “Twisters”. You could argue the record doesn’t move around much: the mood, the tempo, the instrumentation and the preoccupations hold fairly steady from start to finish. That’s a fair criticism of a less assured album. Here it isn’t one. When a band sounds this good doing one thing, the consistency reads as confidence rather than limitation, and I’m happy to sit in it for 45 minutes.

I picked this up expecting another corporate history and got something more affectionate. MacDonald, the Guardian’s games editor, has covered Nintendo for long enough to be in the story herself: there’s a lovely passage about queuing for the Wii at Gamescom 2006, calling her parents from the hall to try to explain it. The book is at its best on the through-line that limitations beget creativity: Koji Kondo writing the Zelda title theme in an all-nighter after the team realised Ravel was still in copyright; the D-pad emerging from the constraints of the Game & Watch; Mario’s mustache existing because pixels couldn’t render a mouth.

The Iwata material is the heart of it. His 2004 line about the industry being on a dead end (“Nintendo is called ‘conservative’ and ‘quiet’ nowadays, so we hope to show our nature as an innovator”) frames everything that followed, from the DS through to the Switch. The hidden tribute to him in the Switch’s OS, accessed by recreating the Nintendo Direct hand gesture on the date of his death, is the kind of detail MacDonald is alert to throughout.

Game development, she notes, has gone from a band to an orchestra. So has the writing about it.

Kaufman’s least immediately legible film, and potentially his most rewarding for it. I didn’t clock how the Jake scenes and the janitor scenes connected until the credits rolled, which may be the point or may just be me being slow—either way, I want to come back to it, just not yet. I suspect a lot more clicks if you’ve got the full reference shelf to hand (David Foster Wallace, Pauline Kael, Wordsworth, A Beautiful Mind, the musicals, etc), rather than catching half like I did. Buckley and Plemons are fantastic, and Collette and Thewlis match them on a fraction of the screen time.