Real music is hard to find. If you've ever felt suffocated in the age of fakery and hype, then Savoy Brown's latest album The Devil To Pay is a blast furnace. Driven by classic blues and age-old human truths - but dragged into contemporary relevance by stinging musicianship and modern savvy - Kim Simmonds' new songs have arrived when we need them most. "In many ways," considers the legendary guitarist, "this is the best album I've ever done. It's fresh and new, and belongs to the twenty-first century". Released on Ruf Records in 2015 - and marking Savoy Brown's 50th year as pack-leaders of the British blues scene - 'The Devil To Pay' was born during a white-knuckle burst of inspiration.

There are no surprises in sound and style on Morph the Cat, Donald Fagen's long-awaited third solo album, nor should any be expected – ever since Steely Dan's 1980 masterwork, Gaucho, his work, either on his own or with longtime collaborator Walter Becker, has been of a piece. Each record has been sleek, sophisticated, and immaculately produced, meticulously recorded and arranged, heavy on groove and mood, which tends to mask the sly wit of the songs. When it works well – as it did on Fagen's peerless 1982 solo debut, The Nightfly, or on Steely Dan's 2001 comeback, Two Against Nature – the results go down smoothly upon first listen and reveal their complexity with each spin; when it doesn't quite succeed – both 1993's Kamakiriad and the Dan's 2003 effort Everything Must Go didn't quite gel – the albums sound good but samey on the surface and don't quite resonate.

The cantata Opening of the Wells, one of Martinu’s most intimate professions of love for his native land, simply cannot be absent from the Supraphon catalogue. The composition is inspired by the ancient custom of saying good-bye to the winter and welcoming the spring, when children come to “open” springlets and purify them of deposits of sludge. A “rite of spring”, yet one entirely different to that we know from Stravinsky. In the character of the wanderer, the composer himself too returns to his native land – at least in his memories, since from 1938 until the end of his life he had no chance to come back home. Martinu also completed the other two cantatas – Legend of the Smoke from Potato Fires and Mikeš of the Mountains – in the final years of his life, homesick, with the memory of his native region and folk songs in his heart.

The two dozen songs on Sugar, Sugar… come from the first four long-players issued in conjunction with the CBS-TV animated program The Archie Show and the expanded Archie Comedy Hour. The project was spearheaded by pop music mogul Don Kirshner. Having scored notable success with early Monkees sides, he found another batch of recording studio pros to provide material and audibly animate the Archies. Among the primary contributors were Ron Dante (vocals/guitar), Andy Kim (vocals), and Jeannie Thomas (vocals), who was replaced by Toni Wine (vocals). The Archies (1968) was the prefab combo's debut and despite an appearance in the album charts, this package yields only the churning midtempo "Truck Driver," the pseudo-affective and hormone-driven ballad "Seventeen Ain't Young," and the infectious bubblegum frolic "Bang-Shang-A-Lang"…