The Highs and Lows of Weather Forecasting

Five albums and potentially five different audiences. Which one are you in?

Bernard Grancher, Daphni, Jim Allen, The Milk Carton Kids, Parlor Greens

Pop In The Real World Taster Tracks 2026 (Spotify)

Pop In The Real World Taster Tracks 2026 (YouTube)

Maybe Things Will Be Alright : Jim Allen

Best for : Lovers of keeping it simple and doing it well

If you're old enough, think back to the mid 70s. It was a time musically when you were regarded as a great musician if you could play four keyboards at once. If you looked the part, your style would trump ability. And disco was a genre for dancing to, not performing and a 12 minute remix didn't make a song better, but did allow the DJ time out to go to the loo.

Jim Allen is the antithesis of all that. He's back to basics. He's the sound of a man who wants to connect with his audience, to share his love and respect for pure pop and to allow space for fun in his act. He's the voice of pub rock.

The thing about pub rock is that you have to learn what people like quickly, and how to do it well. You have to build an immediate rapport with your audience and keep them engaged. Jim has mastered all that. There's nothing pretentious in any of his songs. They're crowd pleasing songs, but naturally so and not forced or calculated. It's very hard to dislike and its natural home is on the roster of 1970s Stiff Records.

Jim switches between genres as effortlessly as Nick Lowe, and his love for the classic song structure of verse, chorus, repeat, middle eight, verse chorus repeat fade never grows weary. This is an album that picks out the best bits of folk, country, rock and roll and pop to leave you feeling warm and content.

'Maybe Things Will Be Alright' kicks things off as it means to go on. It's an appealing slice of jangling pub rock, gruffly sung. 'Panic Button' brings you new wave influences - more pub rock's natural offspring than pop. It's in the phrasing of Elvis Costello if it were played and sung by Any Trouble. You're already picking up the sense of fun which continues with the cute title to 'Let My People Go To Sleep'. 'They Get Up' is the best zombie horror song since Dave Edmunds' 'Creature From The Black Lagoon'. Coming under the radar he has the freedom to experiment with the Oriental feel of 'Where I Am' and 'Covered In Snow' is played with a real feel for solid rock and roll, particularly in its piano.

Jim Allen - your new favourite grassroots band.

Taster Track : Panic Button

https://jimallen.bandcamp.com/track/panic-button

(Sadly Jim's music isn't on YouTube. This is a link to 'Panic Button' on Bandcamp. If you like it, please consider buying it!)

Butterfly : Daphni

Best for : Understanding how club music works

Daphni is the guise of electronic music maestro Caribou when he's releasing music specifically for clubs. For non-clubbers, this album offers plenty of good reasons for listening to Daphni's music at home. It also highlights a few reasons for letting it pass by.

If you're composing club music you're imagining it played in a hot, sweaty, dark environment with bright flashing lights and very loud volumes while crowds dance frenetically. I listened to this at home, while the house was quiet, sitting on a settee and sipping a glass of cold water. It's likely that I respond differently to the music in this environment.

I've long believed that club music is music made by machines, detached from human emotions. It's taken me a while to fully appreciate that behind the machines are DJs who make the choices that move us (literally!). I've also belatedly realised that music is confined by its scales and notes. Machines can make and emphasise sounds that instruments can't.

In the interests of research, I turned the volume up to max, way above the usual level for home listening. (I remembered to plug in headphones first!) It's astonishing what new sounds are revealed in this album, sounds that traditional instruments simply can't make. It's like zooming in close on a picture and seeing the individual dots that make up a colour.

Club music is conventional pop music turned inside out. Instead of placing vocals upfront, closely followed by melody, rhythm and beat, it reverses the order. The beat is the King of Clubs and the Queen of Hearts, but beat heavy doesn't mean thumping. It can just as easily be the glitch and twitch of 'Clap Your Hands' or the light patter of 'Sad Piano House'.

It's a thin line between trance inducing and mind numbing, and Daphni sometimes topples on to the wrong side. A track such as 'Hung' sometimes sounds as if it has stuck. But the unexpected harpsichord of 'Invention' that wrong foots the crowd and the delayed introduction of a melody in 'Talk To Me' will surprise you. The second time you hear the song, you'll be waiting with bated breath for the moment to arrive.

This setting is the natural home for small fragments and snippets of music that don't fit elsewhere. They mark the transitions from one track to another so that you have a seamless mix for the whole album.

Sixteen songs in 59 minutes may feel a little too long for some, but open your ears and you'll find a source of happy energy.

Taster Track : Sad Piano House

Lost Cause Lover Fool : The Milk Carton Kids

Best for : Worshippers at the Church of Americana

Their name conjures up the feeling of rascally Beano characters or lovable family gangs such as The Double Deckers. Their music doesn't.

Sometimes what we regard as Americana is only inspired or influenced by it. The Milk Carton Kids deliver, and do not diverge, from its essence. This is authentic music played on core instruments. They even include the banjo, and unironically, as an emotional instrument not as the cue for a hoe down. Guitars are strummed and finger picked. They squeak as they're played and they slide into melancholy. Their harmonies are quiet and become special. This is music for connoisseurs and aficionados. (They are different, I looked it up.)

It's a reverential experience. You can imagine that, live, their ideal stage set up would be the two of them sat on stools centre stage looking at each other as they sang. Look carefully and you'd glimpse any supporting musicians unobtrusively positioned near the wings at the back. Better still, you'd catch them playing in a church, the acoustics and atmosphere perfectly suited to their solemnity. There would be no banter or joking with the audience. That would be as inappropriate as succumbing to a fit of the giggles during your grandmother's funeral.

There's pleasure to be taken from anything performed this well and with such evident love. The intense focus on their art does make it a little niche for the casual listener though.

The overriding tone is sad and melancholy. It's not that everything has gone wrong. It's the anxious feeling that it could do. That feeling is captured in 'Sad Song' and the line "'Cause there's always a sad song livin' in my heart". It's a feeling they have had all their lives.

They're likened to Simon and Garfunkel. That's fair, but only if you ignore songs such as 'Keep The Customer Satisfied' and 'Cecelia' and focus on 'For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her' and 'Scarborough Fair / Canticle'.

This is an album filled with feeling for their art and it deserves your rapt attention.

Taster Track : Sad Song

Emeralds : Parlor Green

Best for : Lovers of the Hammond organ

The Hammond organ marks out Parlor Green's musical territory as clearly as a beach towel marks out your personal space by a hotel swimming pool.

This is a collection of instrumentals that can be found in the same smoke filled basement club as Booker T, the James Taylor Quartet and Bangs & Talbot. Their passion and love for their music is enough to make this an appealing listen. You sense they could jam and improvise in this style for hours. Thankfully they resist the temptation. The 36 minutes running time of this album is just enough to top up your need for hot, sweaty, sunshine music.

Parlor Greens are a one trick band, who are very good at that one trick. If it appeals to you at the start, you're in for a treat. If it doesn't work for you from the opening notes, nothing you hear subsequently will change your mind. It's a perfect introduction or reminder of the Mod(ern) world soundtracked by the sound of Stax.

The soulful funk of opening track 'Eat Your Greens' can serve as their signature tune. It's tight and punchy, sunny fairground music. As a trio their understanding and ability to relate to each other while playing is remarkable. The drum rolls that bring 'Mustard Sauce' to its conclusion are perfect. The spaces left in 'Red Dog' may have you tingling and holding your breath with anticipation like that moment on a roller coaster immediately before a downward rush. There's a perkiness to 'Letter To Brother Ben', while 'Jolene' is a well disguised cover of a very well known song. If you heard it without any context it would puzzle you, lingering on the edge of complete recognition.

'Emeralds' is a Pimms on the patio kind of record. Enjoy it when the time is right, move back to your music of choice when you've had enough. Parlor Greens offer something that is immediately familiar but too well played to be taken for granted.

Taster Track : Eat Your Greens

Astra Lumen Solaria : Bernard Grancher

Best for : Breaking down experimental electronica

I need to be honest here. Sometimes I can't get my head around what I'm listening to. That doesn't mean I can't enjoy it, but it doesn't make it easy to sell it to others. That's the case with Bernard Grancher's 'Astra Lumen Solaria'.

I'm indebted to a short review in Electronic Sound magazine to explain that it's an album about breaking down, musically and personally. I can hear that but, initially at least there was a warmth and brightness that doesn't fit that description. 'Leading Tenderly' is a slice of stylish French electronica with vocals that call to mind Air. After a gorgeous,minimalist opening it blossoms into a gentle firework that's full of fizzing layers and warm colours 'Des Astuces Pour Une Vie Plus Facie' twinkles like starlight.

Things begin to change with 'Fondre En Masse' which is underpinned by something more ominous, a heavier industrial sound that proceeds relentlessly until it becomes hypnotic. It's the first emergence of cold clouds across a blue sky. Looking back at the Electronic Sound review, it would fit if it was music for the death of a star.

'Astra Lumen Solaria' is always musical, but perhaps a couple of steps removed from music as we usually hear it. It's an album that seems to be squeezing the last drops of life out of an old synthesiser, emptying it of stored programmes and multi note fragments that are built into whatever song is available. 'Advies' feels like two programmes have fallen over and tumbled into each other. 'Vers Le Haut,C'est La Vide' feels improvised and a little noodly, the vocals nestling on top of the song as if it were a jumble of comfortable cushions. By the closing track 'C'est Moi Le Fantoche' there's a definite feel of tapes unspooling, of music running down until it's more of a ghostly presence than a song.

And that's your journey, from prettiness to sadness and from holding on to loss. Sorry I couldn't be more helpful.

Taster Track : Leading Tenderly