Who needs who? No time for editorials, repeat, replete, reheat, let the actual music do the actual walking and the actual talking. Exact same thing as last time once again, another five (or so) slices of music that have passed our way recently, five slices of music cherry picked for your delight and however you like to slice it and of course it was the price of bird seed and…

Five? There’s something rather compelling about five. Cross-pollination? Five more? Is there another way? A better way? A cure for pulling flying swordfish out of the clouds? Is there a rhyme? Is there a reason? What do reasons make? Five more? Cake oil? Snake oil? Bake the oil, everything must go somewhere and no, we never do and the proof of the pudding is in that proof reading. When we started this thing, oh never mind, it doesn’t matter why we started this damn thing, we never should have done and like we asked last time, does anyone bother reading the editorial? We do really try to listen to everything that comes in, we are very (very) very very picky about what we actually post on these fractured pages or about what gets played on the radio or indeed what we hang in a gallery.

Cut to the chase, never mind the editorial, skip this bit, there’s music further down the page, five or so pieces of music that have come our way in the last few days and what’s Wordsworth? Just the basic facts and links and those sounds (and visuals), that’s surely all you need from us on these Five pages we reguarly post?

Here we go, five more slices of music that have recently come our way, the second five of a new year, this time we start somewhere in, wel lwhere are Swell Maps from these days? Birmingham? London?

1: Swell Maps – “Enjoy this pictorial video created by Swell Maps pal Johan Vögel in advance of the long-awaited Swell Maps third new studio album in over 45 years” – The album, C21, is coming out via Tiny Global Productions, they’ll tell you more. Here’s more of the new album via Bandcamp and here’s the Swell Maps website for those not sure if they’re coming or going, they’ve never done niffin’ they can’t explain so we’ll let them do just that, sounding rather good so far to us…

2: Bratakus, the no-messing sisters from the north of Scotland who play what they describe well as “politically charged punk rock ‘n’ roll”, with a new video, made by Alice Black, and a new track and well, they’re always full of energetic goodness, full of challenge, go investigate via their Bandcamp page, looks like they have a new album…

3: Fotocrime – The Louisville, Kentucky band have a strong Killing Joke feel to their locked on bite and their raw edge, an edge that just takes you with it. Both melodic and pummeling, they’ve got something in their industrial-tinged post-punk that you just want to go with – a challenge, a menace, something immediate that you just want to go with. The video up there goes with the second track released from the forthcoming album… Bandcamp / website

And…

4: HÉR – Watch the music video for Going Down, the latest single for HÉR’s debut album Monochrome. Monochrome is out now via Season of Mist.

5: Mandy, Indiana – More from Mandy, this time featuring billy woods (who seems to not like capital letters), he gives them a different slant. We did, for what any of this is worth, already cover the Manchester band’s jsut released new album, they are a band we’ve been covering for quite some time now – ORGAN THING: This band matters and this might just be Mandy, Indiana’s best album so far. Urgh is affirming, cathartic, it is a call to arms, chalk this one up as a win for art and the force for good that art is…

If you don’t know already then this is probabably something more typical, not that anything ever is typical with Mandy, Indiana. This is from the new. album as well…

And while we’re here, more Hariguem Zaboy, read about them via the previous Five Music feature… ORGAN: Five Music Things – Mumbles and their Book of Hell, Buñuel and some kind of high speed chase, Crippled Black Phoenix, Frenzee come from Greece, they probably have a thirst for knowledge, meanwhile Hariguem Zaboy are “the best noise rock in Thailand!” and a whole load of Rage and…