Geoff Westen’s album, “Music For My Friends”, thumps onto the scene like a dropped box of heavy disco balls – all shiny potential energy and the slight threat of chaos. It aims for that classic pop song euphoria, the kind designed to rattle car speakers and fuel late-night dance floors, an "aural assault" as Westen puts it. And it does pulse with energy, a...

A city can teach a person how to carry noise. The Liberties, with its old trade routes and close communal pulse, has long carried dense human music. From that inheritance, Zak Coghlan appears to have taken not only a taste for melody, but a belief that feeling becomes sharper when placed inside a story that can stand up under pressure. “Lead Balloon”, his new single...