The Ting Tings - Sounds From Nowheresville

It’s no Klaxons catastrophe, but this second set is a so-so return on four years’ work.If you plotted hopes for The Ting Tings’ second album on a graph, the result would be a drawn-out, four-year nosedive. After the boisterous, day-glo brilliance of their 2008 debut, We Started Nothing, the odd-couple duo seemed like one of UK pop’s brightest prospects. Then they announced their second album would be called Kunst, an instantly-wearisome joke that suggested sneery disdain for their pop fanbase, and they became mired in lengthy recording sessions in Berlin, that clichéd halfway house for disillusioned ‘serious’ artists. After dramatically abandoning a whole album of material, the question changed from "will the new album be good?" to "will it ever exist?".

Charley Patton - The Rough Guide to Blues Legends: Reborn and Remastered

A winning celebration of a talent that shouts loud from the past.History slips away from us pretty fast. There’s only one photograph of Charlie Patton: a stone-faced fellow in a suit and bow-tie, fingers poised over his guitar fretboard like he’s waiting for a manicure. What he looked like smiling, we can only guess. We can’t even get his name right on album covers. Still, the music of this stern-looking man is the closest connection we have to the birth of the blues, and therefore to the making of pop as we know it.

Spiro - Kaleidophonica

The Bristol-based band reveals hidden contours of genre-free music with fantastic results.Spiro rightly won widespread acclaim for their explorative previous album, 2009’s Lightbox, which was characterised by alluring subtleties and infectious tangents. But this new set takes their intuitive appetite for pursuing the hidden contours of music a whole fantastic leap further.

Sachin-Jigar - Tere Naal Love Ho Gaya

The composer pair’s love songs well complement the frothy rom-com in question.Sachin Sanghvi and Jigar Saraiya may be relative newcomers on the Bollywood music scene, but that hasn’t prevented them from getting noticed. Having worked beside top Indian composers Pritam and Rajesh Roshan, the pair started creating background music before moving onto full soundtracks in 2009, debuting with Teree Sang.

News photos - More From Carnival 2012

In Focus blogs on a regular basis on TheAtlantic.com a series of photos about subjects that play in the news or related to it. This time you can watch a photo series named 'News photos - More From Carnival 2012'.

Luxury Hotels in Bangkok

Beautiful and interesting places in the world, of which you would think: 'I want to go there some time'. This time the subject is 'Luxury Hotels in Bangkok'. Curious where this is about?

The Soul Snatchers - Scratch My Itch

Vijf jaar na het debuutalbum Sniffin’ And Snatchin’ is de Nederlandse formatie The Soul Snatchers terug met een langverwachte opvolger. En nog steeds swingt deze groep muzikanten de pan uit.

News photos - Myanmar's War on Opium

In Focus blogs on a regular basis on TheAtlantic.com a series of photos about subjects that play in the news or related to it. This time you can watch a photo series named 'News photos - Myanmar's War on Opium'.

Shaking Godspeed - Hoera

Eind 2010 stelden wij dat het voor Shaking Godspeed wel eens een pittige opgave kon worden om een opvolger voor te maken voor Awe; een compromisloos debuut dat de indruk wekte dat het trio een schimmige deal met de duivel had gesloten.

Dry the River - Shallow Bed

A brave debut from a long-hyped band, mixing punkish energy with folk elements.Who wants to be in a guitar band with the pressure of rescuing an apparently fading genre? Well Dry the River do, and their intention is clear. Bearing tattoos and professing to a love of US hardcore, the London-based five-piece have been up for the scrap since 2011’s well-received Weights and Measures EP, and tore up last year’s SXSW festival. Now, having made the BBC Sound of 2012 list, they’ll be looking to emulate the success of the Sound of 2011’s breakthrough guitar sorts, The Vaccines.

Alex Winston - King Con

A joyless album where wacky intonation obscures some potentially appealing harmonies.A key fallout of the Lana Del Rey echo chamber of hype was the revelation that so many music critics let their fascination with A&R process amplify anticipation for an album to fever pitch. As the noise rose, so did the low-level snooping – and the questions became so loud that reviewers barely even required a copy of the album.

Ryan Teague - Field Drawings

An elegant, fastidiously constructed album from the Bristol composer.Bristol-based composer Ryan Teague is one of an increasing number of artists, from Efterklang to Portico Quartet, Ólafur Arnalds to Nils Frahm, successfully operating in the fertile margins between chamber orchestration and electronic processing. This, Teague’s third album of delicately poised, wordless instrumental fare, focuses less on the sweeping, bowed string phalanxes that have characterised his previous releases and errs instead toward the dulcet timbres of glockenspiels, xylophones, marimbas, piano and pizzicato plucking – or electronic approximations thereof.