Various Artists – Whatever Gets You Through the Night

Having cycled through theatre and film iterations, Cora Bissett, David Greig and Swimmer One’s multimedia Whatever Gets You through the Night project arrives in album form. And despite being partial by nature, it never sounds incomplete thanks to savvy sequencing and a consistently high standard of contributions.

With the wee small hours as inspiration, we get agony (Meursault’s wracked A Kind of Cure) and ecstasy (Wounded Knee and Bigg Taj’s Live at the Bongo Club, built from muffled beatboxed beats and background chatter); melancholia (Rachel Sermanni’s Lonely Taxi, 2am) and drunken munchies (Eugene Kelly’s droll Chips and Cheese) – a breadth of moods as varied as human experience, combining neatly into a vivid nocturnal tapestry.

Other peaks include Errors’ Embassy Approach, with eccentricities cut from the same cloth as Have Some Faith in Magic; Ricky Ross’s plaintive The North Star; and Withered Hand’s horn-backed bittersweet bookends, which bracket the anthology’s nighttime sketches splendidly. [Chris Buckle]