Hercules and Love Affair - 'Blind'

I don't care. I know I'm not supposed to like this. It's... dammit, it's disco, okay, a word I generally only use pejoratively. When I grew up an anorak-wearing indie kid, the battle lines were drawn, and disco (along with cock rock, admittedly an unlikely bedfellow) was the enemy. And although I'm ever so pro-gay in my white, middle class, liberal way, I happen to fancy, you know, girls. Further, you'd never get me inside a nightclub. Hate the places. Music's too loud, beer's shit and I've never been to one that isn't a meat market. Give me a dark, gloomy and preferably smelly pub with three misanthropic old blokes and a packet of pork scratchings any day. Hey, that's a dream night out. Life is miserable; work with the grain.

But fuck it, this is brill and you'd have to have rags stuck in your ears not to realise it. Back in the days when I cared about this website and used to try to talk about music and stuff on it, I declared my mixed feelings about this guy Antony from the Antony and the Johnsons, and how a particular song had utterly floored and convinced me. Went to see them at the Barbican shortly after that, some pretentious art thing where a series of women slowly revolved as the man sang, some of them, thrillingly, undressed. (I've seen so much nudity in the name of art. Occasionally you go to the theatre and someone doesn't take their clothes off, although you can usually get a refund.) Anyway, he sings on this one and he sounds great - he has a fabulous, almost terrible, voice - against a cheesy and smooth disco track which is utterly of both of its times - about 20 years ago and because of that, completely now.

Of course you buy this on 12" and it doesn't include the best version, which is on the LP, although alongside some useless remix by some bloke or other there's a classy Frankie Knuckles mix, which takes me back to that brief interregnum when I utterly rejected guitar-based music for the abstract thrills of late house and early techno. The LP's got to be great anyway, having heard a fair chunk of it via illegal downloads on the office computer, while vaguely wondering why no one's got round to sacking me yet. But I find downloading just fuels more buying, which makes it okay, and this lot are added to the massive list of LPs I now need to get, work demands having intervened two weeks running to prevent me from venturing to the record shop. What's with everybody - Teenagers, Fuck Buttons, Crystal Castles, Be Your Own Pet, Nick Cave, Youthmovies - putting LPs out at the same time anyway? Some planning, please? I'm under a lot of pressure here.

Deize Tigrona - 'Bandida' / 'Me Chinga'

I never really got to grips with genres. I'm occasionally puzzled when I feed a CD into the computer or copy some MP3s into the relevant music-playing software and the machine tells me that this tune I really like is some sub-variant of a type of music that I hadn't known existed. Occasionally I flirt with reclassifying them all into one genre. I would call that genre 'music', although I might still have to reserve a special category for The Fall, who are above any such relativism.

So I thought this stuff was called Baile Funk, until I went to that ultimate authority on which I base all my life decisions, Wikipedia, which told me that basically that's a misnomer which only the crassest white guy imperialist tourist and cultural appropriator could make. Regardless, this is clearly modern Brazilian music and I seem to have pretty much fallen for this stuff in a generic way, in the same way I love, say Soukous music, without particularly being able to tell one thing from another. The daft and life-affirming Bonde do Role acted as a gateway drug here, although presumably they irk the purists by not being prepared to stay in the 'world music' ghetto, and from that starting point I now thrash about hopelessly in a great pool of similar-sounding records.

Take this one. It's so spartan. It's raw and angry-sounding. It's defiantly unmelodic, and as such seems quite typical. Of course, I don't understand the words, but as a hardcore Mark E Smith devotee, that's never really been an issue. She could be singing/rapping about love and kittens for all I know, but if so, she still sounds mightily pissed off about it all. This is rock music, and yes it's punk music, and a little bit of incomprehension probably helps.

A lot of this stuff seems to be on Man Recordings of, erm, Germany, and having unearthed this and paid more money than was sensible for it in the West London branch of Rough Trade the other week, I immediately had to fork out for more from Man, from Boomkat for a change, very good for these kind of things, through which resulting pile I continue to work, without finding anything quite in the same class. But now there's this new record by Tetine on Soul Jazz, I Go To The Doctor, which is so short and slight it virtually isn't there, and so crude in its innuendo, but which has managed to creep into valuable headspace nevertheless, and looks like making itself at home there, at least until the next impossible to predict thing comes along.

Casiotone for the Painfully Alone - 'Mother's Pearls'

The older I get, the more music seems to have the power to move me. This was not what I expected to happen. I assumed music's power would be reduced as adulthood exerted its deadening grip and other things crowded the space. But even back in my Polaroid-coloured days I used to be puzzled by the frequently-repeated tale of John Peel being forced to pull over when hearing Teenage Kicks while driving, helplessly reduced to tears. Music became an obsession for me over two decades ago, yet it didn't have the power to make this teenager cry. Not so now. I'm clearly at a vulnerable age, where youth's optimism yields to disappointment and practical realisation of modern life's limitations, and there seems an ever growing roster of tunes that are capable of bringing tears to my eyes. I have to be careful what I listen to on the tube these days.

I realised things had reached a new level this morning when I managed to make myself blub just by wandering around the kitchen singing this song to myself while making a cup of coffee. Clearly this is a worrying development. But oh, there's something about this at the moment that just makes me ache. First appearing on 2006's classic Etiquette - and by the way, where's the follow-up, huh? - it recently resurfaced as part of a new Daytrotter session. I've written about Daytrotter and Casiotone before, which means I need not repeat myself for all five of you - but I'll simply restate my view that this man is a genius and the sooner the world gets round to recognising him as such the better off we'll all be. This is one of Owen's brilliantly realised female point of view tales, and the usual sketchy story of regret and disappointment, this time about losing a family heirloom while drunk down the club. This is for anyone who's ever done anything they've wanted to unwish the day after, which is all of us. I've begun to think that regret might be the most powerful of human emotions, stronger even than guilt. On Etiquette a woman singer guested in to perform it, but intriguingly here Owen sings it himself, and it still utterly works, poignant words matched with a cheesy hands in the air disco thumper. Today, nothing is as good a this.

Go there, download it, and be not quite the same person you were before. More exciting still, Casiotone are in the UK at the moment. Bush Hall awaits. I am excited, but I'll try to stay dry-eyed.