MELANIE HORSNELL Trobairitz (Good Stem Records/MGM) No, no, no, Melanie Horsnell. Did you not get the memo? There’s a way these things are meant to go when you have an album of almost brutal (sonic) simplicity – voice, guitar, and that’s it – with the none-more-atractive tone of a folk-ish record that was made in 1967 and left undiscovered for 40 or 50 years. And it goes double if it is a woman, so you can mention people like Sibylle Baier and Vashti Bunyan, or Linda Perhacs:

MELANIE HORSNELL AND STEVE APPEL The World Has A Gentle Soul (Good Stem Records/MGM) Normally I’m not one for the sweet escape or the musical comfort stop: that promise usually comes with some surfing dude, an acoustic guitar and the tedium meter set to extreme. Or a Mothers’ Day atrocity with some Irish tenor in a tux. Or – shudder – Conrad Vance Joy Sewell Bay Shoot Me Now Please God Shoot Me Now. But in the midst of the omnishambles which is federal politics, the confedera