★★★★☆
Two albums arrive this week that, while unlikely to bother the charts, prove that verve and character will always find an audience. With his old band Race Horses, Meilyr Jones of Aberystwyth emerged from the same Welsh scene that birthed Super Furry Animals and Cate Le Bon, in which a sense of domesticity merges with whimsy and surrealism.
Feeling burnt out after the band collapsed in 2012, Jones headed to Rome for a year, providing the inspiration for 2013. It’s a musically sophisticated album (he is classically trained) with plenty of bold brass stabs and rich string arrangements, but with a genial, innocent air and one great melody after another. How to Recognise a Work of Art is a soulful classic about Jones’s art-history education in Rome, while Featured Artist, about “the face of the Observer’s free magazine”, is an irresistibly overwrought mockery of fame. (Moshi Moshi)