I first saw the name The Japanese House on festival billings. I wasn't sure if they were a band or a concept name for an electronica artist. The EPs available on streaming indicated a synth-pop solo artist avoiding personalisation of her work.

The release performance for the album Good at falling held at Rough Trade East revealed a singer-songwriter with a more indie feel for this "acoustic" set. Acoustic here means there is one acoustic guitar but also a synth and electric guitar, presumably it means the music is performed live rather than sequenced by a laptop. At one point a request for the right pedal patch number goes out to a tech in the crowd and there are a few false starts; its neither slick nor amateur. Just something in the middle.

The recordings are filled with auto-tuned and lots of reverb but here the songs are delivered with no styling beyond a straight-forward harmony. Some of the better songs on the album (I saw you in a dream, You seemed so happy) work in both approaches but for most I have to admit to preferring the more highly-produced sound.

Some previous reviews have been negative about the vocals without all the effects but for me it seemed fine here. Maybe a bit weak but perfectly fine.

In a small venue Amber Bain's polite persona holds some charisma but the display is mostly technical, translating the recorded music into a different style on stage. Performance is probably a strong word.

I wouldn't go out of my way to see The Japanese House again but if they were on a mixed lineup I wouldn't avoid them either. I'm happy to stick to the EPs.

Deep Space Station is a classic moody shoegaze with a delightful melody running through it. Despite the title the lyrics are about nature and the sea and remind me a lot of Falloch.

The LUMP LP ends with a monotone set of spoken credits. It starts "LUMP is a product". A collaboration between Laura Marling and Mike Lindsay, of whom I have seen Laura Marling live and like a lot of her stuff and I had not heard of Lindsay before this album.

The first I heard of LUMP was the intriguing video for the extraordinary single Curse of the Contemporary I then had the chance to attend the album launch at Rough Trade East which was an interesting moment, hearing a new set of songs for the first time with little context as to what the nature of the collaboration or the project was.

Marling does the singing and the lyrics but intriguingly mostly played bass live. Lindsay bounced around stage playing guitar and handling the samples and treated sound. Compared to Marling's solo performances this was a much livelier and engaging performance.

Apart from the appeal of people on stage who were clearly having fun, the thing that remained with me was mostly Marling's distinctive phrases in the song lyrics. There are lots of little lyrical hooks, one of my favourites is  "To be born a crab, lonely and sad".

The poetic imagery is contained within relatively straight-forward structures that tend to repeat the entire song so you can catch onto the words the second time round.

I was disappointed to miss their other shows at the Garage and Oslo Hackney.

The album is enjoyable but not compulsive, its a small collection of well-crafted songs but I find myself having to be in the mood rather than putting it on and it putting me in a frame of mind. Its still one of the gems of 2018 though.

Grouper makes this beautiful ambient sound that mixes guitar drones with found sound and layered vocals.

The first time I saw her live I could not figure out how one woman could create such a dense weave of sound.

However at a gig in the Tin Tabernacle overcrowding forced the audience to practically sit in her lap and the answer became clear. Walkmans. Many Walkmans wired up to a sound mixer.