How to feast Roman style, from vineyard snails to wafers

This weekend's Field Day festival in east London is packed with storming new acts.

Kate Nash will play next month

You'd have to say this New York duo, singer Lizzy Plapinger and producer Max Hershenow, have given a fair summation of their debut album with that title, such is both the familiarity and enchantment of the music within.

The third album by Vampire Weekend is, by some distance, their most outwardly straightforward.

Listen to the tracks mentioned in Caught in the Net below:

As its title hints, this often sounds more like a BBC4 documentary than a pop record. And that’s no bad thing.

A badger flash-mob protested today against a Government-led cull of the animals, outside the Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (Defra).

King Creosote is one of the great outsiders. He occupies the margins in both the songs he sings and in the way he sends his songs out into the world. This short residency in a downstairs room in a pub in Clerkenwell coincided with the release of an album that was previously only available at his live shows, and then only in vinyl form.

Emo feels like the last days of grunge right now: the bubble's burst, but the major players still fill arenas.

The exciting thing about this Malian singer-songwriter is that she's always moving on.

Chumbawamba fans have received the Margaret Thatcher EP In Memoriam four years after pre-ordering the record. 

Police in Manchester have arrested two people for an attack on a 16-year-old emo in the first recorded hate crime against followers of alternative subcultures.

On an evening where the big news of the week was still a live talking point, there was precious little sympathy in a famed back room in Glasgow. “Did you hear what Frankie Boyle said about Thatcher?” asked Steve Mason, sometime Beta Band singer and now the proud-owner of an alias-spattered solo career which has recently taken a turn for the incisively political. It’s the old gag about spending the public money earmarked for the late former PM’s funeral on spades, then “everyone in Scotland can dig a hole and deliver her to Satan in person.”