Classy collaboration with songs straight from the heart

Over 30 years Brit-funkers Incognito have created an irresistible signature sound of chugging Latin grooves, inventive horn-choruses and admittedly rather variable lyrics and vocals.

In a week replete with intriguing cross-pollinations of style and sound, this may be both the most deliberate, yet the loosest-sounding.

An avant-dance producer with a Prince fetish who seves to reject "the crassness of contemporary culture"?

Hot Wire opens like gangbusters with the one-two punch of "Duty to the Debtor" and "Little Man", surely the best opening ever to a Hue and Cry album; but by the end, the impact has been dissipated by a little too much polemic, a few too many languid funk moves, and a drab attempt at emulating Steely Dan.

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Originally scheduled to take place at Wilton’s Music Hall, this event – part book launch, part celebration, part poetry slam – sold out so quickly the organisers hurriedly moved it to the larger Clapham Grand, confirmation of both the resurgent interest in poetry and the lingering affection for the artist universally recognised as the prototype rapper.

Diagrams is the latest vehicle for Sam Genders, once co-frontman of electro-folkies Tunng, so it's not surprising to find clear echoes of his former band on Black Light, notably in his familiar, downbeat northern inflections, and the still-flickering interest in animist fable discernible in tracks like "Antelope" and "Animals".

It's the muted ring of steel drums that gives the game away that this 1976 re-release is of Caribbean rather than African provenance.

Those who remember the Monty Python skit about the "groovy" Royal Navy recruitment campaign will be left jaw-dropped by Hell Below, an archival release featuring participants in actual US Army "Battle of the Bands" contests from the late 1960s.

The Temptations were the most significant '60s root of the close-harmony boy-band style that has come to dominate R&B, their voices combining with creamy smoothness, their intricately-choreographed steps the envy of less nimble outfits.

Over the past 14 years, Calexico have released eight limited-edition tour CDs, available only at their shows, but now compiled together as a 12 LP vinyl box set, Selections from Road Atlas 1998-2011, of similar scarcity.

On the opening day of Bestival, Friendly Fires will curate a one-off exploration of “The Past, Present and Future of Dance Music” in the RizLab arena.