It was a moment when those of us long-haul time-travellers had to reassure ourselves that we weren’t suffering from Plasmaton-induced psychotronic hyperstimulation.

Wales had been a high-profile celebrity adviser to the Prime Minister

A companion-piece to the earlier Sweet Inspiration anthology of songs by Dan Penn & Spooner Oldham, A Road Leading Home features two dozen of Penn's songs co-written with other songwriters. They're responsible for several great songs here, including “You Left the Water Running” by Billy Young, and “Break Up the Party”, recorded by Jerry Lee's teenage sister Linda Gail Lewis. Penn's forte was Southern soul, and here his two most famous songs are covered in versions not totally shamed by the hits, Roy Hamilton's “Dark End of the Street” exuding tragic nobility, while Brenda Lee's “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man” merits comparison with the Dusty of Dusty in Memphis.

If mutant garage-psychedelia is your thing, then Aussie quintet Pond's Hobo Rocket should have your head spinning. There's an audible lysergic fizz about everything in tracks such as “Giant Tortoise” and “Odarma”, with their cosmic-swirl phasing, stereo panning and tendrils of sitar, while heavier cuts like “Xanman” and the epochal “Whatever Happened to the Million Head Collide?” offer brutal, shrill psych-rock weirdness, their squalling guitars careening around Nick Allbrook's piercing, high-register vocals. It's perhaps best summed up by the desultory guest mumbler of “Hobo Rocket” itself – presumably the hobo? – who enquires disgustedly, “What kind of drugs you guys on?”. All kinds, by the sound of it.

Though nowadays played on all manner of instruments, from harp to accordion, the Goldberg Variations was originally written for harpsichord. However, hearing this masterful performance by Robert Costin on the Pembroke College organ, it's impossible to imagine that Bach, an accomplished organist, didn't compose it on such an instrument. Right from the wistful charm of the opening “Aria”, the organ's timbre is a model of acoustical grace, a perfect union of instrument and space, and as Costin launches into the Variations, its full majesty is revealed in rich, satisfying sonorities that build to an epic climax with the “Variatio 30 –Quodlibet”. A marvellous, engrossing performance by a true master.

Pokey LaFarge is a throwback Americana crooner, somewhat akin to a sprightlier Leon Redbone. The vibe on this debut for Jack White's Third Man label is pre-rock'n'roll. But if his style is retro, his concerns are contemporary, from the complaints about doctors' fees in “Close the Door” to the anxieties over the way a heatwave drives city folk criminally mad in “City Summer Blues”. But LaFarge can see both sides of an issue, exemplified in his contradictory attitudes to work and unemployment in the diligent “Day After Day” and the lazy charm of “Let's Get Lost”.

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Mogwai's score for the French TV series Les Revenants places certain restrictions on the band's style which, it must be said, work to their advantage. These short cues are restrained and moody, a series of sustained atmospheres lacking the usual Mogwai cathartic climax – any such releases of tension are more subtly and quiety effected, while most tracks simply leave the mood hanging. The closest they come to classic Mogwai is “Special N”, on which string tones and guitar arpeggios gradually acquire a fuzzy burr and counterpoint organ melody; elsewhere, brooding keyboards predominate on tracks like “Hungry Face”, a doomy processional in which tiny glockenspiel tones dot the darkness like lanterns.

The Phoenix Rising is a programme of works collated in the 1920s publication of Tudor Church Music by the Carnegie UK Society, which proved hugely influential in popularising this choral form through the last century. Exquisitely rendered by the Stile Antico consort, the works range chronologically from John Taverner's “O Splendor Gloriae”, in which the Eton Choirbook style is still audible, to Orlando Gibbons' “O Clap Your Hands Together”, where Psalm 47 is brilliantly set in a cascade of repetitions thatdevelops intense hypnoticpower. The various sections of William Byrd's “Mass for Five Voices” are interspersed among works by Thomas Tallis, Thomas Morley and Robert White.