Correatown - "Valparaiso". "For the six years before the bankruptcy, your father had a trick. He would bring home a dish from the factory, something simple with a lid, unwrap its newspaper on the dining-room table. I would say, 'That's nice,' just like that, nothing fancy. They made simple things. Simple but nice. We would use the dish for sugar, or herbs, or apricot pits. Two weeks would pass. And then one day I would be putting an apricot pit in the dish and your father would say, 'Do you know where you just put that pit?' And I would say, 'In a dish'. And he would say, 'You put it in the stuff of Manawaka beach'. We'd have been at Manawaka beach two, maybe three months before; lying under the sun on holiday. And your father would have secretly taken a handful of sand, taken it all the way back home, taken it to the factory, thrown it into the vats. That was his trick. Made glass with it. His partner, Ralph, always rolled his eyes. The sand from those beaches - Manawaka, Lake Andy, Huron, San Marguerite, from Porto once - was impure. 'Not glass-grade,' Ralph would always say. But your father didn't care. 'The stuff of our sweet times,' he would say. 'Do you remember?'" [MySpace]

Speech Debelle - "Spinnin'". In my to-post folder for weeks, but then Speech goes along and wins the Mercury Prize and I'm just a bandwagon-jumper, trying to nick some gleam from her trophy. And yet on tracks like this, Speech Debelle shows she has enough gleam to go around; she's gleaming so hard that her running shoes, her chewing gum, the creases between her knuckles gleam. Optimism that's a little banal, sure, but ratatat drumstick whoop, yes yes, just the thing for here & today. (A lovely record.) [MySpace/buy]

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Please do leave a comment for Michael Krueger, yesterday's guest-blogger.