Top 5 Albums of the Week
Culture Calling's Top 5 albums of the week, an eclectic mix of records from across genres and decades. Come discover weekly albums to bulk out your collection.
By Charlie Walker | Updated Jul 14 2025
Buena Vista Social Club – s/t (1997)
Back in our rotation since we featured the Sambroso All-Stars on our July events feature, Buena Vista Social Club has done more than any album to bring Western attention to the rich and varied world of Cuban music, and indeed Latin music in general. Capturing the golden age of Cuban music from the 1930s to the 1950s, and named after the members club in the Buenavista quarter of Havana, the project revived the careers of many musicians who had been brought out of retirement for the project.
Much can be said of the records historical background (Cuba has a very complicated mid-20th century history that is very open to interpretation and misinterpretation), so instead, we will focus on the music:
Spanning the many genres and styles of mid-century Cuba – son Cubano, bolero, criolla, guajira, danzón – and using native techniques and features like the descarga (essentially a jam), soloing on instruments you’ve never heard of – including the Laúd and dumbek - this combination of all these veteran musicians playing their specialised styles led to possibly one of the greatest musical collaborations of all time.
Replete with solos, backed by driving rhythms, featuring singers of all ranges, and twenty different musicians across the album, Buena Vista Social Club has laments (guajira), dance numbers (danzón), and sophisticated love songs (bolero) that trawl back through Cuba’s history, playing the long-forgotten classics that defined the hedonistic Havana underclass. It’s an absolute trip.
Ween – Chocolate & Cheese (1994)
No one ever really figured out of Ween were comedians posing as musicians, or musicians posing as comedians. Nowhere is this question more puzzling than on their iconic Chocolate & Cheese release, where, as the album title suggests, they continually juxtapose something nice with something horrible:
The disgustingly creepy ‘Spinal Meningitis (Got Me Down)’ (is it a kids voice? Is it an adults voice pitched up? Who knows) followed immediately by the lush, soft-rock-infused summer track ‘Freedom of ‘76’, then followed by an incredibly jarring, Beavis and Butthead-soundtrack-sounding ‘I Can’t Put My Finger On it’, then by another lush, soft-rock instrumental track ‘A Tear For Eddie’. Hence, Chocolate and Cheese. They’d probably work fine on their own, had they released a serious rock album alongside another discrete joke album, but no, they instead served us chocolate and cheese on the same plate.
It's frustrating showing Ween to anyone normal. You have an actually stellar rock-fusion track in the form of ‘Voodoo Lady’, one of their best known, but then you have to sit through a track actually called ‘The H.I.V. Song’. It’s actually called that, and the song actually is about that. Had they come up in any other generation than the MTV generation they might have been rockstars.
Well, they were rockstars in all seriousness. They had a very famous track which featured in the Spongebob movie, the same track which Hillenburg said inspired his creation of Spongebob, and they’ve been on numerous world tours and inspired many other nonsense bands. Their Quebec album is considered one of the best of the 2000s. Their chocolate-cheese-combo may isolate most, but it didn’t stop them from being one of the 90s and 00s biggest acts.
Jasmine Myra – Horizons (2022)
Leeds-based bandleader, graduate of Leeds Conservatoire, and once a member of Rob Mitchell’s Jazz Orchestra, newcomer Jasmine Myra has turned a lot of heads with last years Horizons, establishing herself with a dramatic, heady jazz style that in some ways borders on modern classical. Vaguely danceable, incredibly sophisticated, and impossibly measured, Horizons explores unconventional structures and unpacks difficult emotions, generating huge moments of tension and release that would be suited for a tear-jerking film soundtrack.
The intro track, ‘Prologue’, generated such a swell of emotions upon first listen that I had to pause for a break. The illusion of decohesion via the disconnected drumming and polyrhythm that forces your brain to work overtime to piece the fragments together is a stimulating task on its own, and more so when the parts you piece together generate such great force from within.
Hugely atmospheric and emotive, the fact that Myra isn’t one of Britain’s most well-known artists is absolutely amazing to me.
Prophet, Mndsgn – Wanna Be Your Man (2018)
A peculiar, energetic, and majorly groovy collab record between long-lost funk extraordinaire Prophet and new-school producer Mdnsgn, Wanna Be Your Man updates the beauty of 80s boogie for Gen Z.
Released in 2018, it got a bump of popularity when Tyler, The Creator sampled the title track for his single Peach Fuzz, an unusual decision for an artist who prides himself on producing all his own work, yet leaves Wanna Be Your Man untouched, unedited. A testament to its lush, funky, and forward-thinking production.
While the backbone that Mndsgn provides is unmistakable in its talent and groovy intuition, it is Prophet you propels the record beyond a simple compilation of beats. His high falsetto swinging in and out of the bass beats, his humorous and soulful adlibs that add a unique character, and his lyrics and melodies that place the album concretely in the early 80s, all combine to a nostalgic acid trip of musical wonder. A killer combo between two great artists, it’s a shame they haven’t collabed again since.
Van Morrison – Astral Weeks (1968)
Usually here we try to recommend albums from artists and genres that you may well never have heard of, or albums by recognisable artists that are slept on for some reason or another. This is neither, instead it is one of the greatest albums in this history of rock. Van Morrison himself actually rejects the reputation that Astral Weeks has, only ever performing it in full over forty years after its release. A well-loved album barely loved by the man who made it.
It’s important to recognise milestones like this in the history of music. Despite not performing well commercially at all, its blend of rock, soul, folk, blues, and classical, as well as his own native Irish influences coming into the mix, as well as its sharp stylistic departure from the ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ version of Van we are all used to, makes Astral Weeks stand colossally tall in the rock hall of fame. Deeply poetic lyricism, angelic melodies, and structured to work as a whole, it has to be one of the greatest albums of all time.