They sometimes feel as second-hand as The Black Crowes, but The Heavy's capacity for rabble-rousing is a potent strength, which in music – if not always politics – isn't necessarily a bad thing.

He merges his raw lyrical roots with No I.D.'s voluminous soundtrack, resulting in a decent album far more celebratory than his previous work.

It’s Thomas’s guilt-free love of mavericks past that lends such evocative warmth and unusual spontaneity to a fascinating album that could have been pure self-indulgence.

Consequently and unlike most covers records, If I Had a Hi-Fi (which, rather neatly, is a palindrome) sounds wonderfully fresh and easy, but also yields some unexpected pop trinkets.

Flash, brash and brimming with an irrepressible anarchic vigour, more than anything, Bring Your Own is a thing of unfettered joy.

The album demands to be heard in a single sitting, in a contradiction of the digitally shuffling age.

The Shape of Things is, by some margin, Foxx's best album since Metamatic, the 1980 solo debut that has become one of modern electronica's sacred touchstones.

Intensely individual without being overly self-indulgent, TOTEM offers an at-times madcap, at others beautiful but always-rewarding insight into Ryat's mystical and eccentric world.

It’s an album whose ingenuous, often nakedly honest songwriting offers an emotional fist gloved in arrangements of seductive velvet.

Nobody would expect an eighth album by a band 20-plus years into its career to sound this fantastic, but time away has obviously helped re-energise the brothers into crafting this triumphantly grand return.

It has the feeling of a band progressing in their own rights, under their own terms.

For all its capricious cherry-picking of the historic benchmarks of sensuality and synthetics, there's still a sense of genuine invention that permeates the whole album.

Delivering on that precocious promise, Rose's debut long-player actually reins in her EP's feistier extremes somewhat to deliver 10 tracks of timeless, simply adorned (albeit by some dextrously restrained Music Row stalwarts) song-craft which, while they certainly doff a 10-gallon hat to the country canon, never seem constrained by Nashville tropes, old or new.

There are around 20,000 records like this released every year by female troubadours. But there's something just very right, and really quite splendid, about Get Well Soon. It could well prove to be a timeless little wonder.

Instead of shadowing the pack, this album puts them right up the front.

You wouldn't expect soul from a Glen Campbell record, but it takes many forms. A veteran who needs help to express his memories of a life less ordinary, but ironically sounds on the top of his game, is clearly one of them.

Explores the dark, suburban-gothic shades always loitering beneath their surface glimmer.

If this were an EP, it would be captivating--Everdell's voice is certainly commanding--but, spread out over 11 songs, it loses some of its hold.

Goodman casts a spell on the listener with Sees the Light.

With high-concept sounds and an ace sleeve, Again Into Eyes is a bold debut, and an extremely rewarding experience.

Terrifying yet magnificent horror from a group getting doom metal so very right.

While slightly more subdued than before, the pint-sized sparkplug proves she can still churn a stimulating groove, and doesn't need cartoonish gimmicks to do so.

Whatever the treatment of his songs, Holly's knack of pairing of simplistic, catchy melodies with understated--almost flippant--melancholy always shines through. As such, over 50 years since his death, this is a wonderful testament to his songwriting prowess, longevity and legacy.

Whatever your take on the chillwave phenomenon--that brand of overexposed, Polaroid pop mining childhood memories kick-started (arguably) by Animal Collective's influential album Merriweather Post Pavilion--it's a conversation that's happened, and Equatorial Ultravox does little to further the debate.

It's a bewitching album that gives pause for thought throughout.

He clearly relishes the heightened emotion of his source material, the album wisely avoiding cheap campiness in favour of respecting the music's rich sense of drama.

Here the daughter of bossa nova creator Joao Gilberto has made an album that either drowns in its own sensuousness and sentimentality.

In some ways, this is one of their most beautiful releases in a career that has never been short of elegance.