John Primer channels his inner Mud convincingly, but you’ll be peering past him at the A-list band.

That Repentless is coherent and persuasively powerful is a tribute to the identity of the band.

Berlin is Kadavar 2.0; cleaner, more inventive production, broader palette (although still 70s-centred), stratospheric energy.

Ironically, these more daring forays emphasise the inoffensive blandness of some of the other tracks, but if the future holds more similarly brave experimentation then ZBB are on a fascinating career trajectory.

A clutch of fine torch songs (Iceman, Dead For Love, the title track) save the day, suaveness replacing the sordid sweat of old. Their youth was doomed, but their adulthood shows promise.

What The World Needs Now... continues where 2012’s This Is PiL left off.

Fourth album The Night Creeper is their most convincing statement yet, a buzzing set of doomy psych-rock songs with great hooks and punishing riffs.

Crosseyed Heart actually delivers.

Nobody will pretend this album is among the most inventive you’ll hear in 2015. But Buckcherry just wanna pump up the volume and get the groin shifting. And they do it well enough to put some zest in the tank.

The Book Of Souls will doubtless be celebrated most for its epics, and if you thought Maiden had pulled out all the stops in the past, you may need to strap yourself in and say a quick prayer to Eddie this time round.

You could spend hours ticking off the references (which obviously extend beyond Abbey Road), but what gives the album its identity is their own sense of style.

Mayall’s own songs are self-reflective, particularly Ain’t No Guarantees and the title track. And while his voice increasingly betrays his age his Hammond and piano playing has lost none of its vigour.

Occupational hazards aside however, this is certainly the band’s strongest in recent memory, and what it might lack in edge or novelty is well countered by craft and assurance.

Whichever level you enjoy it on, this folkie’s volte-face is less ‘Judas’, more ‘genius’.

From the manically undistinguished soloing of The Tempter Push to the leaden progressions of Walk Alone, it is uniquely generic, extraordinarily ordinary.

[A] meaty pop debut album.

The songs on this follow-up to 2013’s Dig Thy Savage Soul rock harder than before while retaining the garage signature of ex-Lyres guitarist Peter Greenberg.

Meliora is easily the sextet’s finest outing to date, a meticulously executed, artful collection of black-souled retro doom-pop, as heavy as Metallica, as melodically sophisticated as ABBA.

Debut album Dark Black Makeup is a thrilling half-hour of punk rock with a small ‘p’ but a big UNK!--hooky, heavy and furious in all the right places.

Disturbed are back, and they’re on top form.

Occasionally, as on Fire Storm Hotel, with its shades of an 80s hair metal anthem, he sounds at once energised and enfeebled and you find yourself willing him to reach the velocity of yore. But most of the time, you could play these tracks to an alien and they would struggle to tell them apart from Motörhead’s 90s, or even 70s, work.

[The Fratellis] still lack an identity beyond the decent Glaswegian doggedness that has got them this far.

Old ground, yes, but viewed through bright, fresh eyes. You want the real vintage rock’n’soul deal? Look this way, and then make sure you catch them live.

A 70s classic rock party, then, but one with a few new guests.

He decided to “rock out” at every subsequent opportunity, so that mass audiences understood and acknowledged the founding role of bluesmen in rock. This album might be considered a further step in that direction.

Weird, beautiful music to get lost in space--or at least a hammock--to.

If there’s a disappointment about Genexus it’s that it only really delivers to hardened FF fans, that it’s essentially more of the same winning formula.

Capped by the sublime You Trip Me Up, even in 2014 Psychocandy was a visceral burn around the very edge of listenability.