Kwes' voice underwhelms throughout, as if he's embarrassed by his own singing, and he ends up underselling the songs into which he's put so much effort.

They fare better on the more tuneful, less screechy 'Midnight Hours', but as a whole the album would have benefited from some ruthless editing and extra production spit and polish.

Aitch’s debut draws on local heritage but remains heavily anchored in a forward-thinking rap blueprint. With the ‘cheeky chappy’ mask tucked slightly back (if not fully removed), and a more introspective attitude on show, it’s an even more powerful formula.

‘Vertigo’ is a diaristic tale of scaling mountainous fear, traversing back to her naive youth spent making music in her bedroom – and welcoming a new chapter with newfound courage.

If Little Comets played to their strengths they could burn far brighter.

Some isolated moments make you want to vom a bit--Groove Armada trombone on ‘Many Rivers’--but ‘Love Inc’ neatly reworks a snatch of Lil Louis’ house classic ‘Club Lonely’ into insistent Balearica, and you can’t argue with that.

It might sound like Real Lies are living in the past, but Real Life is fiercely in the present.

‘No Signs Of Weakness’ plays more like a curated playlist of experiments rather than a fully realised body of work: it lacks direction, the momentum sputters, and even some of the more ambitious tracks could’ve used another round of sculpting.

Each tune is utterly lovely in its own right, but--my God--are they depressing. [7 Oct 2006, p.39]

‘Zombie’ has all the swagger and pep of his previous collaborator The Weeknd, while the tempered nature of ‘Cameo’ and ‘Renegade’ allow traditional pop songwriting to coexist with bolshy, bone-crunching settings. These fleeting moments are by far ‘Reborn’s most satisfying, and offer proof that there’s plenty more creative road for Kavinsky to bomb it down in years to come.

Brain-rinsingly psychedelic without needing to tell you about it, they deserve to sit at the table with Current 93 and post-Syd/pre-stadium Pink Floyd.

Mica's choppin' and screwin' attempt at repackaging its intelligence and emotion makes it something fresh that you can feel. Drink up.

Two properly good moments out of five isn’t a great ratio, but at least it’s telling us that The Men’s wagon is still rollin’ steady.

It’s less nightclub, more drunken iPod selection, typical of late-period Tricky: brilliant, frustrating and fatally inconsistent.

'We Are Science' has a spooky cinematic scope with a dubbed-up, electronic gospel feel for our times.

But damn those cruel hormones - Hanson's collective balls have MmmDropped, and the giddy rush of adolescence seeks to mutate Mercury's finest investment into a trio of crack-voiced hulks.

This is an understated gem of a record.

‘Stay Awhile’ and renditions of The Righteous Brothers’ ‘Unchained Melody’ and the Burt Bacharach and Hal David-penned ‘This Girl’s In Love With You’ are stunning in isolation. A whole album of Deschanel’s wholesome, entertaining-the-troops voice and M Ward’s tasteful instrumentation is cloying.

The club bangers lack the oomph of his past singles and the lead-out tracks, ‘Fan’ and ‘Worth It’ are criminally limp. .... Eventually, the vulnerability shines through.

Many of the guests are of the squeaky-clean variety--Ella Eyre and Sinead Harnett will be deemed edgy by almost no one – while two Lianne La Havas-sung numbers tackle bossa nova (‘Needn’t Speak’) and slinky disco (‘Breath’). Still, Rudimental know when to light the fireworks.

It’s the sound of a former trendsetter, settled happily into adulthood, doing his own thing, following his muse, comfortable in his skin. It’s a pleasure to hear.

While it’s heartwarming to see Lauv’s newfound openness, the album is – ironically, given his most persistent theme – missing a little something.

Over the album’s 52 minutes, Megan sprawls out, mining different aspects of her identity and personality at her leisure. It’s exciting when she enters new territory.

'Worlds Apart' reads like a suicide note of a band that's tried to intellectualise its place in the canon of Western music and, in doing so, recognised its own irrelevance. [22 Jan 2005, p.51]

Manages to contain enough surprise turns and twists... to keep you interested. [25 Jun 2005, p.64]

There's little here that's moves on from the kind of trip-hop balladeers that abounded in the late '90s or indeed the singer-songwriters that Sheeran admires such as Damien Rice or James Morrison.

It's managed that rarest of feats, a techno record with a heart.

So there aren't any retreads of 'DARE' or 'Clint Eastwood' but it is a stunning album from start to finish.