It's not all bad. Many of the other 13 songs on her 11th studio album (financed by pledgemusic, with a percentage going to animal shelters) show flashes of the melodic brilliance of her early 90s output.

It sounds grimy enough to suit the lowdown vibe they’re after, but the songwriting is a letdown.

For everybody else, an album of atmospheric repetitions and meandering jams likely won’t be overly exciting.

Be Your Own Pet attacks with enthusiasm, and everything here rocks sufficently, although some remedial songwriting classes may be required before they make the move to sports arenas.

Much of it sounds like it could have been played by humans using traditional instruments.

Perhaps the thinking is that a softer, subtler approach will make Antibalas more palatable to a wider audience. Unfortunately, it's come at the cost of what originally made their music so exciting.

His arrangement choices are flawless. While guitar stays front and centre, piano, strings, group vocals and slide guitar make fleeting, effective appearances.

[It] offers the comfortable familiarity of an old flannel shirt from the 90s but leaves you wondering if time has stood still for the Chicago post-rock quartet. It has not, as is apparent on the five follow-up songs.

Hope is brought together by Pemberton's distinct vocal style and lyrics, which perfectly capture the disaffected, post-millennial, iPod-DJ, over-tweeted, quarter-life-crisis condition.

Though the tunes themselves seem unassuming, based on conventional chord progressions and strumming patterns, that simplicity draws attention to Darnielle's fine songwriting.

Drake's hooks are flimsy and irritating. His long-winded emo choruses gnaw at your brain. He complains about fame way too much. He mentions Kelsey Grammer for no reason. He's completely humourless. Worst of all, he sounds like a frog – not like Kermit in Rainbow Connection, but actual croaking.

The Mississippi native leads a spartan group that includes the Felice brothers’ Ian Felice and Greg Farley through 10 woodsy cuts that convey warmth, loneliness and the rural South’s sinister underbelly.

The complexity of some of the arrangements and the bouncy danceability of most of the songs make it easy to overlook the lyrics initially, but with repeated listens they start sinking in.

Even when West’s going in uncomfortable directions, his music feels alive.

Dreamy and hypnotic, alternating between sparse and lush, these tunes' tempos tend to stay down, and things can get pretty stagnant, but there's a great sense of ambience and mood.

It’s an effortless but unpredictable experience. Hynes may not turn up until midway through a song, but he glides seamlessly into the album’s comfortable atmosphere.

Universes builds on that vibe [of a late-night P.A. set] with exuberant bangers full of snappy, discofied drums, repetitive phrases and dusty funk that could fit nicely into a DJ set of classic Philly soul re-edits or slickly produced tracks from the current UK garage revival.

It’s a much more musically diverse album than the Raconteurs have done before, but there are many more misses than hits among these 14 tracks.

Despite the somewhat pessimistic prognosis, Davies is a sharp enough tunesmith to keep his darkly droll song cycle upbeat and rockin’ throughout.

For a band so heavily influenced by modern classical music, Mono are not at all restrained, and that's what's great about them.

The interchanging players fit beautifully into B&S's repertoire of unrequited pop anthems and introspective acoustic ballads.

The first release under eclectic singer/songwriter Solange Knowles’s boutique label, Saint Records, the younger Knowles weaves a collection of alt-R&B songs together seamlessly.

Like the best singer/songwriters, Callahan is an English major's lyricist, and by deftly blending the personal, the political and the mythological, he again leaves us plenty to pore over.

Though Bragg leaves behind punk rock fire for the personal, there are still political--and optimistic--moments, weariness be damned.

He still sounds like Hayden, but he’s stripped down the production to better approximate the sound of a band in a room. That bare-bones intimacy works perfectly with his delicate voice and melancholic songs.

Finally, a top 40 album that attempts to capture the restless energy of recent times and spit it out in a way that doesn't just feel good, but honest, too.

If In the Vines isn't a record that impresses at the level of individual songs, neither is it something you throw on in the background and forget about.

The crisp production makes this more accessible to newbies, but it’s definitely still a Souleyman album, successfully capturing the raw, unbridled energy that’s fuelled his jump from the wedding party circuit to indie rock festivals.