The most exciting thing about them--their knack with a tune and fanfare--is buried beneath what could be considered unnecessary flourishes. Strip it back guys, chill out. You’re still young.

Prepare to be taken on a journey around the pair’s sonic universe that touches on everything from US R&B, Nilsson-esque singer-songwriter numbers and back again, all under a heady sheen of studio shimmer that can feel woozy, psychedelic or just 110 per cent odd at any one point.

This is primal, bluesy and as in-your-face as the clenched fist on the sleeve. At 65, it’s a brave change of direction.

They’re not as overwrought as the earliest Bright Eyes records--recorded when he was in his teens and early 20s--but they’re just as pure and open-hearted, albeit with the (jaded) wisdom that comes with age, making it arguably his best solo effort yet.

Another career highpoint for Wagner and co.

Become Zero is an affecting and profound work that inspires great empathy.

Otis and his touring band rip it up and the excitable singer thrills, with what now reads like a greatest hits.

There’s an intriguing mix of self-penned tunes (Something Familiar with its country-soul undertones), cool covers (Jackson C Frank’s Milk & Honey), and historic reinventions, from lute ballad to World War One elegy.

The intention is to capture music and make it sound as if the listener is in the same room as the musicians and certainly, producers and label owners, David and Norman Chesky, achieve that effect with this wonderful album, which finds the quirky Ohio-born singer backed by a jazz quartet that includes guitarist Russell Malone and trumpeter Wallace Roney.

At times, this record can come across as little more than a variation on one of those CDs of new age music designed for meditation and spiritual well-being--Marim, for example, is a collage of pan-pipe-like sounds and water noises, and Omar could feasily belong to the type of compilation called Rainforest Colours--but there are some treats here.

While some may sneer at the glitches and production tricks that pepper the record, thinking them mere gimmicks, those who stick around long enough will be rewarded by a string of mature, thoughtful songs emerging from their concealment, gradually revealing a little more of themselves with each play.

It’s as strong a collection as any of his in recent times and tied together of course by that voice--deeply authoritative, unfathomably evocative and really quite irreplaceable.

Lighthouse sees Crosby at his most stripped-back; rather than attempting to update his sound to suit the times it feels as if he has distilled it, leaving something akin to Essence Of Crosby, despite being crafted in cahoots with Michael League of Snarky Puppy.

While this doesn’t mark a new beginning for the band, it nevertheless represents a step down a different path that they’ll hopefully continue to follow.

The music exceeds expectation and while this understandably isn’t her best album, it looks at the current trend for reformations and reduces them to ash.

Clean, sophisticated and with nary a bushy beard in sight, it turns raditional ballads into something that could be chart-friendly today, sitting them alongside a couple of self-penned numbers.

The long-awaited Music Must Destroy is Ruts DC’s first fully-fledged rock LP since Animal Now and it doesn’t disappoint.

A sequence of aural art installations carved out of sound, a Tate Modern exhibition mounted on a shiny disc, spacious and sparse, repetitive and insistent, haunting and inspired. That makes it disjointed perhaps, but that’s just the diverse nature of its multiple outlooks.

The cloistered and unwilling girls’ father’s attempts to get them to do a Herman’s Hermits left them more in line with enjoyably sloppy garage rock. In fact, they went so far out as to prefigure post-punk’s plangency and jittery inclusivity: they were essentially The Raincoats, a decade ahead of time.

The Ramones unwittingly started one of the biggest upheavals music will ever see. Finally we get to find out why, in the most well-realised form yet. It’s heartbreaking that none of the original band are here to see it.

This might be a bit noisier than their newer fans are used to, but they won’t do much better than starting at Numero uno.

The band’s writing and performance is so tight it’s actually become uptight and as one accessible masher follows another, Only Ghosts reveals itself to be regrettably one-dimensional.

COW makes massive gains from having been created quickly, much of the source material being recorded on the road, and the samples and titles provide pleasing echoes of the group’s earlier work. Despite the nostalgia, those samples manage to sound fresher than those of more recent projects.

A true gem that deserves the attention that famous episode received all those years ago.

An alternate version of Young Americans named after it’s working title, The Gouster, is compiled here officially for the first time, and works an absolute treat as an album in its own right. ... Still, Bowie completists will own everything here.

Iit’s actually every bit as tantalising, sumptuous and fully-realised as its illustrious predecessor.

As she breezes past 70, the mood of Dolly’s songs is inevitably nostalgic and retrospective.

75 Dollar Bill are blending elements from the past to create a stunning future.