The orchestra's work is subtle and supportive rather than flashy, allowing free rein to that astonishing voice.

The results can be more interesting than listenable – and the musical contents do seem wilfully random.

The songs are sparky and Cherry is in excellent voice as she raps, sings and swings against the sparse, drum and bass-style backing orchestrated by Four Tet.

Pleasant, sad, classy and thoughtful. No more than that.

David Bowie's perpetual predicament is that he can't escape David Bowie's past. In that respect, he's just like the rest of us: we can't escape David Bowie's past either. The Next Day leaves you wondering why you'd ever want to.

The intricate interweaving of guitar and ngoni juxtaposed with the bright, clear backing vocals makes for a sound that’s dynamic and assertive.

A sassy self-overhaul, AM issues lubricious R&B come-ons over a self-assured narrative arc with personality and open potential cannily spliced.

The fourth album from the award-winning strings-and-sisters folksters is a thing of shivery and spooky charms.

Listened to sympathetically, as soppy late-night jazz, it’s fine. Just don’t expect sparks to fly.

Morning Phase is an often gorgeous sequel to Sea Change, but it’s also more than that: it’s cheering proof that Beck isn’t ready to start repeating himself just yet.

[Life is Good] proves once again that Nas is one of the smartest and most skilled players in the game.

PTSA may never stare you in the face, but you'd be a fool to turn your back on it. It's carrying a knife.

“Organic moonshine music” she calls it, and no one could argue with that.

At what point does a child prodigy turn into a talent so exceptional that we no longer talk about age? Sarah Jarosz’s third album answers that question in style (though just for the record, the banjo, guitar and mandolin supremo is now 22).

Here are a dozen more such, all beautifully crafted and conceived with poetic flair, arranged nicely for restrainedly plucked instruments, sung in a thin soprano which strains into a yelp.

It's all a bit "junior school music project" at times, and there's nothing John Cale wasn't doing half a century ago, but it's nevertheless an impressive work.

Built for repeat listening, this will keep on giving. Don't you just hate it when the hype is right?

First Aid Kit sing harmonies so close you couldn't run a Band Aid between them.

There are times in this 100-plus minutes of a concert recording duplicated over two CDs and one DVD where you want to jog Mehldau's elbow, but overall it's a triumph of imagination and structure.

DeMent cuts through the sheen with a simplicity that reaches back through decades.

Slinky, spooky, superb.

Lovely album from a true one-off.

But where Learning drifted into the ether, this captivating follow-up thrives off harnessing his fragile sensibility to fulsome melodies.

While there is nothing here which startles, the spirit of the music is vivid.

For anyone who lived through grunge, this is mere nostalgia. Anyone who didn't is advised to go straight to the source.

With A Wonder Working Stone, Alasdair Roberts continues to blur the borders between ancient and modern, between heady myth and harsh reality, and between folk and whatever sounds right in context.

Those moments [where it's stirring, sentimental, and altogether too safe] aside, there's plenty more that is beautiful, forgettable and primed to aid a little light Sunday-afternoon catharsis.

A passionate, heartfelt, serious, dogged effort, pregnant with reflection and as wise as you could hope for.

The Village largely whispers rather than shouts, and it's all the more powerful for it.

If you like smart pop and are not familiar, hearing Bird for the first time will feel like discovering a new planet.

Bloodsports is effortlessly superior to its predecessor A New Morning, and averages out roughly on a level with Head Music (though more consistent in quality).

Stephen Malkmus is back making amiable but unchallenging off-kilter country rock songs.

There isn’t a shadow of doubt expressed here about where Mavis is going, but there is plenty of feeling that the journey, like all journeys, is bordered with darkness.

Believers is made of a darker, spookier Americana than its predecessor: full of small-g gothic, anti-Chris Isaak-ish songs that submerge you deeper and deeper in their dark charms.

Her first UK release is a polished, bluegrassy thing of no small wonder.

Boy manage to tease something close to pop perfection.

"What's Wrong with America" is the masterpiece, doo-wop and social protest mixed with God-bothering. Someone book them for a festival, quick.

Classy pianos, minor chords and brushed drums back her ever-elegant, half-spoken syllables.

A couple of tunes, including the title track (one of two West Side Story selections, along with "Tonight"), can even sound a little pedestrian, the swing faltering. But, given time, most of it works.

The warm human purr of her ethereal vocals is juxtaposed towith fluid electronic elements and the occasional welcome interjection of bluesy guitar and jagged off-beat percussion.

The Atlanta singer delivers soulful, socially conscious meditations.

It's as close to a perfect Americana album as there's been this year--fans of the California sound from CS&N to the Jayhawks will find much to love.

Big only because Arcade Fire think big, Reflektor stretches stadium rock’s reach in the acts of self-reinvention and revitalisation. Now that’s entertainment.

Taken on its own merits, however, there's plenty to enjoy, as Bush sings new vocals over remixed and re-edited backing tracks in a deeper, more weathered voice.

Fluent melodies, nature metaphors, and expressive settings are the robust ties that bind these reveries.

This album shimmers.

These are tipsy juke-joint stompers with feeling in their heart as well as dust in their grooves.

Daves is a guitarist, Thile a genius of the mandolin. Both sing. Together they hammer and tongs the songs like smiths.

Simultaneously grounded and spiralling off into the stratosphere, this is urgent, epic stuff that doesn't let up for a moment.

There's not a duff track or dull moment in this 75 minutes of studio material.

Between the pub and the high seas, Elbow reset their mission statement here: to navigate the heart’s tides with their art intact.

It's that rare commodity: an album to immerse yourself in and spend time with, both things no one does any more.

Their most consistent and accomplished album to date.

The King Of Limbs, named after a famous oak in the Savernake forest near the studio where In Rainbows was made, is good but not great.

Ageing is a war they can’t win, but by facing it head-on, the Manics have found the spur to move forwards.

It's testament to his songcraft that it feels all of a piece.

One Breath draws on choppy emotions--grief, depression, anxiety--but Calvi commands the tides with the imperious authority of Barbara Stanwyck leading her posse in Sam Fuller's wild western Forty Guns.

Truth is, the release of Tin Star should set Ortega’s adopted home town alight.

It may not be for everyone, but it's evidence that there are still some restless minds out there.

Ten out of 14 tracks are outstanding, especially considering Bugg's only 18.

There's no progression or narrative, it's immersive rather than engrossing. Slow Focus is an album to steep yourself in.

She has ... created a sound which is almost absurdly ill-matched to her songs.

The Instagram of albums, which is to say a source of instant nostalgia, its 70s- and 80s-inspired cocktail of disco, house, lounge, samba et al, could be merely kitsch but is elevated both by the meticulousness of its production and the sinuous seductiveness of its melodies.

It's a rather beautiful thing.

It finds the singer in meditative mood--this is, by some distance, the least playful Björk album--and, amid soundscapes made from tinkling harps and bells and deep electronic burps and farts, she's an uncharacteristically discreet presence, a humble narrator of the wider story she's trying to tell.

The world adored the xx's Mercury Prize-winning debut album xx. Coexist is, if anything, an even finer piece of work.

It is absolutely beautiful.

These songs bounce, buzz and bubble along with timeless life.

From the self-mockingly banal title onwards, it confirms them as that rare thing: a band able to combine grandiosity and groundedness.

while D contains strange time signatures, proggy flute solos and syncopation aplenty, it soon reveals itself to be a work for the heart as well as the mind.

It's all very gladsome, technically fine and will lift your day. But, as with all such heritaged musics, it won't make your day over. Pleasant though.

Stuart Staples and his band delivering nine pieces of beautiful bossa-nova noir, daydreamy reverie and existential easy listening.

The songs are mostly shaped in her traditional chord-to-chord method, their melodies looping behind the tempo of the guitars and, for once, in a spirit of uplift.

Even if [Psychedelic Pill is not essential], it's by some way the best non-essential album Neil Young has ever made.

A dance album that spins the decks back to the turn of the millennium.

Their music which, as it happens, is a thrilling mix of raw vocal harmonies, rattling homemade guitars and handclaps.

There are enough album tracks and B-sides to make the case that what we actually had in 10cc was a British Steely Dan: clever, funny and funky as hell when they wanted to be.

Whether this Blue Note debut featuring Robert Glasper is better than his two albums with Brownswood is moot, but the best tracks--"Trouble", "Heaven on the Ground", "Do You Feel"--are very good indeed.

The result is refreshing but also a bit boring, although things get interesting towards the end.

Arc is built with daytime radio in mind as much as the indie disco.

The sound is gothically cavernous and frames her seized phrasing with tasteful restraint.

Though some of the good-girl-gone-bad shtick has been sacrificed on the altar of go-for-it jangly pop, she's still as good as it gets when she finally opens her pipes on "Dallas".

Just simple, old-fashioned talent and charm.

It marries a downbeat songcraft to an expansive sound courtesy of producers Guy Garvey and Craig Potter.

It may be a bit rushed--too sickly sweet for one sitting, while their youthful lyrics will ripen yet--but the hit rate is nonetheless impressively high.

How you respond will depend on how you react to such gubbins being brought to bear on Merritt's A-to-B-and-back melodic sense. No doubting its realness, though.

The songs? Melodically flat, feel-driven jive from the hip.

All of it frothed up into an accomplished brew and delivered with good-timey vim but without a whole lot of charisma, especially in the vocal department. Snake oil, in other words. Good fun snake oil.

While newer tracks “My Song 5” and “Let Me Go” snag by throwing surprisingly moody shapes, Martika-esque closer “Running if You Call My Name” sounds like something smoothed for A-list romcom duties.

The second studio album from the experimental New York trio oozes colour.

Danilova's commanding tones evoking nameless terrors over wonderful doom-laden synth-rock.

Bradley, a 62-year-old ex-plumber and James Brown impersonator, has a raspy, infinitely pained voice but there doesn't appear to be any real interaction between him and the band.

While nothing grates, all it really achieves is to make you want to hear Hank sing them.

IOH is their most emotional release yet and also their most philosophical.

Precocious, certainly, exhilarating, at times, Lorde’s debut album is almost but not quite as good as it thinks it is.

Redemption by plucked string. Buddy Miller produces analogically.

Two non-trad covers (Anais Mitchell and Fleetwood Mac) remind you that he's earnt the right to do what the hell he wants.

Not for the faint-hearted, nor those offended by religion. Often brilliant.