Almost every track sounds like a potential single in an indie rock/Americana kind of way.

Jamal sounds close to his 1950s Chess Records best.

Sadly, they simultaneously fail to disguise a whole bucketload of ponderous, self-indulgent navel-gazing from the same source.

He sets his bruised but unbowed soul against a stark musical backing and rediscovers the power of keeping it simple. Beautiful.

For all its faux-primitive origins, their seventh studio album is every bit as likely to ship platinum as the previous six.

Casual bystanders might wish for more memorable songs or some advancement of the form.

Scratch beneath the surface sheen of It's All True and all kinds of depths emerge.

It's a skilled blend of the organic and the electronic.

Always may well be the Californians' finest yet.

James's voice is slightly diminished but not so as to sound like anything other than itself. She's the real deal.

It's mostly a thing of pleasing lonesome grooves--but there are moments where it sounds like the Mahavishnu Orchestra tuning up.

Wrecking Ball is as surgical as a ball of pig-iron on a swinging chain.

It's half George Harrison, half Keith West.

In a crowd of loudish country and R&B guitars he tells brief stories of everyday lives with a correspondingly everyday voice, but with a kind of unslung abandonment that goes rather well with the guitars. It's very good.

Sun is an album of polished electronic pop that mostly struggles to distinguish itself from the current slew of female singers.

A natural wonder.

Either way, we get what we always get: the analogue rendition of a stick of Southern yarns, long on observation, short of syllable and rough as your old boots.

As we glide through Post Tropical the tracks steadily grow bigger, with gospel-style harmonies and languid slide guitar lending texture to create a dreamy, if cold, soundscape that may leave some with a sense of frustration, as if we are building towards an ever-shifting point on the horizon.

While the presiding atmosphere is retro, the Avila brothers' production keeps things properly real.

Old Fears is the sound of a quick, keen mind at work and play.

Great tunes, decent voice, scary attitude.

The most vibrant, organic and energy infused African hip-hop debut since K'naan's The Dusty Foot Philosopher.

The most compelling Spanish album I've heard in ages.

Exquisitely poised solo pieces that subtly pay homage to the likes of fellow keyboard masters Abdullah Ibrahim and Erik Satie.

A real gem.

At its best, in the opening “All Will Surely Burn” and in a thrilling closing version of “Rivers of Babylon”, this is mesmerising trance music of great power.

The first really serious contender for album of the year thus far.

There are overworked beatscapes and confounding lyrics, sure--but also multiple sublime, fully formed songs.

The Blue Note debut can be as frustratingly tentative as his first outing for RCA 15 years ago.... Things do heat up, with drummer Eric Harland stoking the fires, but there's no big flame.

Desire Lines lacks the hooks of their best work, with no obvious hits.

Revelation Road proves, though, that form may come and go, but class is permanent.

The internationalist (Scouse-Chinese-Scottish-Bulgarian-Israeli) electro-rock quartet may not have presented a comprehensive summary of their career here, but it's a superb starting point for Ladytron latecomers.

Happily, the North Carolina’s modern hippie’s second album is too ambitious, too fluently fluently surprising and too lovely to appeal to 1970s retro-heads alone.

A delightful indie pop record that’s by turns intense, playful and touching.

[On Bloom] Alex Scally and Victoria Legrand have finessed their vision to perfection.

Tracks such as "The Bay" have enough to get heads nodding, but if you hear this on a dancefloor, it'll be courtesy of a seriously hard-working remixer.

Walker is almost unique among his generation in continuing to provide mind-food instead of cosy nostalgia. If you go into Bish Bosch half-wishing he'd belt out a ballad, you leave it with absolutely no regrets.

His major-label follow-up wisely keeps the retro aesthetic.

The danger is that they might spread themselves too thin, but on this evidence they've kept their best ideas close to their chests.

In spite of the self-conscious effort to create something "beautiful", the songs slowly reveal themselves to be things of real beauty.

Enchanting stuff.

It borders on the twee. That it doesn't cross the frontier is the reason this is worth your attention.

If mainstream and soulful's your country bag, you can do a lot worse than this.

This is meditative, spacious, profoundly dark music, evidently haunted by Miles Davis's early-1970s excursions into free electronica, as well as the wolves of the Nordic imagination.

This is heartfelt, sweetly sincere and as good an album as BPB has made for some time.

Not really "folk" at all but a programme of music for solo guitar (and occasional clarinet) drawing on three centuries of complex harmony; or at least the harmony which appeals to the gruff old Pentangle picker.

They are awfully thoughtful, though the thoughtfulness does frequently give way--sometimes you feel with a sigh of relief--to the technical liberation of jig and reel.

This is jouncey, mostly R&B-derived pop with a keen ear for what supports a melody. It's good.

D&B&G is delicate and unaffected but clever and soulful--a balm and an inquisition.

You might even argue that this and its predecessors, My Name Is Buddy (2007) and Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down (2011), represent the most cogent work of his long career.

It takes a few plays to acclimatise to but, once won over, whatever you listen to next will seem pedestrian by comparison. Lovely, but wholly on its own terms.

Love This Giant is a skewed and funky instant classic.

Cherry's version of Suicide's "Dream Baby Dream" is an unmissable marvel... Elsewhere, it's not the freedom of the backing that's the problem so much as the randomness of the material, with several songs feeling as if they were chosen to look hip rather than sound interesting.

While this may once have been filed under 'shoegaze', now we can call it 'noisy dream pop' and just wade in its wash of guitars.

It's lovely to fall asleep to. Which is a compliment, not a complaint.

His most enjoyable LP since Our Favourite Shop.

One minute it's like listening to early Genesis, the next Smile-era Beach Boys, the next XTC and the next, um, 1980s Genesis.

They've done a respectful job of augmenting the atmosphere of melancholy, contemplation and unease.

A close to fine debut.

Contact is shamelessly allusive, never remotely challenging and characterised by a get-to-the-chorus immediacy.

Here, Beam adds funky Stevie Wonder synths to the mix. And marimba. Lots of marimba.

She's an oblique writer and arranger, though, often interesting, never predictable.

There is no shortage of shimmery songcraft here.

A classy, well-made record.

The live stuff is consistently inventive.... Randomness dogs the remixes, but that's standard.

You won't have heard anything like it before.

Chris Thile is the most remarkable mandolinist in the world; fluent, articulate and sometimes just a little too clever to be truly engaging.

Giddily debunking sacred falsehoods with good, honest scepticism, Bauer’s raucous rebirth offers the best of both worlds: intrigue and instant reward for Walkmen doubters and acolytes alike.

Throughout, we get a wounded and fragile man setting his hope-filled heart to music.

There’s something artificial and experimental in the project’s very DNA, but that need not be a bad thing, and it isn’t.

If music be the food of love, Kelis has cooked up something tasty enough to satisfy all but the hungriest of hearts.

It's seldom terrible. And seldom does much to persuade you that it wouldn't be a better idea to cut out the middle man and listen to Gillespie's old LPs instead.

Funny, warm, eloquent, dynamic, oddly soulful and technically delicious. An unremitting joy.

It's rather fine.

The impeccably hip credentials of HN's Roberto Carlos Lange are rather at odds with the wonderfully gloopy Latin-cheese of this Spanish language, old school synth-session's best tracks.

There is in these performances a slightly mannered theatricalism which you will need to reconcile with any desire you may harbour for either simple affect or no affect at all.

So far, so Mogwai. However, a few surprises have been chucked in, too.

Somewhere between Ladyhawke and M83, it's 1980's fetishism all the better for the apparent lack of irony.

While it may, at times, sound a little too familiar--A&F is almost good enough to banish the memory of the dozen or so albums--influenced by grams not Parsons--since.

All diva froideur and drum machine snap, it nevertheless transcends pastiche via a pervasive air of murky ambiguity.

A chastened affair: instrumentally pared-back, vocally wan and full of unremarkable Brill-Building-meets-Belle-and-Sebastian ditties.

Krall's smoky contralto lacks the pungency of Wilson's, but compensates with greater mobility.

It's a bright, optimistic, emotive world, Heidi's, and well suited to the neutral "roots" pop sound which frames it.

An example of its genre it most certainly is.

The Vega songwriting style is hardwearing.

Unless I'm going insane, On a Mission sounds like a modern pop classic.

Fans of Raising Sand and O Brother...will find much to love. As – more surprising this – will fans of classic-era Fleetwood Mac.

In short, if Land of CanAan were a Stevie Wonder album, it would be Hotter than July rather than Innervisions.

Their self-titled debut, aptly enough, is one of the most bitterly anti-romantic albums this side of the third PiL offering.

Very enjoyable package.

Essential for fans, of course. It is left to the rest of us to look on from a safe distance with our hard hats on and to marvel at the most self-regarding singing voice in post-war popular music.

The music is softly strummed, and Bird’s voice is a high, lonesome thing like the wind on a prairie. Sort of.

If the Mayans were right and the world really is going to end this December, you won't hear many better soundtracks than this.

It sounds like a soundtrack for the end of the world, or the birth of new worlds. Extraordinary.

Isbell is an accomplished and serious songwriter and what keeps Here We Rest from being the stonker it so nearly is is not the writing but the slightness of his voice – and his band.

Never, whose song titles are nearly all one word, isn't as daunting as the avant-garde approach might suggest.

Set your sights high, by all means, but when each track sounds like an attempt to emulate a specific great (Bruce, Bob, Leonard, the Band etc) the confused listener can't help but be left thinking "Will the real Low Anthem please stand up?"

Tough, soulful, rockin' songs.