An atmospheric yet danceable debut.

Memphis is a late-night delight.

A genuinely odd collaboration.

Katie Stelmanis's emotionally tortured vibrato meshes with her band's lush textures to often-potent effect.

There’s singing going on, all right, it sounds lovely, but little is conveyed other than loveliness. However, there’s no arguing with their authenticity or technical excellence.

Unrefined, unresigned, occasionally clunky, frequently obtuse but always, always fit to bust.

Proper, stop-you-in-your-tracks talent with the occasional song to match.

Crain’s third album has proved something of a breakthrough in the US.

Within the first 60 seconds it's alluded to Blue Peter and Taxi Driver in successive lines. Wind in the Willows it ain't.

Her debut is an accomplished, glossily shimmering thing.

The sixth album by these Kentucky alt-country types sees them risk destroying forever the aura of existential gravitas they've accrued with the previous five.

Funny, sad, perfect.

More important on first contact, anyway, is the feel of the music, which grooves. Really good.

Ghost on Ghost is as dense stylistically as it is lyrically.

It is a near-total triumph.

It's a less distinctive incarnation, but as evidenced by the stutteringly propulsive "Ye Ye", hardly less hypnotic.

Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon and Pugwash’s Thomas Walsh strike another fine balance between cricket’s arcane specifics and its universal metaphors in cucumber-crisp batches of catch-all pastiche-pop.

In its own downbeat, understated way, Tinsel and Lights does more for festive good cheer than any number of more traditional Christmas albums that go straight for the razzle-dazzle.

Gossamer is hard to fault, besides the fact that it's more of the same.

In place of politics, or any kind of point, all this album offers is a parade of premium brands, from Grey Goose to Louboutin. The overriding sensation is akin to reading one of those luxury-shopping magazines you get on planes while a mediocre hip-hop station plays over the headphones.

The second Nixey solo album is a thing of subtle gorgeousness, with Nixey's none-more-English, sexy school-mistress diction dealing with topics as bleakly improbable as the Bridgend teenage suicides.

The music treads a gingerly path between the lighter textures of honky-tonk and a sort of indie lounge-pop. Charming.

Sweetly soaring stuff.

Based on his native London, its themes are hardly original but he handles them with likeability.

If this isn't Foals' pop classic or their art masterpiece, they're having a huge amount of fun squaring that circle.

The odds-and-ends nature of this compilation is spelt out by its title, but the quality barely suffers for that.

Wonderful Glorious alternates between distorted rock and freewheeling country-pop interludes.

There's no "Chasing Pavements"-style killer, but she has murdered the Cure's "Lovesong" using Heart FM-friendly jazz-lite as her weapon.

There are 36 performances, most of them evincing a spumey "aaaargh, Jim-lad" recreational vibe.

Yorke's lyrics, consisting mainly of repeated aphorisms and clichés ("A penny for your thoughts", "I've made my bed, I'll lie in it"), don't suggest any great depth.... But the sounds, bringing in elements of tropicalia, Afro-funk and laptronica, with glitches, rainforest sounds and superb analogue-synth squelches (if anyone steals the show here, it's Godrich), mean you hardly notice.

Gentle Spirit is impressively inert.

A partial return to top form for the widdly-diddly axe-meister.

Nonchalant no more, here they spike their sparse blues-print with humour and humanity, dub grooves and Southern gothic flavours.

“Inside the Idle Hour Club” is the comedown: woozy, wavy, lush, long. Not exactly cohesive then, but hey--it’s a trip.

An intimate, introspective album that takes tentative steps to reveal the soul behind the star.

As a soundtrack, sure; as a record, one for the completist.

Venturing further into radio-friendly pop-rock than ever before, her fourth album showcases a strong voice which (unlike brother Rufus) actually hits the notes.

This is a very capable attempt to update that swoonable sound, and the arrangements do offer a few contemporary touches.

Simultaneously the most and the least pop record of the autumn.

CocoRosie [is] squat, inventively, somewhere between Fever Ray and Joanna Newsom.

It is not a substantial offering, nor does it plough a new furrow--but it is a buzz.

It's often barely there, notably the final minutes of "Lux 4". This is musical homeopathy.

This one feels much more like a group searching for a sound together, even if the sound once belonged in a Venn diagram linking Led Zep, Deep Purple and Dio-era Sabbath. And it rocks most periodly.

Although it is both loud and quiet, it neither rocks nor swings.

Even though the album comes in at nearly 80 minutes, surprisingly it doesn’t feel too long. This is largely because it doesn’t get stuck in an Afrobeat rut.

Drake is revealed as a serious artist whose gossamer-light songs can sound painfully vulnerable, and there's more than a bit of black dog in the poems.

Save Rock and Roll features unexpected excursions into rave-pop, and numerous celebrity cameos, but enough airbrushed pop-punk to prove they haven't forgotten which side their bread's buttered.

Recorded in Hollywood, which figures - there is a near-visual sense of overstatement to the bleakness.

Just like Levi Stubbs, he can't help himself.

It's good, but you want to hear them live.

This darkly amusing, awkward yet oddly graceful return of the ostensibly dead, more than measures up.

Most of LTHS consists of thumping soul-pop reminiscent of JoBoxers or high-energy Hives-like garage rock, and even if it errs on the side of sameyness, it's rarely dull.

Tales of Us has a stately pace and woozy beauty, with cinematic orchestration of swaying strings over acoustic guitar or mossy cello.

And whaddayaknow, this ugly duckling – out of a hoodie and into a tux – turns out to have a fine white soul voice and has followed a record you couldn't bear to hear more than once with a record you'll want to play over and over.

Not a perfect debut, but one that leaves you with the feeling that we're dealing with a living, thinking artist here, not just another Brit School waxwork.

Enough promise here to keep listening.

Liars revel in keeping their listeners on edge and entertained making Mess their most wickedly enjoyable album yet.

With guests such as Jack White and a surprisingly bearable Norah Jones, Rome makes a fine fist of recreating the elegance of prime 1960s Euro-pop. All good, no bad, and never ugly.

Rocky's rhymes are believable when reminiscing about growing up poor.

There are standouts aplenty and, as song rolls seamlessly into song.

Their festival-friendly rap-rave-metal goes "the-generation-that-are-going-to-change-the-world" political.

It induces a heady sense of perpetual forward motion, whether graceful or full pelt. Stunning.

It may not be as mind blowing as FutureSex. But, frankly, what is?

Ward's at his best when he ditches the troubadour formula, as on the glam-pop romp he takes through Daniel Johnston's "Sweetheart".

It's a blast.

Most of the beloved Feat features are featured.

It's two-thirds pretty good, all the same.

Generation Indigo is a hugely enjoyable electro-pop album.

On record, this is a joyous burst of blissed-out world pop.

Neville almost levitates through doo-wop, soul and R&B standards.

On the evidence of this [album] one can safely say that the Dø are the best French/Finnish duo in pop.

The slightly sterile neo-soul fump of the Roots may lack the feel of their progenitors but the songs make up for that.

They have now cracked out the synths, ramped up the drum machines, and found their calling in giddy, lovelorn electro-pop.

It can be plodding and takes a while to get going, but also occasionally reaches soaring, festival-fields-at-dusk heights.

The result is an album of solid country virtue.

The repertoire leaves room for instrumental chops from saxophonist Ernie Watts, while Haden's big bass fiddle thumps out the time with authority.

It's a shame the God-bothering pomp of John Legend collaboration "The Believer" spoils it all at the end.

They sound confident enough to provide space for Finn’s lyrics of high nights and soul-harrowed hangovers

Mostly, though, this lingered-over comeback offers sumptuous returns for those prepared to linger over it.

Pianist Matthew Bourne goes all English-pastoral in this largely lovely solo suite.

A cool, edgy soundtrack for the summer, should it ever arrive.

Suggests and afternoon in Ikea. Snorbital.

[An] exceptionally artful debut.

Slipstream is welcome, despite large portions of it sounding generic to the point of self-parody: funky, strolling, sunny California blues-rock with lashings of soul.

Bewitching.

Well, they were demos once; and here they are, in all their functional glory.

It is derivative and woebegone and its musical twists are seldom hard to predict, but it is also finely crafted and devoid of the phoniness which can make such works unbearable.

Nice is the word.

For all Bird's reverence for American rural music of the past, Hands is startlingly contemporary.

BTS is a covers album recorded at and paying tribute to Memphis's Sun Studios, deploying tumbleweed guitar twang, and occasionally, the falsetto.

When he shuts up, and lets the shambling jangle and daydreamy exotica take over, it's great. When he sings, it's murder.

Bracing stuff.

Just when the world is no longer particularly bothered about a new Arctic Monkeys record, they've finally released one worth being bothered about – at least in parts.

When it's good, it's a thrilling and ambtitious state-of-the-nation address.

The most rewarding part of this double-disc is the first quarter. Not that the hissy old demos and rarities on the rest of the collection are without their charms. But it's the opening section which really whisks you back to another age.

Haunting and harrowing, the uncomprehending first reactions are combined with a score both alarming and consoling. Also here, Mallet Quartet (2009) and Dance Patterns (2002), but it is WTC 9/11 which packs the most powerful punch.

An almost comically deep, rich baritone croon, it carries echoes of Scott Walker, Nick Cave, Elvis Presley and, more prosaically, the guy from Crash Test Dummies.

Feels Like Home is musically conservative, socially ingratiating, politically vulnerable. It is unmistakably a piece of product. But it is also brilliant.