Spalding tries to breathe new life into the dead form of smooth jazz-fusion. And nearly succeeds.

Lakeman writes, sings, plays, produces and mixes, which may or may not explain the rather dry, stoney sound of the album and the rhythmic forthrightness of the playing.

It is, almost inevitably, charming.

The ballads will be the tracks from Little Red to own the charts for the foreseeable future, but it’s on the 5am dancefloor that Katy B’s second album will score its biggest impact.

It's touching, witty, and like everything else the Bostonian ever does, brilliant.

Ultraviolence is more of the same, but less.

Happily, beardy-weirdy Texas psych-folkies Midlake manage to weather Tim Smith’s split with no pinch in purpose or progress.

Subjects resulting from such reveries include imperialism, the environment and the more familiar home turf of love and longing. Nobody does it better.

As befits a novelist, the songs are narratives concerned with the big issues. Life, death, that sort of thing. Good record.

Fusion fans might be confused but as a sentimental affirmation of melody it's Metheny to the core.

[In French] it's beguiling and sexy. When she crosses the Channel and sings in English, she's a ten-a-penny kook-merchant.

With treasurable details – the dubbed-up refrain of "Black Icy Stare", the Merseybeat-ish groove of "Karmatron" – feeding into an overall ambience of lotus-eating sensuality.

Over rudimentary backing beats, in that "ya feel me?" accent, his humour often hits the spot. However, the going-through-Customs skit, followed by a track about having his urine tested at the airport, is as tedious as it is righteous.

As long as you don't ask too much of it, it's good knockabout rowdy fun.

Right at the end of what is officially the most depressing month of the year comes a shaft of unadulterated sunshine.

A barrel of laughs it ain't. Over sparse, semi-orchestral backing, Gahan tackles the big ones.

It recalls MGMT before the wheels came off. Which is no bad thing.

What We Saw..., then, is the usual Spektorish mixed bag of literate genius and "look at me" showboating.

The set list's rather obvious and the interstitial chat goes on a bit, but the heart of the man is there to be heard.

There's a childlike sense of adventure and fun about his sampladelic approach.

Michigan auteur Hawthorne has synthesised his influences into perfect power pop, with the help of producers including Pharrell Williams.

It’s still the instrumentals, with their bass growls and motorik rhythms, moody ambience, psychedelic wig-outs and violent moodswings, that have the most flavour.

Another sweet viper's bite of post-Freudian dyspepsia from the singersongwriter who loves to mistrust.

They don't significantly compromise the essential charm and glitchy poetry of the songcraft.

Nobody does this kind of thing quite like the Swedes, and NATD are a welcome addition to that nation's synthpop hall of fame.

Finn's second album continues the project he undertook with his first – namely to shake off the shackles of being "Neil Finn's son" by swamping his dreamy, Beatles-esque pop songs with moments of electronic and percussive madness.

Low-slung, dub-ish beats are appealing, though lead some tracks to Snooze Town.

Drawing on anything from Medieval plainsong to free jazz, she creates an extraordinary sensation of light, air, and space.

Baird's own rather fabulous acoustic is garnished with touches of dobro, pedal-steel or electric, over which her wisp of a voice, and words, hang in a vapour.

"I Wanna Talk 2 U", [is] just one highlight of an album which manages to be sonically inventive, dense and complex and melodically accessible.

See You There revisits his classics as well as finding room for one new track and a beauty of an alternate version of "What I Wouldn't Give."

Too safe, too familiar...and was that really a power-ballad key change? Good guitarist when the songs allow it, though.

It does just enough to bring "happy" to you, and you've gotta love the black humour of any band who'd call a song "God Help This Divorce".

A seething, soundtracky, high-gloss, high-energy orchestral Latin "fusion", full of licks and stabs and twiddly bits.

Beyoncé's strident triumphalism is displaced by muted heartbreak and the cookie-cutter R&B of her mega-sellers ditched for a subtle, stripped-down sound that suggests someone's been listening to Janelle Monae.

It's an assured collection of pure pop with an independent sensibility, equal parts Kylie and The XX.

The arrangements for a small rock band are rudimentary, leaving everything to depend on the song and the singer.

As so often before, the duo’s choice of vocal collaborators is timely and transformative, bringing fresh, unexpected angles to their pieces.

It's still a cut above most epic global-influenced rock.

She's on the cover, smirking in front of an old map: a naughty sea god(dess) in a Cruikshank cartoon. Which somehow suits the discursive post-folk rompery of the music: highly arranged, wordy as an Elvis Costello song with larks taking the place of bitterness.

With its flutes, xylophones, mandolins, a truly incongruous mention of Superman III and, not least, Martin's own lilting delivery, it also has a fair quantity of charm.

It's great.

Every once in a while, the results can be more enjoyable than the main event (see Stephen Stills' Manassas). And this may be true of CRB.

For all the virtuosity in his fingers, Jerry is no singer, and this collection of tasteful exhibits needs faces [guest singers]. The faces save the record.

If Mala wasn't conceived as Devendra Banhart's Europhile album, it's doing a damn fine impression of one.

If you replace the techno with ambient tones and piano noodles, he can sound a little reedy and exposed.

Much of the time, it's reheated Madchester. The rest, it's over-literal psychedelia.

It's loud, it's brash, it's real and it's utterly exhausting.

They show a weakness for the winsome, but Faye O'Rourke's fabulous foghorn fixes that: when she takes the mic, Cars' promise rings out loudly.

Turn Blue’s stealth seduction suggests this much: their wrong-footing instincts should keep them on the right track.

It's pleasant enough, but on the whole feels like Hynes' sketches towards an album, rather than the finished item.

You can almost hear the chickens out in the yard and see the dust mites dancing in the sunlit air.

Restlessness and drive applauded, but oh for the sound of those demons.

Home Again is sweet, inoffensive, well-intentioned and gently, grainily melancholic, and it operates most fluently at the slow temperature which offends some while delighting others.

One day, maybe the Lips will play nice again. Until then, they and their Fwends have given us plenty to get our heads around.

Apart from a lovely snare-drum loop on "Recat" (annoyingly, all the tracks are called Re-something or other), this is barely even a head-nodding experience.

Few bands do that thing - spitting the venom of the dumped, but somehow staying romantic at the same time - better.

Songs typically travel from the spindly to the epic, and extol the virtues of living life to the full.

His second solo album, while often truly horrible, is also fascinating and funny.

Halstead's songs and Euros Childs-like voice breathe the sort of honesty and goodness that's harder and harder to find in the iTunes age.

They've brought touches of ska and Latin into the mix, but KD&L still don't do anything Imelda May can do better.

Reuniting him with Slowhand/Backless producer Glyn Johns for the first time in four decades, I Still Do is Eric Clapton’s most assured album in ages, its understated poise and refinement reflecting the influence of his late compadre JJ Cale.

If the band can let go of their younger selves completely, that masterpiece will be theirs.

Honest, soulful, happy-sad, warm and welcoming.

Wilfully abstruse, then, but still one hell of a talent.

Oceania is best listened to in bits.

It's broodingly impactful stuff, only hampered by the kind of self-parodically indie-kid vocals that remain in a permanent state of posturing ennui.

The voice (Joni Mitchell meets Anna Calvi), is as tough and tender as before but the music now acts as a bouncy counterpoint to songs with lyrics such as "death is a hard act to follow", blurring the line between unsettling and uplifting nicely.

The perfect soundtrack for early summer, and all the possibilities it holds.

The results are fluent, tasteful, ghostly and more than a little wistful. Ideally served with morning coffee.

Penny has garage-rock form, but Too True is a light-footed, echo-heavy pop makeover with a 1980s gloss, frothy but forthright.

Turn a deaf ear to the Cowell-connected producer Labrinth's uninspired Brit-hop beats and instead concentrate on the surely intentional comedy of Tinie's "I've got so many clothes I keep some of them in my aunt's house" and "I've been to Southampton but I've never been to Scunthorpe" (both from number-one single "Pass Out").

Their heat-haze hybrid of soul grooves and falsetto-funk chic feels too under-cooked to sustain a whole album.

Despite a version of Earth Wind & Fire's "After The Love Is Gone" that is so good you can play it for days, this dream-team collaboration between jazz singer Elling and big-time weirdo producer Don Was delivers less than it promises.

It's all pretty good, but you want to see them live more than replay the album, though "504" needs downloading.

There's a modicum of standard Teenage-Fanclub-meets-Mekons indie jangle. Far more interesting, however, are the dreamy, dazed disco tunes.

A hitherto only-hinted-at humour (try "UK Blues") punctuates this hypnotic and haunting glimpse into an imperial isolation.

The sound is a return to the Whigs' finest and the mood is whiskey, cigarettes and damnation.

Nothing much happens in it, but there is plenty to be seen

It's the very definition of "not bad", but surely there's some urgent paint you need to watch drying instead?

It sounds like a Sabbath album, from the tortuous lyrics to the eight-minute track lengths. But something about it feels wrong.

It is not a bad record--Danger Mouse doesn’t make those--but it does feel safe and predictable rather than fresh and exciting.

Tracks such as "Epilogue to a Marriage" here, serve as a reminder that there's always room for the real thing, and you'll know it when it hits you.

It's nothing that Best Coast and the Magic Numbers don't do better.

If his follow-up doesn't evince quite the same exuberance, it still twinkles with a well-travelled exoticism.

It's actually a more interesting artifact than the Mitchell one. Having said that, it is also hobbled by a paucity of good songs and a slightly splashy production. Solomon rides the turbulence like a whale.

It's derivative and is a near hybrid of Mew, the Postal Service, M83 and Empire of the Sun, but it's perfectly likeable without ever inspiring outright love.

R.E.M's 15th album could trade places with almost any of the previous 14.

Squelchy synths, down-and-dirty basslines, and vocodered vocals stay just the right side of Jamiroquai.

Like the late Johnny Cash, Jones has reinterpreted the venerable songs in a bare, bluesy style. Unlike Cash, he never quite makes them his own.

By Ben Gibbard's own admission "a much less guitar-centric" record than usual, it is therefore, if only by default, the closest thing yet to a follow-up to Give Up by Gibbard's other concern, the Postal Service, although it's more about pretty pianos than effervescent synths.

[Tales from Terra Firm] ought to be the one that separates the Oxford quartet from the indie-folk bandwagon and kicks them a few steps up the ladder to being Mumfords-sized.

It's almost boring: yet another excellent British Sea Power album.

Historic reunion of the piano and vibes duo-masters starts unpromisingly on a hit-you-over-the-head-with-a-mallet version of "Eleanor Rigby", but recovers with gorgeous treatments of Weill's "My Ship" and Jobim's "Once I Loved".

Sounds like Kraftwerk's Autobahn driven by a tractor. Forget Krautrock, and say hello to Yokelrock.

It is a glossy thing that entwines her Californian folky yin around his Southern gothic yang.

At times, listening to The Civil Wars is like wading through a swamp of still-raw emotion. It is an album that is more haunted than haunting.

Coming from a band who blatantly don't want to be a band any more, Angles is inevitably disjointed. But it's not disastrous.