It remains the case that this kind of thing only has something to say about distance travelled, no more.

The Glaswegian band's chosen style this time around, namely dark vintage synth pop (early Human League) and scratchy, spindly post-punk (Wire, the Cure), matches the mood and subject matter perfectly.

Gruff’s gorgeous voice helps humanise Feltrinelli. Never more so than on “Hoops With Fidel”, which, rather than demonising him and Castro, conveys the ideal of international revolution as a beautiful thing. As beautiful, in fact, as this album.

This is a belting return to form by the best vocal artist in jazz.

Its main virtue: brevity. Most songs are sub-2 minutes, and the entire album is over in 20.

Its chances are boosted by Ian Broudie's bright, bold production, but, apart from one obligatory Beatlesy ballad, it's full of route-one glam-rock stompers with not a single interesting or original twist and lazy stuff-that-rhymes lyrics.

However much you think it a tired formula, this lot shake it awake with their relentless charm.

Should you be struck by a nostalgic mood yourself, Oui Oui Si Si Ja Ja Da Da is a Madness album like they used to make 'em.

The latest retro sensation, Waterhouse is a 25-year-old from San Francisco ... who's trying to sound like Ike Turner circa 1958. And he's pretty good at it.

Fragrant Word has killer synthpop tunes buried within it, but too often you wonder how much better a record this would have been if they quit dicking around and just gave you the song.

The soundtrack to Jennifer Aniston. Nice. Attractive. Hygienic.

There's a master at work here and if he finds his filter he'll no doubt lose some of that fairy dust.

It's essentially 1980s indie jangle with hints of Afro-pop and Northern Soul, carrying echoes of Orange Juice.

The treatments range from Schifrin/Morricone atmospherics to full on Prokofiev/Tchaikovsky bombast, with results which are variable, but the scary choral, Omen-style version of "Where's Your Head At" is a hoot.

It might be more accurate to say that nearly all of the songs on Whispering Trees aim for "Satellite of Love" but come closer to achieving Sky dish of desire.

Obscure or not, they're songs worth learning, especially when sung as gorgeously as this.

The none-more-Nietzschean, grandiose-apocalyptic mood continues through the utterly splendid Olympic theme "Survival", with its über-ELO arrangement, and "Animals", with its sound effects of an angry, riotous mob.

The beats aren't always the best, but Wretch, who lives on the notorious Tiverton Estate and whose "mum's still living in the ends", has a self-awareness lacking in many of his peers.

Impressive rather than engaging.

Both gently gripping and strangely sinister.

When he isn't sounding like a Police album track ("Locked Out of Heaven") or a Musical Youth album track ("Show Me"), he's mostly sounding like a Wham! album track (the disco-pop "Treasure" being a case in point).

As is conventional with contract filler, this is not going to be a go-to album in the canon.

Everett’s earlier, fearless accounts of family tragedy have refined his ability to explore extreme states of emotional disrepair.

Each to their own. For me, there's nothing here not to like, but even less to love.

The songwriting has come into focus and the hooks get under your skin.

It is, as you'd expect, spacious, gentle, reachy, euphonious and, for Air, fairly organic sounding.

Equal parts Byrds, Beatles and Burritos, this kicks away the cobwebs nicely.

The small print is that Travis are still doing what Travis have always done.

He comes on like a Conor Oberst meets Brian Wilson in a ramshackle approach that sounds to these ears like a refreshing burst of honest emotion in an often pallid musical landscape.

It's tender, touching and not nearly as miserable as its subject matter suggests.

This is light and breezy pop that marries summery synths with dreamy female vocals.

As an 19-track collection of rarities from the period 2003-present, TTEC is necessarily a mixed bag of styles and qualities.

When these three Liverpool lasses let their freak-folk flag fly their abandon is contagious. Their voices are great, which helps, but it's the unexpected instrumentation that really seals the deal.

It's an album you can hear without ever really noticing. Radox for the ears.

Composer Joe Acheson seems more interested in texture than development and you can long for a discordant voice, but as head-nodding experiences go, this is pretty good.

Woon's work is unashamedly bucolic (he writes songs about going for a walk) and beat-literate (he's worked with Burial), and his tremulous, medieval folk singer voice makes it perfectly bearable.

Sistrionix is a hugely enlivening 41 minutes of deliciously distorted vocals, instantly memorable fuzz-up guitar riffs, handclap breakdowns, and vicious put-downs of cheating lovers and sleazebags.

None of it is clumsy but, equally, none of it truly escapes the originator's gravitational field.

Conor Oberst has always been an artist to inspire, irritate and frustrate, and on what he says will be the final BE album he does these things in equal measure.

Spread over a 67-minute album, their second with new voice William DuVall, that grinding insistence first impresses, then just grinds.

Whatever they say, this isn’t the “comeback story of a lifetime”: it’s the low-risk re-entry bid of a band who know where their bread is buttered.

Very musical, it is, if ever so slightly coffee table.

Pretty lovable.

At its best on the quasi-techno anthem "Low Times", it's claustrophobically compelling, if too formulaic to be truly super-natural.

Though less folky than their 2010 debut, Blood Speaks sticks to the harmonies and arpeggios formula that made their Jack White-produced "Gastown" single so memorable.

Her fifth studio album is dominated by navel-gazing auto-therapy sessions.

Occasionally the listener is carried away on the soulful cusp of Gonjasufi's scraggly voice, but more often than not they are simply overwhelmed.

The wan vocals and listless melodies conspire to render such eclecticism [on this album] as flavourless as a Cup-a-Soup variety pack.

Their unadorned, effects-free music remains simple and straightforward, like a rock equivalent of the Dogme school of cinema.

The album’s end stretch meanders, but the fidgety techno bounce of “Got Well Soon” makes its point, which is that Breton have it in them to draw converts on their own outsider terms.

Only the more straightforwardly poppy numbers disappoint, with power-ballad manqué “Crescendo” a particular anomaly.

An unprecedented futuristic hybrid of dubstep, speedcore and math-rock, with lyrics which charge towards unexplored lexicographical horizons.

She makes a half-decent dance diva on "I Need Your Love", but I'd ask whether that doesn't defeat the object of being Ellie Goulding, though I still don't know what that object is.

You’re not listening to songs so much as attempting to pull up the past as if it were an old pair of trousers, and then rope it into place with lengths of digital cable. It is both ridiculous and oddly moving.

CYHSY now sound more or less exactly like The Killers.

The second Yelle album is essential for anyone who appreciates dancefloor-friendly European synth pop.

This often sounds more like a BBC4 documentary than a pop record. And that's no bad thing.

It's exquisite, of course, but dull.

It is stately, rather imperious music, conveying emotion through the deployment of technical effects rather than through the revelation of a voice.

Carry Me Back ticks all the boxes: jaunty, soulful, nostalgic without being cloying.

"Anastasis" is the Greek word for "resurrection", but stasis is closer to the truth.

After a four-year hiatus, Shakira’s 10th album is full of raggae-tinged, bouncy melodies and absurd, occasionally quite poetic lyrics.

Moon is bookended by the structurally perfect melodies of "I Heard the Owl Call My Name" and "Heart of the Woods"--but what’s in-between is often too airy-fairy to really grab.

It's nevertheless a hugely enjoyable ride, Clarke and Gore's duelling synths creating an entirely instrumental soundtrack to the sci-fi movie playing inside your own head.

Solid, polished, dancefloor-friendly, and other damningly faint adjectives.

There are no standout songs but that's kind of the point: GTTW washes over you like a cooling stream on a hot day.

A loose-limbed, spacious, American indie-folk-rock. Political, challenging, dissatisfied and, naturally, righteous.

You know exactly what to expect: high-energy, hugely entertaining garage rock. And, with the odd exception, that's what they deliver.

For the most part this is a glorious hymn to the art of playing together, of which Lennon would surely approve.

It's the drift, eddy and thrust of the whole ensemble that tells the main story.

There are collaborations with Bobby Womack, Sheila E and George Clinton. All driven by the heavy funk bass of Collins. Which is never a bad thing.

It isn't long before their second album goes sour, settling into a pattern of either doctrinaire psych-rock or alt-country which recalls the Dandy Warhols in their more meandering moods.

He's not breaking any moulds--it's solid, guitar led, pop-rock--but then Marr is the man for that job.

So Long’s strenuously busy patchwork leaves you wondering how something so superficially impressive ends up making so little impact. The answer lies in the way the Bicycle Clubbers rarely deliver these gap-year reports with decisive force enough to thrill, or dwell on an idea for long enough to fulfill its promise.

Everything's turned up to 11 but content is absolute zero. If the Cribs were any more landfill, they'd have seagulls following them around.

Back to Forever moves things into the 1980s--all fist-pumping verses and “Kids-in-America”-like big choruses.

The main signifier is Peyroux's sound, now as downhome as a chicken shack and artfully haunted as a Cassandra Wilson session. Tasteful.

Sadly, the Showgirls star is no Alicia Keys (who contributes three songs), and while she unquestionably has a voice, the material's nothing you'll want to remember.

It's about time he delivered something of substance. YCTAODNT fits the bill, kinda. It's long on heartbreak and short on yee-haw affectations.

For the most part it works well, provided you can live with Dawn's butter-wouldn't-melt ingenue phrasing and tone.

If H&LA's 2008 debut was an ideal accompaniment to the clubland chaos, then Blue Songs is the gentlest of comedowns.

Some might call it Kylie for hipsters, but it's quite lovely for that.

Tracks such as "Boiling Water" wouldn't sound out of place in a naff holiday resort. There are notable exceptions, though, such as "Fire" feat Ms Dynamite.

A genuinely empathetic production, then, which does not pull up many trees.

As always, Ladytron make the world feel a more haunted, evocative, romantic place. Faultless.

Unless you have a natural predisposition towards the enjoyment of self-consciously nerdy vocals and jangling harmonic songs taking a 'sideways looks' at life, Sky Full Of Holes will leave you completely unmoved.

This feels like a wearisome exercise in reasserting his market appeal.

What's revealed is what's often been outshone by the originals: the sheer quality of the songwriting and vocals.

Ice on the Dune is a seamless suite of elegiac synthpop, with fairydust-flecked melodies, a perpetually peaking bass end, chord changes that reach into your heart, and fantasising falsetto vocals.

Most of disc one consists of ponderous, blustering nonsense, with a black chandelier used as a metaphor for depression. Disc two shows more promise.

Their command of "neeeooow" noises suggests a schooling in retro rave, and their cover of the Jets' "Crush" turns the sugary original into something superbly sinister and stalker-ish.

Touching and strangely beautiful.

It sees Golightly staking her claim once again as the Brenda Lee of the Medway scene.

The upbeat tracks are as catchy as conjunctivitis.

[Four] sees them rediscovering guitars with a vengeance – and many tracks here come with the sort of epic quality that has helped Muse filled arenas.

Difficult to fault, [yet] it's equally difficult to get excited about.

Pervaded by children's laughter, this is a lovely departure from the Mambazo norm, as befits the quest it reflects.

New project HDBA (a translation of the German name for the board game Frustration) sees him actually having fun, after a fashion.