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.