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

It sometimes meanders like a wasted hipster at an Animal Collective after-show. Yet it preserves enough presence of mind to yield gems such as the sing-song "Alien Days" or the deliquescent "Mystery Disease."

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

The Atlanta singer delivers soulful, socially conscious meditations.

It's exquisite, of course, but dull.

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

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

This critic cannot in all honesty say, with a clear conscience, that their second album is absolutely terrible. Because it plain isn't.

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

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.

Those moments [where it's stirring, sentimental, and altogether too safe] aside, there's plenty more that is beautiful, forgettable and primed to aid a little light Sunday-afternoon catharsis.

Overlong at 19 tracks, it has its moments.

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

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.

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

Surprises are few and what Delta Machine lacks is one big, arena-ready, fist-in-the-air synthpop stormer.

Enough promise here to keep listening.

She has ... created a sound which is almost absurdly ill-matched to her songs.

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

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

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

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

A rapid sugar rush, followed by a gradual crash.

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

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

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").

Most of the beloved Feat features are featured.

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