This is an artist with taste and opinions of her own, not just a schedule and a fanbase to satisfy.

There is nothing not to love about it.

Each song sounds much like the last but with hooks like this, who needs prizes for subtlety?

Strangeland is drenched in reverb-heavy piano, Chicken Soup for the Soul maxims and moderately maudlin musings about not being young any more.

Tthey run the gamut from cheesy to cheesier with Hucknall managing to make every song sound impressively dated.

His 12th album is certainly magnum: 59 often leaden, mostly hubristic minutes to make that 1215 Grand Charter seem like light relief.

It's a pop record, which means one killer track would redeem everything. Predictably enough, it never comes.

An album which merely proves that the Cranberries haven't lost their knack of saying nothing in a grating way.

It all hangs together quite nicely if, as ever, rather uninvolvingly.

The eighth Marilyn Manson album features some of his finest lyrics yet and, musically, it often approaches the heyday of Holy Wood and Mechanical Animals.

The writing is generic, the studio-craft impressive. Enjoyment will depend on how you get on with the voice and its hooting cannonade of mannerisms.

It's on close personal terms with magnificence.

Every intro twinkles and every chorus swells effectively enough. But if indie carries on like this, we're gonna need a bigger landfill.

This has more bounce and sees Lovefoxxx & co close to their best.

It's the sound of a deeply dim man backed by competent-but-conventional musicians.

It won’t frighten the horses, but it might encourage you to buy an overpriced T-shirt.

[A] bog-standard shamateur indie rock, with riffs borrowed from The Smiths and Velvets, lyrics borrowed from Dylan and Iggy.

He wins you over, eventually.

Nothing to see here.

Collections constitutes a fairly sharp decline.

From dancehall/nu-metal hybrids to dubstep-meets-Bond theme balladry, its bombastic stuff, but also finely tuned in its balance of sincerity and showmanship.

A strange end to a strange album, whose mood, to invoke one of their earlier songs, is not so much "Fuck You, It's Over" as "fuck yeah, it's over!"

He specialises in staggeringly banal lyrics ("Grow old with me", "When you hold me in your arms I can feel your heart") delivered in an overwrought cry-baby warble, and song structures with big predictable sub-Keane, sub-Arcade Fire crescendos.

It's an hour of radio-friendly pop-rock in a Deacon Blue meets pre-ironic U2 vein, all over-reverbed vocals and mildly modish electronics.

What matters is that the I Monster team have cooked up a production that matches our expectations of a League LP.

The result is not, however, a revolution in his sound but a refinement.

It's bright and brash, sometimes almost life-affirming, but leaves you wondering two things (the influence of Graceland and singing in a comedy "foreign" accent).

The constant here is Arthur’s voice: genuinely soulful and able to switch from MC to Marvin at the flick of a falsetto.