Although it is both loud and quiet, it neither rocks nor swings.

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

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.

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.

The most compelling Spanish album I've heard in ages.

Stapleton's writing for this recording, satisfies on every level.

Nothing you wouldn't expect.

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

Balminess, after all, is the chief asset of this second album's slow-rolling, harmonic country-gospel jams.

With a little luck, and the careful choice of singles, there might be life in this party yet.

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

Ferguson's smoky tones recall the young Aretha Franklin at her more restrained, [but] it's all ever so slightly boring.

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

This quickly becomes the stuff of a thousand, middling US soft-rockers and when they're not whining like Maroon 5, they're whining like Blink-182.

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

Words and Music, the first full studio album in an aeon from Sarah Cracknell, Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs, is a masterclass of pop theory and practice in perfect harmony.

An aural Waltzer, exhilarating and nauseous. On the plus side, there's oompah brass, jaunty jigs and a song channelling Fraggle Rock for vocal inspiration; and on the minus, oompah brass [and] jaunty jigs.

Mostly it's clichéd Pelion heaped on cheesy Ossa in a mountain range of sickly gestures.

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

This comeback album suggests a hiatus spent in a cryogenic freezer. Which is to say that they sound the same ... only rather less vital.

[On Bloom] Alex Scally and Victoria Legrand have finessed their vision to perfection.

Through the Night aims for Dusty in Memphis, but it lands closer to Petula Clark.

Ditto & co ... appear to have disastrously lost their fire. Only "Love in a Foreign Place" shows the sort of strutting disco beast they are capable of. It's too little. But not, one still hopes, too late.

Buckinghamshire band SBP return for their third album with a far more complex musical palette.

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.

A classy, well-made record.

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

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.