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.

A mature, reflective, intelligent, Americana-inflected [album].

Electra Heart is too professional to be truly terrible, but it's never clever enough to be more than merely toytown.

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

Fear Fun is the kind of album that can name-check Sartre, Heidegger and Neil Young in the same song.

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

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

This is jouncey, mostly R&B-derived pop with a keen ear for what supports a melody. It's good.

Bewitching.

Two non-trad covers (Anais Mitchell and Fleetwood Mac) remind you that he's earnt the right to do what the hell he wants.

Blunderbuss does, at times approach his finest work. But it doesn't do anything he hasn't already done.

The results can be more interesting than listenable – and the musical contents do seem wilfully random.

Lakeman writes, sings, plays, produces and mixes, which may or may not explain the rather dry, stoney sound of the album and the rhythmic forthrightness of the playing.

Tuneful enough, his debut is an MOR bricolage of prevailing musical styles.

If mainstream and soulful's your country bag, you can do a lot worse than this.

There's enough on the highly politicised Macaroni to justify stepping outside to find him.

It's a rather beautiful thing.

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.

Historic reunion of the piano and vibes duo-masters starts unpromisingly on a hit-you-over-the-head-with-a-mallet version of "Eleanor Rigby", but recovers with gorgeous treatments of Weill's "My Ship" and Jobim's "Once I Loved".

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

Filled with beguiling close-harmony tunes which wouldn't feel out of place on the Wicker Man soundtrack and sound like venerable trad-arrs but are actually originals.

Overlong at 19 tracks, it has its moments.

Unrefined, unresigned, occasionally clunky, frequently obtuse but always, always fit to bust.

Slipstream is welcome, despite large portions of it sounding generic to the point of self-parody: funky, strolling, sunny California blues-rock with lashings of soul.

For once all that languorous muck is refreshing.

Wonderful.

Suggests and afternoon in Ikea. Snorbital.

Both gently gripping and strangely sinister.