At its best, it has a radiant, marvellous sound.

The most pungent aroma rising from Juju's avant-jazz dub-trance grooves is that of a funkier Mahavishnu Orchestra.

The continuing appeal of AC/DC lies in the fact that this self-proclaimed bunch of “noisy little guys” consistently sound like they’re having good-hearted, OTT fun.

Costello’s peerless lyricism often mirrors his tone, and here it’s suitably refined.

There is a strangely addictive quality to hearing something quite so aggressively sui generis as this.

The arrangements on Barry Adamson's latest album seem more restrained than usual, his jazz-noir ambitions trimmed to a blues-funk palette of bass and drum grooves carrying Hammond organ or piano parts, with just the occasional solo horn part.

It's an album packed with Wordsworthian sturm und drang.

There's nothing wildly inventive about her modern take on the vintage vibe. But it’s nonstop fun.

Armatrading has proved more than willing to evolve down the years, but How Did This Happen is mostly a welcome return to familiar sounds and ideas. She produced the album at home, playing all the instruments herself (as she has done for decades) with considerable slickness.

As a swansong, it's as fine as might be expected given the circumstances.

Go-Go Boots is the promised "R&B Murder Ballad Album" recorded concurrently with last year's The Big To-Do, and it's every bit as good as that description suggests.

It’s their most accomplished clawing-back so far of the basic dark rock’n’roll street-smarts that were lost as they cast fruitlessly around for new directions with projects like the acoustic album Howl and the awful noise-scape effort The Effects Of 333 (their very own Metal Machine Music).

Laura Marling continues to impress on her third outing, though the transatlantic influences are becoming more apparent.

She sings like she’s falling apart, but the quality of the album suggests she’s got it together.

The songs on Everything is Beautiful, by contrast [to Everything Sucks], are warm and sun-dappled; reminiscent of the uplifting, gospel-influenced hip hop of Chance the Rapper.

Perhaps the most wonderful thing about Senjutsu is just how much fun the band are having. It’s an album built to entertain, full of theatre, full of gold-standard musicianship. They keep things neat at 10 tracks, but when they do indulge themselves a little, it’s worth it.

Their sixth album, Marauder, is their most experimental to date, blending everything from rough garage rock to Motown rhythms. They’re reinvigorated, brimming with energy and self-assurance.

Soberish is a record of push and pull, of doubt and regained confidence. ... Phair is the queen of rock reinvention, and as this album proves, she’s got a few lives left.

It's a surprisingly enjoyable transformation for some of the tunes.

It belongs in that hour when the sunlight dims, everyone leaves the park, the disposable barbecues are smoking abortively, the makeshift Lilt bottle bong's started to taste like shit and you don't know whether to go back to bed or fritter away your last tenner in town.

Overall, it’s a collection primarily concerned with the somatic rather than cerebral sides of Richard James’s music, overdosing somewhat on staccato, bouncing synth twangs and jittery drum’n’bass beats.

Featuring a blend of standards and originals spiced with judicious covers of sometimes obscure indie tracks, it manages to sustain a mood and attitude throughout without offering too many hostages to homogeneity.

Throughout, there's a fresh impetus to Tricky's musical muse that enables his dark imaginings to connect again with beautiful simplicity.

It may lack cohesion at certain points, but one thing is never in doubt: Minaj is still one of the best in her field.

Recorded over a week in New York, Everything Sucks is the brash, unapologetic sister to the more sensitive Everything is Beautiful.

It’s entirely delightful, and Andy Bell has never sung better, discovering his “inner choirboy” again.

It’s pure rock and roll: sleazy, slick and lots of fun. Sound & Fury marks another milestone for a remarkable artist.

Bookended by “Frau Tomium”, a bleep-tastic tribute to electronic pioneer Oskar Sala, Toy could have come from any time in Yello’s career, so resilient are their tropes.

Southeastern finds him working in a more stripped-down manner which focuses attention firmly on his songs. Fortunately, they're brilliant: vivid, multi-faceted tales of souls adrift.

Open Wide melds the confidence of youth with the poise that comes from experience. It's the sound of a band who’ve truly come into their own.

His vocals are by far the album’s most potent aspect, bringing grace and wonder even to the more routine material, and hoisting the better songs to classic status.

Del Rey’s deliciously twisted pop fuses hip hop beats with her breathy vocal delivery; their mutual power is in their ability to keep things hidden, whilst seeming utterly explicit. It’s a heady mix to be caught up in.

Twelve Nudes is Furman’s most urgent and cathartic record to date.

Tegan and Sara’s last album, 2016’s Love You To Death, was a bold stadium-pop record; this one is less polished, but just as punchy. ... Most people read their teenage diary and cringe. With Hey I’m Just Like You, Tegan and Sara have painstakingly, tenderly, written theirs out again.

he record is a confident immersion into a genre he’s only toyed with before. And just as Good Thing never fully sacrificed Bridges’ style, neither does Gold-Digger forget his roots.

An ambitious reach for new heights.

The results are frequently transformative, and always enjoyable.

Eight albums in, and some of that edgy math-rock experimentalism has been lost, along with two original members of Leon Bridges’ band. But what they now lack in raw, ferocious edginess, they make up for glorious driving riff on Performance.

What’s impressive is how Thundercat makes this music, with its complex structures and zigzagging rhythms, so human.

Working with a lo-fi palette of mostly acoustic instruments, they’ve conjured a weird wonderland in which Angela Carter meets Bjork round at Robert Wyatt’s.

Few songwriters can juggle seriousness and whimsy as adeptly as Paul Simon on Stranger To Stranger, his best album in several years.

The past typically isn’t the most comfortable place to inhabit, but Swift embodies her younger self fully, imbuing these tracks with the same immediacy and emotional heft as she did all those years ago. Country twang or not.

Thanks to the remarkable instrument that is Furler's voice: huge but fragile, fearlessly ragged and wild, seemingly a conduit of a tumultuous past that has included drug addiction and mental health issues, it perfectly counterpoints her songs' robust construction in a way that makes you wish she kept every song she wrote for herself.

Despite the occasional challenge of big blasts of (gleefully disruptive) discord on tracks such as “trolle-gabba”, those considering dipping a toe into avant garde pop will find the waters are warm on Fossora. Give it time – it’ll grow on you. Like a fungus.

A confident return from an artist now comfortable in who she is.

Musically, Dark Matter is some of their catchiest and punchiest material in years. It’ll have you nodding your head – but it’ll never let you get comfortable.

Accompanied by a crack hometown band for whom the intricacies of New Orleans’ distinctive second-line rhythms are clearly second nature, it’s a parade of infectious funk and soul right from the moment Bruce Springsteen romps through “Right Place Wrong Time”, to the Doctor’s closing roll through “I Walk On Guilded Splinters” and “Such A Night”.

Commontime is full of engaging ideas and genial character, by some distance the most assured and complete of Field Music’s releases.

Fuelled by a black humour that’s almost become her trademark, there’s heartbreak and ecstasy, desire, fear, uncertainty, acting on impulse, making mistakes and (maybe) learning from them. And those are tunes we can definitely dance to.

The simpler arrangements allow more room for Rhys's sleek harmonies to drive his whimsical wordplay: accordingly, the album has the lush, beguiling charm of a sun-kissed soft-rock album by The Beach Boys or The Young Rascals.

The song order mirrors the real-life messiness of dismantling a past relationship while falling in love with someone new. ... She frequently weaponises her voice, snarling and howling her pain into the ether; on the French-spoken piano ballad “Falaise de Malaise”, though, she is whisperingly vulnerable. What an extraordinary artist Martha Wainwright is.

On Everything Hits at Once, the Austin-formed indie veterans have compiled a glimmering collection of songs that date back to 2001’s Girls Can Tell, or are as recent as to come from 2017’s Hot Thoughts. There’s also a brand-new song, closer “No Bullets Spent” (built using parts from “Dracula’s Cigarette” of their Get Nice! EP), which is a low-simmering take on power and corruption.

Dave Alvin's latest album may be his best yet, its tales of the flipside of the American Dream set to gritty blues riffs that speak of long months on the road.

An album that’s as enchanting as it is astute, from a band to treasure.

At its best, on “Ride My Dub”, “Expanding Dub” and “Call It Dub”, the results offer snatched glimpses of the eternal in the fleeting moment. Even better than its parent album.

The meringue-light and snow-bright Visions is a sort of cut-up, laptronica take on the kind of sugary, girly electro-pop confections Prince produced for a succession of female starlets in the late 1980s.

On her third album, the self-titled Kelsea, she finds a balance between the two. There’s more than a hint of early Taylor Swift on perky opener “Overshare”, while “Club” is as uplifting a “not going out” song as you could hope for.

"Moving" apes the shameless anthemic yearning of Coldplay, and "A Different Room" has the windy bluster of U2. But it's the tiredness of the songwriting that cripples Where You Stand.

Whatever style he uses on this first solo album in more than two decades, from country-blues to croon, rock’n’roll to reggae, he sustains that character as a unifying thread.

Their brusque punk-pop style and his louche intonation suggest a tidier version of the Libertines.

It's ironic that soul music dominates, given Collins' lack of its most crucial element: a commanding vocal presence.

[There are] some decent moments on this debut album.

Six years on from the vivacious Bang Goes The Knighthood, Neil Hannon’s latest Divine Comedy outing seems to lack the bite which gives the best of his work its raffish frisson.

Ono’s continued Flower Power philosophy--“People of America, when will we see?” goes “Now or Never”--feels simplistic at a time when artists are so used to deconstructing the social and political systems that Ono rails against. And so Warzone falls into a strange dichotomy: as the album closes with a version of “Imagine” that is hymn-like enough to sound like the heralding of a new dawn, the relevance of Ono’s protests feels as if it’s faded.

At times the whole jazz-hands-emoted, Original Cast Recording! vibe can grate; the stageyness undercutting the intimacy of Taylor’s sharp, literate lyrics. At others, the evident effort of performance plays winkingly well into the choreography of her self-dramatising self-analysis.

State sees Todd Rundgren deliver his customary laconic commentaries on a world gone mad from behind a wall of rock, techno and dubstep riffs.

Interspersed with vox-pop musings on matters like police shootings, The Last Days Of Oakland is a state-of-the-nation address akin to Sky Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On.

20 songs that alternate between good and dreary.

“Rituals” is Lipstate’s tribute to Steve Reich’s Music For 18 Musicians, its arpeggiating guitar lines intertwining hypnotically, while the opening “Deep Shelter” takes a different approach, its lowing drones sliding over each other in Terry Riley-esque manner, seeking rhythmic pulses behind sheets of high, keening tones.

It’s not always pretty--his blast of antipathy “Can’t Stand You” is just relentless disparagement, with none of the subtlety of “Positively 4th Street”; ultimately, it’s small wonder to find him, in “Poor Traits Of The Artist”, caught between loving and hating his need to create.

Musically it’s standard rockin’ country fare, save for the poignant tints of accordion applied to “Homecoming Queen”.

They're virtually unrecognisable as the band that made their game-changing debut, save perhaps for "All the Time."

Halfway through, as guest rappers stop littering the proceedings, the album does a 90-degree shift and becomes a banging club affair, stuffed with David Guetta-style synth-stompers.

Pleasant enough, but too twee.

Like Comedy features their ebullient charm in large dollops.

Melancholy of tone, it occasionally attains the antique industry of Michael Nyman's early Peter Greenaway scores, but the overall effect is more akin to the musical equivalent of a mock-tudorbethan semi.

Originally planned as the second half of a double-album, Lupercalia is his most approachable effort.

It’s been 20 years since David Crosby’s last solo offering, but Croz finds his fire undimmed, and his freak flag still proudly flying, if slightly tattered.

Pink Friday 2 shows flashes of the inventive brilliance that made Nicki such an undeniable superstar, but like so many legacy sequels, it mostly just makes you wish you were listening to the original.

He avoids turning the songs on this album into as much of a box-ticking exercise as they felt on earlier records, managing to weave influences in with a little more flair.

What's impressive is the consistency of approach and execution.

An album of fresh pleasures is the pay-off, but don’t come looking to it for substance.

On this album, you find yourself drifting in and out. She tackles trolls, racism, overpopulation and the internet age. You crave solutions as each track closes, or perhaps more of those sublime, witty character studies she offered on Let Them Eat Chaos.

It’s musically ambitious, if over-stuffed at times, but unashamedly impenetrable lyrically, even with the “help” of the accompanying gobbledegook short-story and supposed Map of Eyeland.

Forever Neverland is chock-full of safely idiosyncratic bangers, and never misses a beat. But maybe it could have done with missing a few.

Okay, but not much more.

The 16th GBV album is business as usual: plangent garage rock.

Emotional echoes of this complicated public history reverberate through Jude’s solid collection of mature mid-tempo rockers and ballads. ... Lennon’s production is clean, steely and a little claustrophobic.

Wareham’s languid, imperturbable voice and steady-paced music have a familiarly narcotic effect.

It's pleasant enough, but sometimes the words do rather get in the way.

Not bad, and nice for Nick. But for every good 'un, there's a dull 'un too.

Themes of lust, power politics and rebellion are smuggled in via unusual locutions, de-synchronous beats and treated sample-loops – interesting stuff, though occasionally one yearns for a decent tune.

Thanks to her faithful for enabling the rest of us to enjoy Correa's gauzy, melodic dream-pop.

His ambitious arrangements need more disarray, and less sweetness.

The emotional turmoil is better served by the more introspective balladry of “Various Storms and Saints” and “Long and Lost.”

Guillemots have never been short on ambition, and Walk the River opens accordingly, with trepidation and expectation wrapped up together in the title-track's foreboding intro riff, as Fyfe Dangerfield sings of "backing out of the race".

Oddball fun, and educational too.

There’s unintended comedy and a few overlooked gems amongst the lesser lights unearthed here.