There’s something of the warmth and fulfilment of Tupelo Honey about the album generally.

Tracks like “No Limit” and “Need U”, with their miasmic, swirling synths and pulsing vibrato effects, epitomise modern boudoir-soul, as Usher slips effortlessly between warm caresses and pleading falsetto.

On Remember Us To Life, Regina Spektor exhibits stronger affinities with Randy Newman, thanks to a turn of phrase often leaning towards the ironic, and a deceptive worldview which, like the sardonic string arrangements and ominous piano settings, gives most of these songs a slightly sour sting in the tail.

Head Carrier is an altogether more convincing affair than 2014’s comeback album Indie Cindy, the intervening months of roadwork having helped relocate the band’s classic mode.

There’s an intensely private quality about 22, A Million that makes it initially hard to penetrate. ... But as the album progresses, it becomes more accommodating.

Thoughtful, engaging and utterly contemporary, it’s one of the albums of the year.

This fourth album is produced by south London’s Paul White, and a shared taste for Talking Heads and especially Joy Division (the LP is named after their song, more than JG Ballard’s novel) takes it way off the mainstream hip-hop map.

Hammill continues to explore the hubris of human existence. He’s often best, though, when he ventures off-track into more warmly specific tales.

The Experiment’s increasingly obvious fault, though, is how close they keep to the middle of their many musical roads.

Bubbling synths and glistening ripples of acoustic guitar adorn these tales of elite bohemians.

Songwriting points remain shrouded, and voices drowsy, but an understated fearlessness pears through the mist.

After bandmates quit and more heavy blows rained down, he retreated to a cabin, where these wonderful songs poured out. “Frontman In Heaven” is one of several which both mourn and resurrect the idiocies and potent faith of the rock’n’roll age.

The most revelatory song of the now mature songwriter is, though, “My Father’s House”, from Nebraska (1982). There’s a sluggish, nightmare feel as Springsteen dreams of a bramble-tangled house in a haunted field, a home where he’s no longer known; a past he can’t return to. The merits of this rough, questionable compilation lie in such small revelations.

There’s a pleasing congruence between the way that the surreal invades the ordinary in Rennie Sparks’s lyrics, and the way that Brett Sparks’ voice and music illuminates that invasion.

Furfour finds the duo at their poppiest: even though they create songs from improvised sounds, there’s an engaging, hypnotic charm to tracks like “Milky Light” and “Heavy Days” that’s strongly reminiscent of Eno’s pop side.

The result is beautiful, visceral and, predictably, emotionally devastating.

Steinman’s sonic fingerprints are all over the album--the furiously arpeggiating piano riffs (one “borrowed” from Randy Newman), the brusque guitars, the Wagnerian pomp--though it is Loaf’s stagey delivery, with that juddering vibrato, which dominates songs.

Despite the diversity of themes and styles, the sense of a confident single voice comes through much louder and clearer than before in this new context.

Schmilco seems diffident and restrained, mostly built around the folk-rock strummings of Jeff Tweedy’s acoustic guitar, with minimal embellishments. But it’s exactly the right approach for the bitter, painfully personal songs he has written here, which address the living and the dead, the loving and the lost, and most of all Tweedy’s own furies and frustrations.

Six years on from the last Teenage Fanclub album, not much seems to have changed.

Some of the backing tracks have novelty appeal--the cartoonish, kazoo-like loop of “Bird Song”, the Qawwali elisions percolating through the Zayn Malik duet “Freedun”--but the most striking work here is her virtually acappella treatment of “Jump In”, with just a sparse beat beneath her rhythmic vocal repetitions.

Throughout, he creates an absorbing sound-bed from folk-rock grooves embellished with unexpected tones and texture.

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.

One step forward, two steps backward: having produced perhaps his best album with 2014’s Carry On The Grudge, Jamie T is at best stationary, and often retrograde, on Trick.

Although it marks no significant shift in style--she’s still mining the same pop-R&B seam--it’s undoubtedly a better effort than its predecessor.

As the album proceeds, the band’s strident Mumfordry becomes all too wearing, these songs patently designed more for festival singalong than introspective reflection.

[A] sparkling, multi-faceted comeback album.

Despite Andrews’ occasionally overwrought attempts to conjure up a mood of malevolent fate by channelling his inner Nick Cave, it’s an absorbing journey.

Less structured and song-oriented than Channel Orange, it’s a long, meandering ramble through Ocean’s passing interests and attitudes, hopes and memories, alighted upon like scenes briefly glimpsed from a train window and then dropped into tracks that aren’t so much sung as delivered in an undulating sprechstimme that seems to be avoiding the difficult choice of a compelling melody.

This debut album has a slick sonic design and retro flavour akin to Random Access Memories, but ratrher than the 70s, he’s gazing fondly back at the early rave era.

Blending Cline originals and recent covers with reimagined standards by the likes of Jerome Kern and Rodgers & Hart, all realised in beautifully enigmatic arrangements which wrap woodwind, horns, strings and tuned percussion around Cline’s guitar. Throughout, atmosphere is paramount.

Pure & Simple sticks for the most part to an agreeable neo-traditional approach.

Her own third album suggests she’s every bit [Damien Rice's] equal in tracking the heart’s mysterious emotional undercurrents.

On John Paul White’s Beulah, the dark emotions of tracks like “Fight For You” and “Hope I Die” mingle with the bitterness of “The Once And Future Queen” and the low self-esteem of “I’ll Get Even” to create a strangely subdued portrait of emotional turmoil, couched in Southern folk and country modes.

“Riser” features Jaki Liebezeit-style tom-toms behind cosmic contrails of synth trapped in a cavernous ambience; while string synth and wordless vocal keening drape like fog around “Abandoned/In Silence”, whose clarinet line establishes accidental but apt echoes of the theme to Exodus.

Throughout, the band’s gorgeous harmonies temper the sombre mood.

It’s really interesting seeing how much chemistry Dubz and Giggs still have; it feels like there’s still some space for Ard Bodied 2.

It’s hard not to become overly aware of how the similarity of both the musical settings--basically, strings allied to rhythm programmes of skittish or explosive beats--and especially Bjork’s delivery tends to leach the individual songs into one another.

As with many great albums, successive hearings reveal more clearly the elliptical tunes at the heart of these eight quietly intense pieces, climaxing with the eight-minute “Age Old Tale”, a masterly band performance.

It’s well-wrought and entertaining for the most part, though there are moments, as in “The Palest Of Them All”, when the archness becomes top-heavy and capsizes the song.

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

The issues she covers are complex at times--“Called You Queen” recounts a problematic period partnering a gay man, “before your body betrayed you”--but “Blue Diamond Falls” closes the album on a positive note, affirming feminist possibilities that “you can be whatever you like”.

Its dark, unflinching songs certainly ponder humanity’s less attractive traits, with arrangements to match.

Wreathed in mellotron, vibrato guitar and ghostly backing vocals, several songs evoke the windswept psych-pop of The Coral, whose singer James Skelly co-produces Blossoms.

The results are quirkily, unexpectedly appealing.

Other highlights include Los Lobos’ typically confident swagger through “Bootleg”, and the unusual alliance of ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons with Colombian singer La Marisoul on a wonderfully gritty “Green River”.

The result may be the band’s best album yet, one on which they come closer than ever.

Only occasionally does the survey of this interpersonal battlefield afford an optimistic light.

The Warrington quartet was clearly in the process of defining their own sound.

The album only develops a steely ragga rasp in the last few tracks, when the hometown likes of Bounty Killer, Capleton and Sizzla make their presence felt.

It’s Robinson’s soul-scorched vocals that hold everything together, his relaxed charm shining through whether he’s engaged in perplexing, mystic narratives or offhand, recreational encouragements to “relax your mind”.

His voice, which should be the focus, sounds muffled by effects. Neville’s fluting, melismatic vocal is much better served on the slow waltz hymnal “Heaven”, a persuasive reflection of his faith.

With songs about mountain men and sentient country houses, it’s like a more pompous (and crucially) humourless version of The Incredible String Band built around flutes, celesta and caterwauling: okay in very small doses, but unbearable at album length.

The deceptive geniality of his delivery, meanwhile, recalls Gilbert O’Sullivan, enabling him to bring darker undertones to apparently pleasant pieces like the lilting waltz “I’m Gonna Haunt This Place.”

He’s helped by the sleek production of Ry and Joachim Cooder, the former lacing delicious guitar lines through Outlaw’s songs while his son adds subtly illustrative percussive flourishes.

It’s an attractive, still beguiling attitude that courses through the album like ambrosia, offering a welcome, if unworldly, alternative to pop’s prevailing discourse of acquisitive antagonism and automated emotions.

Vessels’ remix of “E.V.A.” and Copy Paste Soul’s “Tomorrow” both temper brisk, scuttling pulses with tender string textures, while Petar Dundov’s take on “Sputnik” builds from spartan beginnings to an epiphanic, widescreen electro synthscape.

Though not wholly succeeding, he offers music as a sanctuary, and world of its own.

Recorded in one take, with drums, bass, guitar and backing vocalists huddled around two microphones, the results have a rustic charm akin to a more grizzled Leon Redbone, with rolling rumba-rock and reggae grooves.

The songs rely on cringeworthy conceits like “Red, White & You” or rote expressions like “Sweet Louisiana”, while the refurbishing of the domestic abuse anthem “Janie’s Got A Gun” just tips it further over into queasy melodrama.

Guitarist Carmen Vandenberg and singer Rosie Bones are on hand to bring focus to Beck’s vocabulary of guitar sounds.

“Cold Little Heart” builds from piano and the merest shiver of strings to a Morricone-esque pitch of intensity, before Kiwanuka himself arrives five minutes in. It’s a big, powerful statement of intent that the rest of the album doesn’t quite live up to.

Ellipsis finds Biffy Clyro reverting for the most part to the core blend of melody and heaviness that draws comparisons with Muse.

It’s all delivered with welcoming warmth and humility, over impeccably buttoned-down soul-funk grooves.

The 10 songs of this debut album are all about character, change and companionship, from various angles.

Her debt to Grace Jones is evident in the elegant melodrama of “Ten Miles High”, but her application ranges much further on an album of intriguing strategies.

The wonderful Wildflower is cause for celebration, its Zappa/Beasties-style collage of voices, samples, beats, sounds, and especially laughter offering a joyous affirmation of life.

The production/remix duo of Richard Norris and Erol Alkan here offer a retro-psychedelic throwback to a more imaginative time, one where the Krautrock grooves of Neu! and Can collide with spacey Ibizan house synth washes and the whimsical acid fairytales of classic ‘60s Brit psychedelia.

It’s a weird one, mysterious and mildly menacing, but eerily engaging nonetheless.

Devonté Hynes’ latest outing as Blood Orange takes the soft-soul stylings of 2013’s Cupid Deluxe and mashes them together with African voices and percussion, saxophones and vox populi samples to create a sonic collage that seeks to marry the vision of Marvin Gaye with the methods of Frank Zappa. That’s a considerable ambition, and unsurprisingly it falls well short much of the time.

The result emulates, and equals, Joanna Newsom’s Divers, another ambitious album about the inescapable inter-connectedness of love and death.

The blues and soul power are real, even as racial lines are leered and sneered at, the sort of ballsiness that could make rock breathe freely again.

The brittle garage-punk of this debut positively seethes with trebly guitars, reedy organs, waspish fuzzboxes and urgent drums, with singer Mike Brandon exploring the ramifications of titles like “What Happens When You Turn The Devil Down” and “Flowers In My Hair, Demons In My Head” in tortuous, passionate manner.

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.

An enjoyable diversion.

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.

There’s a dispiriting aridity about The Mountain Will Fall, which lacks the joyous eclecticism of DJ Shadow’s earlier albums.

Erykah Badu lends a childlike charm to the sunburnt fizz of Glasper’s bossa nova version of “Maiysha (So Long)”, with Miles’s trumpet shining through towards the end.

Though not quite as potent as Shangri La, but it constitutes a confident negotiation of the “difficult third album” hurdle.

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.

The result is an album of rare beauty and intelligence, rendered in imaginative arrangements containing sometimes startling harmonies.

As ever, California gets plenty of mentions, though there’s less filler than usual, the album reaching a yearning epiphany in the string-draped song for a son, “The Hunter”.

Skin is brilliant across the board.

Why Are You OK finds dad-of-four Bridwell reflecting honestly on the ennui of everyday, surburban life. Unfortunately, the result is largely forgettable.

It’s relentlessly dull, the sort of feyly English, unfunctional dance music Hot Chip pioneered to declining effect. Okumu’s airy voice barely brushes the listener’s sleeve, never mind mending their soul.

This second album since returning from an absence caused by lack of interest offers nothing new musically, but Manson at full-strength.

A country-gospel stab at Ellington’s “Come Sunday” badly misses the mark, and Toussaint’s innate funkiness is only lightly felt, sometimes sacrificed for too much tastefulness. There are still many American treasures here.

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

It’s a lovely, laidback collection, with percussionist Willie Bobo adding a languid Latin feel, and multi-instrumentalist David Lindley excelling on guitar and violin, while Reid’s sepiatone delivery is expertly framed by master producers Eddy Offord and Tom Dowd.

The predatory, hypnotic swamp grooves that have been Tony Joe White’s stock-in-trade throughout his career lend a magical backwoods bayou ambience to the nine tracks of Rain Crow, on which his peculiar songcraft and grizzled Woodbine baritone conjure up gripping regional narratives.

As might be expected, the favourites chosen by Mark Kozelek for his covers album are predominantly those reflecting cloudy, sometimes ambivalent emotional responses.

Too many of these tracks are slight ideas and punning phrasework over-egged into grotesque wedding-cakes by Dudley’s billowing strings, leaving Fry stranded in the position summarised in “Brighter Than The Sun”: “I’m a man out of time/Looking for a mountain to climb”.

The main problem is that overall, the aptly-titled By Default just lacks excitement and panache.

All told, probably The Monkees’ best album, after their hits compilation.

Perversely set to chortling, bustling electropop synth figures, these songs present existence as “bounded by brackets of life and death, alone from first to last”, delivered in Middleton’s glum brogue, with only the most wafer-thin hints of humour tempering the onslaught of self-recrimination and hypochondria in a track like “Steps.”

It’s a fascinating oddity streaked with sex, violence and sorrow, a sort of seedcorn of the Robert Rodriguez aesthetic, presented complete with the lithographs that accompanied the original, albeit in cramped CD size.

Played entirely by Shauf save for the lush string arrangements, it’s a baroque-pop exercise with echoes of Seventies smarties like Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman and Steely Dan, though rather more empathetic than them. And less cynical.

Bryce Dessner brings his minimalist experience to bear on “Garcia Counterpoint”, a Reichian exercise of layered guitar lines, but only Wilco’s Nels Cline comes close to the spirit of exploratory abandon in Wilco’s live version of “St. Stephen”. And amongst a tranche of dutiful replicas, Anohni’s “Black Peter” stands out for its transformative orchestration and delivery.