It’s not a perfect album--like so many, at 17 tracks it’s way too long, and there’s too little variation in tempo and mood--but it’s yet another confirmation of what can be achieved when subtlety and sensitivity are the driving forces.

It’s Vance’s sepia growl of a voice that grips most on The Wild Swan, bringing raw conviction especially to the opener “Noam Chomsky Is A Soft Revolution.”

Sadly, following the great strides made on the grief-stricken The Sea, with The Heart Speaks In Whispers, Corinne Bailey Rae reverts to the blandly serviceable beige soul of her 2006 debut.

This third album is a delight, riddled with hooks and energy that hark all the way back to the early 70s heyday of Big Star and The Raspberries.

With Konnichiwa, Skepta hoists grime to another level. It’s not just a case of his lyrical prowess, which goes some way deeper than most of his peers; it’s the way that he has fiercely retained control over his own destiny, overseeing everything from mastering to merchandise through the Boy Better Know collective.

Drawing on the embattled, hopeful possibilities of early Seventies soul, rock and folk, its chamber-classical and folk instrumentation allows for pleasure as well as despair. This is a Radiohead album to make you feel, better.

Save for three traditional songs, Strange Country comprises brilliantly-wrought original material haunted by themes of uncertainty, lassitude, jealousy and spite.

The process of recovery shifts through numbness, melancholy and tentative hope in an admirably straightforward, touching manner that suggests Cohen’s previous tenure in edgy art-rockers S.C.U.M. was another world entirely.

A bitterly beautiful album.

It’s not completely without merit--some of the backing tracks have a mesmerisingly entropic grip, as well they might, with 14 writer/producers involved in a single track--but the overall effect is utterly wearying, and unpersuasive: after all, only fools waste pity on the wealthy.

Lemonade is fiery, insurgent, fiercely proud, sprawling and sharply focused in its dissatisfaction.

The Ship is a strange amalgam of Eno’s familiar ambient approach with poetry--the latter delivered in a sonorous basso profundothat resonates with a sort of looming, warning warmth.

With its serene harmonies and Byrdsy jangle of arpeggiated guitars, “Quiet Corners & Empty Spaces” heralds the most potent Jayhawks album in ages, with some of Gary Louris’s best songs captured at their sweetest by producers Tucker Martine and Peter Buck.

Although comprised of re-worked leftovers from last year’s excellent Wire album, Nocturnal Koreans finds the band still managing to find new routes to take away from that tightly-focused project.

All in all, a difficult task accomplished with no shortfall of style and invention.

Romance remains their core theme, although “Rosebud” strikes out for the harsher terrain of thoughtless cruelty.

A skilled interpreter, Simpson’s bruised baritone murmur morphs to fit the contours of each song.

She lacks rhythmic ingenuity: most tracks just stump along in unaccented 4/4, the spiky riffs cycling dully over and over.

There’s a curious congruence to the duo’s harmonies that brings their songs to unique life, nowhere more so than when their voices take perfectly divergent paths over the melodic lilt of “The Lamb You Lost”.

Whatever his anxieties, it’s never less than gently engaging.

The tableaux of refugee camps, warzones and dereliction--an abandoned building littered with syringes and shit, a drug-riddled neighbourhood, a polluted river, “a displaced family eating a cold horse’s hoof”--builds grimly throughout, albeit to uncertain ends.

They’ve made a relaxedly unhurried album that smacks as experimental. While not the instant grab fans may be expecting, this assured follow-up--like all good things in life--improves over time

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.

Fay Hield’s singing throughout is open and honest, delivering the stories unencumbered by needless ornament or moralising.

That could stand as a motto for the album: this is music seeking to let in the light.

An album by turns terse, sinuous and playful, streaked with disgust and delight in roughly equal measure.

There’s barely a moment on Distance Inbetween that doesn’t ooze new-found strength and inspiration.

Fallon is never going to escape the Springsteen comparisons that still cling to him like those Born to Run leathers, but this is solid, genuinely inspired songwriting that TGA fans will enjoy.

While this follow-up shares some of the annoying mannerisms that curdled one’s enjoyment of The 1975’s 2013 debut, it’s ultimately a much more enjoyable and considered work, one which starts to deliver on the immense hype that accompanied their emergence.

Her second volume of collaborative remixes/re-recordings with diverse guests draws its source material from all stages of Ono’s career, and brings home not just how enduringly courageous she has been, both artistically and socially, but also underlines the vein of fierce feminism running throughout her recording career.

The lyrics sound like they’re being negotiated, rather than expressed, while the music, for all its pleasing West Coast and Brit-psych affinities, lacks the risk and edge that made Sixties psychedelia such a thrill-ride.

His raps here still stick fairly closely to the trap-music conventions that have dominated the hip-hop scene in Future’s hometown Atlanta for the past decade or so.

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

Wonderful Crazy Night is not an album of hit singles, but John knows his game is to sit on the sub’s bench these days. But still to be delivering such carefully and enthusiastically forged handiwork says much about his respect for his legacy and his audience.

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.

Oh Rihanna, it was so worth the wait.... This album shows Rihanna hitting back at anyone who ever said her voice could only do certain things and showing them she can do anything she wants to. Such attitude; no apologies.

[Lucinda Williams is] producing enough quality material to follow last year’s double-album Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone with another double-album of equivalent potency. The songs on The Ghosts of Highway 20 have the unerring ring of truth about them, shining glimmers of light into dark and unpalatable corners of life.

“How long will it take to break the plans that I never make?” It’s a question that was inevitably begged by those previous celebrations of low-rent outlaw glamour, and, in attempting to answer it, Suede may have made their best album.

David Bowie releases the most extreme album of his entire career: Blackstar is as far as he's strayed from pop.

Soothing stuff; but there’s too little variety to counteract the general tendency towards stasis.

Overall, it’s an unexpected triumph: bright, sexy, smart and full of life, HITnRUN Phase Two is like the blind date from heaven.

It’s an OK effort overall, but far from Kelly’s best work; and it really goes to pieces in the five bonus tracks of the deluxe edition, which spin off in all directions

All in all, it’s a fine addition to the seemingly bottomless corpus of Springsteen’s ever-expanding oeuvre.

The absence of those usual big arena hooks proves critical through the rest of the album, when the songs don’t quite hit home.

Neil himself essaying a choice selection of guitar solos which (thankfully) stretch the usual limits of blues modes. Because otherwise, things can get a bit bogged down and stodgy.

Valgeir Sigurosson’s production of 2013’s Tales Of A Grasswidow lent it a cohesion which is sadly absent from Heartache City.

It’s not so much that she’s changed direction completely, as that she’s drained her art of the obfuscating sonic blabber to leave her pop aesthetic.

There are isolated moments of musical intrigue scattered here and there through the album.... But as 25 continues, it’s gradually swamped by the kind of dreary piano ballads that are Adele’s fall-back position.

Kylie’s Christmas is wearyingly hard going at times.

It’s a wonderful collection, with even Richard Thompson’s cold-comfort message in “End Of The Rainbow” imbued with a warm glow.

The standard dips slightly in the later stages, but the grooves throughout are sleek and snappy, and CeeLo himself has rarely sounded better.

At its best, it’s tremendous stuff, with droll, sardonic portraits of lovers and losers punched along by grooves that sound variously like the Spencer Davis Group produced by Holland-Dozier-Holland (“Shake It Little Tina”), Stonesy raunch pitched midway between rock, funk, soul and country (“Me N Annie”), and sundry suggestions of Elton John, The Replacements and Calexico.

This is your echt ELO in all its familiar state of sub-Beatlesy woe.... Whether his form of “properly” meets with your approval will, of course, depend on your capacity to perceive virtue in the familiar and the sentimentally melancholic (and in brevity: Alone in the Universe clocks in at roughly 35 minutes’ duration).

Arriving several months after the tragic documentary, this soundtrack has a waif-like quality that’s touchingly appropriate, with Amy Winehouse’s demos and live tracks interspersed with brief snippets of Antonio Pinto’s incidental music.

There are lots of little things to like about Little Mix’s third album.... But there are too many instances here of registers painfully over-reached, and uneasy compromises between emotion and arrangement.

As you’d expect from Elbow’s frontman, the songs on this debut solo album rarely stray too far from the sleeve on which Guy Garvey wears his heart.

There’s the same penchant for itchy, unusual beats from the likes of 4Tet and Fred; the same provocative, philosophical flow; and the same undertow of paranoid wariness.

While the combination curdles occasionally here, there are moments of majesty which justify the gambit.

There’s a Gabrielle-style vibrato tremble to Sey’s voice on the warm “Poetic” and hypnotically anthemic “Hard Time”, while producer Magnus Lidehäll finds myriad means, from trip-hop beats to gospel choir, to realise Pretend’s character of the raw and the cooked.

As usual with Newsom, the deeper resonances resound louder with subsequent exposure.

Track after track follows the same formula, with Newman’s subdued introductory verse swallowed by a huge, anthemic refrain that never lets up, his voice drowned in a tide of orchestra and chorus, all dialled up to 11. It’s quite frustrating.

Rudimental’s follow-up to Home is not quite as impressive, though in fairness, most of the contributing vocalists lack the charismatic tone that John Newman brought to that debut album.

What’s most impressive about Adams’ 1989 is the experienced troubadour’s eye and ear with which he brings out the material’s underlying strengths, finding melancholy currents lurking beneath supposedly upbeat, celebratory songs.

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.

Mostly, the album comprises a series of scuttling bleepscapes lent individual character by unorthodox instrumental detail.

It’s alienation couched in the most genial manner; and along the way, he gets to muse over such matters as speech and silence, mysticism and medicine, relationships and reality, in a beautifully meandering song-cycle.

There’s prodigious ambition here, and moments of great pleasure.

In “God Knows I Tried”, a reference to ““Hotel California” conjures up the mood of sun-baked dissipation, while she grudgingly confirms the dead-end revelation of celebrity, “I’ve got nothing much to live for, ever since I found my fame”. It’s a disillusioned rejoinder to the burning urge for fame that stains youth culture in the 21st century, and as such, fits in perfectly with the album’s overall sense of exquisite decay.

Kelly Jones seems particularly bereft of inspiration on Keep the Village Alive, with insipid lyric clichés harnessed to settings that resemble a swift rummage through an arena-rock record collection.

A rich, rewarding indulgence.

Ultimately, there’s something genuinely courageous and admirable about Cyrus’s ambitions with Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz. Sure, it’s way too long, and flamboyantly self-indulgent; but it’s free, and it’s fun.

If the solutions offered are sometimes better than expected, they’re also, frequently, tentative and tired.

Unsurprisingly, his vocals are the most appealing aspect of the album, with the emotional strength of his lead lines supported by subtle harmonies.

There’s an openness about Hawley’s writing here that cuts straight to the quick--as if he’s digging through the ruins of his own Hollow Meadows, to try and shine a light on his soul.

While pleasant in places, there’s a lack of drive about Zach Condon’s latest outing as Beirut.

Beauty Behind the Madness leaves one feeling just as estranged from Abel Tesfaye’s depraved character as previous releases boasting less adhesive tunes.

There’s plenty of talent there, but more homework is needed before they graduate to the bigger leagues.

It’s a record of heartbreak cauterised by hope, so alongside the routine tears and recrimination is a recurrent element of recovery and optimism that sets it apart from most other soul-diva offerings.

Large parts of it still rely too heavily on a dour combination of industry and portent.

Lindi Ortega split sessions between Nashville and Muscle Shoals. The result stretches her character in new and intriguing ways, effectively redefining Ortega as a cross between Loretta Lynn and Amy Winehouse.

Notionally a five-track EP, M3LL155X is in its fullest realisation an art film/performance (co-directed and co-choreographed by her), freely available on YouTube.... Musically, it’s a more focused, coherent application of the same kinds of sounds and vocals used on LP1.

Sometimes, her influences are obvious but her exploratory enthusiasm is ultimately winning, and her vocals layered in a way that pivots on the cusp of the sensual and the spiritual.

It’s amusing to hear Method Man claiming “Wu-Tang is for the children, go get your child support on” in “Two Minutes Of Your Time”.... It’s an ironic counterbalance to the sinister lope and slow-rolling menace of the typically inventive drug and gun metaphors of tracks like “50 Shots”, “Bang Zoom” and “The Meth Lab” itself.

A varied arsenal of approaches, but barely a mis-step.

Four decades on, it sounds as revolutionary as ever.

There are occasional moments of unalloyed pleasure on this, but frankly not near enough to persuade one that The Fratellis reunion was worthwhile.

Iit’s sad to lose such a determinedly individual outsider talent, the vulgar bark of whose records, one suspects, was rather worse than his bite.

[The hammered piano is] a slightly overdone element, but there’s much to enjoy here in the group’s disenchantment with the dubious benefits of email, blogs, search engines and telecoms.

The album slips into a febrile combination of reminiscences, boasts and complaints that manages to keep an eye firmly on the present whilst gazing fondly back on former tribulations.

The album never regains ["Strong's"] scuttling momentum, lapsing into a boudoir-soul bubble-bath that, with too much immersion, leaves one’s interest wrinkling.

An artful yet unschooled prospect to reckon with.

There’s a strange, comforting beauty to Romano’s sombre baritone.

The unusual alliance of Floridian rapper/singer Eric Biddines with south London groovemaster Paul White brings an engaging, infectious charm to Golden Ticket reminiscent of Outkast and Arrested Development.

It’s a genial set.

This 30th-anniversary performance of the album at Glasgow’s Barrowlands doesn’t convey quite the sense of risk that accompanied their early shows, but the cocktail of noise and melody has largely retained its potency.

Rarely has such optimism sounded quite bereft of inspiration. Frankly, negative people have a right to more inventive positivism than this.

Marks to Prove It sounds more like a band, with songs reached by trial and error and group arbitration, not by notation. It’s there right from the opening bars of the title-track.

The problem with albums about depression is that they are the most literal exposition of the principle that an artist has suffered for their work, and now it’s our turn--and doubly so when it’s a 90-minute punk-opera wrenched screaming from their very soul, as here.