The eight tracks of Valtari, which, while pleasant, are somewhat underwhelming examples of the band's formula.

It’s always nice when artists sound genuinely excited to participate in a collective project, and that comes through in spades on the delightful, crisply produced, and well-arranged McCartney III Imagined.

Wig Out at Jagbags finds him reverting to type, with willfully obtuse sonic strategies that strive to wrong-foot even the most devoted listener.

Beth Ditto’s debut album is a bit of a mixed bag.

Hands of Glory is a smaller, more intimate work than Andrew Bird's recent albums.

It’s not bad, as such, but like Primal Scream it promises more than it delivers.

There's no denying the aplomb with which Isaak handles even Presley's vocal parts, which are respectful without being slavish copies.

If I’m honest, it’s as hard to tell this Future Islands album from the last one as it is to tell one seagull from another. But that’s not to say they don’t all soar and swoop in a way that’s guaranteed to lift the heart.

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.

Tracks such as the languid instrumental “Easy Blues”--which lives up to its name--and “Earth Blues”, a slippery sci-fi number, are worth the price of admission.

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

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.

Gracie Abrams’s light graze of a croon skates elegantly over the sweet, piano-driven “Badlands”. Guest-free highlights include the delicately plucked “Alleycat”, resonant “Stay” and “Conversations with My Son”, which skips along its gorgeous acoustic guitar solo while Mumford’s lyrics pledge enduring love and support.

On Different Kinds of Light, Bird isn’t an entirely new artist, but here she proves she was never the one-dimensional singer some might have pegged her for. Not then and not now.

The result is a mixed bag. “La Fuerte” (“The Strong”) would be a forgettable club banger were it not for Shakira’s lyrics, still raw with grief. “Tiempo Sin Verte” and “Como Donde Y Cuando” are more interesting thanks to their minor chord acoustic strums and angsty one-two punch of electric guitar.

The overall impression is of someone trying to disguise their true emotions with comic bluster: in that sense, ironically, it's a more macho album than Humbug, despite its lighter touch.

This cohesive mood piece casts a hypnotic spell.

This 2CD set features one disc of early rarities, and one of sundry items from Cash's Columbia catalogue--not the most comfortable combination, but not without interest.

Backed up by polished and expensive-sounding production, notably some lovely piano work on “Alright Now” and a hazy blur of strings and Kurt Vile-like chanting on “One of Us”, this is a strong, nicely workmanlike record, Gallagher never totally rocking the boat but delivering something far more personal and (for him) experimental than he easily could have done.

They’ve formed their own blueprint in which the messages they purvey and the grandiose shows they stage are our main point of interest, but the music, production-wise, falls a little by the wayside when it comes to breaking new ground.

At times, Vega’s use of clunky rhymes undoes the elegance of her more literary lines. ... It’s still lovely to have Vega back in action. Her level-head, outward-facing ideas and collected tone really steady the heart and offer the mind safe opportunities to wander.

Overall, it’s an entertaining, multifaceted set, albeit weakened by a tendency to pursue slim ideas and dead-end notions.

Home sounds like an invitation to a decedent, warmly lit house party where there may or may not be a jar of keys in the corner.

On Spirit, Depeche Mode get serious and political, which doesn’t really suit them.

For Together At Last, Jeff Tweedy revisits choice items from his back catalogue in solo unplugged mode. It’s a brave step, given the imaginative depth with which Wilco animates this material, but it does allow the songs’ core characters to come through more strongly.

The songs on Me Moan are steeped in sinister intimations of bad desires, wanderlust and dark secrets, essayed with varying degrees of intelligibility over arrangements that mostly eschew the commonplace.

Taken together, the results demonstrate how adeptly Amadou & Mariam straddle both local and global, with a truly "world" music that deserves mainstream chart success rather than niche appreciation.

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

An unmitigated disaster.

While their retreads of "Robot" and "Thursday" come perilously close to "Bohemian Rhapsody", the makeovers of Kelis's "Acapella" and Sparks' "The No. 1 Song in Heaven" are brilliant.

This third album sounds exhausted, worn out rather than careworn.

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

The melancholy mood pervades throughout, into the itchy, insect flurries of Penderecki's Polymorphia, for 48 strings, and Greenwood's 48 Responses To Polymorphia.

Oddly appealing overall, when not tending too much toward the twisted.

Although some of the songs follow that same pop structure seen on the first half, by contrasting them with more experimental sounds (that are not hoping to top the charts), they have much more impact.

There’s so much sheer, on-one attitude in Gallagher’s parka pastichery that’s hard to resist. His band are on fire with it. Riffs skirling from the guitars. Drums constantly a-quiver. Even tossed-off tracks like “World in Need” (“send godspeed”) catch flame with harmonica hooks and shaken maracas.

Compared with his perky previous albums Mars and Mean Love, there’s something underwhelming about this third effort from Ahmad Gallab, aka Sinkane--it feels every bit as pedestrian and dutiful as its title suggests, its slow, methodical grooves pleasantly light but laborious.

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

Despite this obvious recommendation, the more radio-friendly follow-up still proves hard to love.

The big Brill concept doesn't work, Cahn, Cooke and Ellington not being song-factory writers.

The trio's manipulation of euphoric rave dynamics on tracks like “Therapy” brings a fresh approach to a tried-and-tested form.

Nesbitt is back with her second LP, switching to a brand of soul and R&B-fused pop that feels bang on time, and suits her far better. The Sun Will Come Up, the Seasons Will Change has slick, polished production from Fraser T Smith (Adele), Lostboy (Anne-Marie), Jordan Riley (Zara Larsson), and Nesbitt herself.

Happenings finds the Leicester band on synth-corroding, speaker-rattling form, with Pizzorno banging out big tunes and splashing out big, bell-bottomed chords. .... The slower songs still keep the tunes rolling.

Endless Scroll sets out to shake the listener from their complacency, because in this age there’s just no time for ambivalence. It’s a fantastic debut from one of the most exciting new bands around.

Large parts of Blak and Blu are spent crooning falsetto soul numbers or cranking out chunky rockers in the vein of the Stones and Bob Seger.

The most effective songs here are those which reach out directly to her family.

Inspired by a shared affinity for the Suffolk landscape, these are mostly small, pastoral ambient pieces which drift, as the title suggests, over the shifting coastal flatlan.

Potential affection for this self-titled debut is likely to depend on how one takes this and similarly twee sentiments.

Set to light, sparkling arrangements of banjo, fiddle, dulcimer, concertina, twanging mouth-bow and comically honking horns, these songs are populated with a bucolic menagerie of foxes, dogs, birds and little horsies.

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

The Spark is Enter Shikari’s most eclectic and accomplished album to date.

So many records as reflective and evocative as Egypt Station prove to be career codas. Despite occasional misfires this one proves that, at 76, McCartney, socially and sonically, still has plenty to say.

The only new aspect of this follow-up to 2011’s On a Mission is her transatlantic phrasing; otherwise, it’s pretty much the same old thing, with pulsing dubstep synths relentlessly driving things to the lowest common denominator.

The distinctive, sparse trio settings afford a surprising diversity of emotive intimacy.

For the most part, LaMontagne isn’t reinventing the wheel on his seventh album, but he once again proves his music is as reliably good as ever.

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.

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

While his obsession is sincere, the oppressive weight of the arrangements, freighted with heavy rock guitars and declamatory drums, occasionally fattened by dramatic strings, makes them hard to engage with on a personal level.

It's far from a perfect album--there's a ponderous solemnity to "Ages", and Pulido so far lacks Smith's compelling, visionary focus--but Antiphon extends the band's engaging, mysterious charm.

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

With Different Days, though, they seem to have settled into a sort of not-quite-mainstream indie-rock tinted with neo-psychedelic touches.

The quiet piano pieces of Eirenic Life are intriguingly low-key.

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.

Merritt's main problem may be that his baritone croon makes him sound cynical even when he's baring his heart, an impression only partly undercut by his occasional ukulele strum.

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

Hip young American male/female duo Cults look to classic 1960s pop history for the 11 bite-sized pop nuggets of this impressive debut.

It’s the overall cool/warm Tropicalismo tone that’s most engaging about Mellow Waves, established through the light accretion of sparse piano, percussion, synth and guitar parts supporting his soft vocal on opener “If You’re Here”.

A shameless but cathartic hit of nostalgia.

In large part a break-up album, Rare Birds finds Wilson picking through the romantic embers and taking tentative steps forward, over arrangements reflecting both his recent position in Roger Waters’s touring band and his need for healing.

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.

As a songwriter, Steve Earle is blessed with two apparently contradictory gifts: the ability to animate fictional lives, and a streak of cussed, lefty sincerity that gives bite to his truth-telling.

The results here are surprisingly congenial, their sparkle only slightly subdued by the breathy reverb that swathes everything in a sonic dust entirely appropriate to the 1970s source.

It's dizzying psychedelic country in finest Meat Puppets tradition, full of slightly off-centre harmonies in Grateful Dead manner, and plenty of Kirkwood's swirling, trippy guitar.

Minor Alps is a collaboration between American indie stalwarts Matthew Caws (of Nada Surf) and Juliana Hatfield, an alliance so congruent that Get There is surely the best work of their careers.

After the refreshing change furnished by 2014’s The London Sessions, things are pretty much back to normal for Mary J Blige on Strength Of A Woman, which finds the Queen Of R&B Reproach once again embattled by amorous treachery.

It’s BUSY. The trick – as with a Pollock – is to stand back, soften the joints and enjoy the energy. That energy is delightfully consistent.

It’s all a bit depressing, and not helped by the plodding music, which sags back into plonking piano quadruplets and dissatisfying, baggy sax, leavened by the occasional squall of guitar.

The songs themselves are low-key and unexceptional.

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.

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.

Thea Gilmore's 70th birthday tribute takes the form of re-recording her favourite Dylan album in its entirety, triggered by her acclaimed 2002 cover of "I Dreamed I Saw St Augustine", which sustains its solemnity despite the inclusion of congas.

A viscerally entertaining album that never lingers for more than four minutes per song. Rock’n’roll isn’t dead: it’s just been sleeping.

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

The calm, methodical “Gravity Wake” blends stately Moondog-like drums with undulating synths and relaxed solo horn lines that inescapably bring to mind Terry Riley. Elsewhere, the use of rhythmic, murmured vocables in “Glossolalia” recalls Steve Reich’s Music For 18 Musicians.

Dirty Jeans And Mudslide Hymns is full of typical John Hiatt tropes: old-timers and hard times, devotion and desperation, in roughly equal measure.

It's Tunng's most direct effort yet, eschewing the “folktronic” bricolage of albums like Good Arrows; but there's plenty happening beneath the surface.

Rebooting the euphoria of their 2004 debut, Funeral, WE is a big old blast of an album. One destined to lift the spirit, inflate the soul and get fans dancing giddily through the carnage of 2022.

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.

For all his production skills, he remains first and foremost a vocal stylist of considerable ability.

It’s a burly collection, with the band’s flanged guitars and proggy synths asserting their refusal to follow any set style, and Hayden Thorpe’s bristling vocals similarly stretching indie constraints; but when the only “new” track is jerry-rigged together from two old tracks, it all seems a bit unnecessary.

Producer Royal Trux's Neil Hagerty doesn't try to rein in Blumberg's more abstruse inclinations, but finds ways of unveiling their strange beauty.

Here, the abrupt shifts between ballad placidity and animated angst underscore the theme of changing course.

Cooder requires considerable forces to realise his amalgams of blues, rock, folk, reggae and Mexican music, and here his band is expanded by the extraordinary, shrill horns of the 10-piece La Banda Juvenil.

Set to scratchy, fractured beats and sound-montages, it’s a welcome dose of no-age hip-hop in direct line of descent from De La Soul.

Hawthorne's muse is steeped in '70s influences--notably falsetto and symphonic-soul giants like Curtis Mayfield and Barry White, while trailing threads of piercing lead guitar through songs like “Wine Glass Woman” and “Corsican Rose” bring to mind Ernie Isley's work on “Summer Breeze”.

Olafur Arnalds' third album, For Now I Am Winter, is an exemplary suite of Icelandic music, blending American minimalist techniques with European sensibilities.

It's a lovely, warm-hearted gem.

For Life Love Flesh Blood, Imelda May has hooked up with T-Bone Burnett and his failsafe session crew of tasteful interpretive talent to effect a shift away from boisterous rockabilly towards more sensual torch songs like “Call Me” and “Black Tears.”