Though occasionally subdued, Kelis brings a moody character to “Runnin’”, while Sitek offers subtle variations on the funk-soul style, edging into salsoul and swamp-rock on “Cobbler” and “Rumble”.

Smoke Fairies’ fourth album finds the English duo taking a tangent from their folk/blues approach with the help of a young producer, Kristofer Harris, who gives them a textured sound.

Tarpaper Sky finds him relaxed and confident in his craft.

Caustic Love may be the best UK R&B album since the 1970s blue-eyed-soul heyday of Rod Stewart and Joe Cocker.

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.

Carter Girl reaffirms Carlene Carter’s role as scion of country music’s leading family through a mixture of Carter Family classics and original material, plus shaky duets with Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson.

A bleak but alluring album.

Both musically and lyrically, the project cleaves to that kind of silly-spooky, funfair innocence, in a way that lends the album a freakish, cartoon unity denied to some of Tare’s previous projects.

It does seem as if Paloma’s sacrificed some individuality for some of that bankable overwrought wailing.

The drawback of having such a cross-cultural appeal as Shakira is that you’re expected to try and satisfy its every demographic niche, a demand that weakens her first English-language album since 2009’s She Wolf.

There’s a mismatch overall between the angry observations and the pell-mell pop-rock riffing of tracks such as “Cannons” and “One More Last Song”, so eager to curry favour and cajole us into singalong hooks.

The chunky robot-rock riff [in the opening track] suggests they’re headed to Queens of the Stone Age territory, a route confirmed by the strutting “Brothers and Sisters”; but each track seems to signal some fresh direction.

The result is an ambitious, varied, but largely unlovable work, its individual songs crammed with too many divergent ideas.

Reconstituted with a brawny two-guitar attack, The Hold Steady return with another portfolio of dirty-realist tableaux in Teeth Dreams.

Competently organised and confidently delivered, it’s an engaging set, but ultimately, like all live albums, essentially a souvenir.

It retains their signature blend of folk-rock songcraft and miasmic guitar-drone textures, but in a more purposive manner.

Though the elements don’t always hang together, there’s no shortage of intriguing ideas.

His bland cocaine narratives lack the compelling authenticity of Nas’s.

This isn’t a bad collection overall, if less than the expected redesign.

His ambitious arrangements need more disarray, and less sweetness.

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

Too much is still being worked through, though, for this to be the exhilarating, post-depression party its best music suggests.

The sonic thinness which seems inherent to Mount remains his limiting weakness, and modest strength.

Despite being written by different combinations of the line-up, it’s possibly their most homogenous album, most songs riding gentle pulses of percussion, organ and piano, guitars circling the action.

Waterhouse’s own vocals could be stronger, but his throwaway manner has a languid charm.

Comprising equal parts Stones raunch and REM-style country-rock, songwriters Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley are working at the peak of their powers.

Despite his desire to move more towards pop on this third album, Robert Ellis can’t prevent his country roots showing through.

Like Random Access Memories, it’s an enjoyable dance-pop album lacking a central focus. But one whose diffident charm makes a pleasant change from the overwrought wailing that routinely afflicts R&B.

“Wanderlust” establishes the overall thematic impulse to live culturally beyond one’s means, but in practice this can lead to the preference for smarts over suitability that spoils a track like “A Dog’s Life”. But there are moments of greatness here and there.

It’s starker and sharper than you might expect--the most pop-conscious piece is a collaboration with Robyn, “Out of the Black”--but it works well on the sinister shuffle of “Spit Three Times” and bleak jitter of “Naked”.

Throughout there’s a determination to find the appeal in paradox, notably the beguiling blend of cool and cumbersome that carries the love song “Prince Johnny” to another place.

Penguin Cafe’s music continuing to explore the more earthly pleasures to be found at the confluence of world, folk, minimalism and chamber music.

Her Scots brogue addresses the issue of “who you’ll be one day” with husky urgency, yoked to jaunty jangle-rock and prancing piano-pop which doesn’t anchor her in too parochial a terrain, giving Peroxide a broad appeal potentially akin to Ellie Goulding.

Though most effective as a droll raconteur, Snider here relies on covers of songs by the likes of Gillian Welch and Lucinda Williams; fortunately, guitar wizard Neal Casal is on top form.

While Fridmann (best known for his work with Mercury Rev and the Flaming Lips) weaves his usual psychedelic magic, the accentuation of purely sonic elements--glitchy loops, textural effects, the miasmic tone--is at the expense of Finn’s core songwriting strengths.

It’s a much better album than Sea Change, just as immersive, but wiser and less indulgently wallowing.

Emmaar is a typically impressive blend of the emotional and the political from Tinariwen.

It remains to be seen whether the band can transcend their influences and develop a sound that’s solely theirs.

A trio of absorbing driftworks.

One of the truest, wisest albums you’ll ever hear.

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.

Seth Lakeman new album is dominated by the past, through celebrations or commemorations of old ways, occupations and disasters.

With Build Me Up from Bones, Sarah Jarosz restores an earthy inventiveness to folk music--despite the violin and cello of her touring bandmates Alex Hargreaves and Nathaniel Smith tweaking the bluegrass settings with classical flavours that reflect the singer’s conservatory training

The music struggles to match the lyrical focus, sounding piecemeal and haphazard.

Ironically, given its disillusioned tone, After the Disco offers welcome confirmation of the vast and varied terrain available to pop and rock when it dares stray away from the mainstream or merely contemporary.

It sounds as if it’s designed to slip down as smoothly as possible, but accordingly, each song slips too readily from the memory.

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.

Pleasant enough, but too twee.

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

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

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.

While Doyle struggles to balance his various musical elements--the opening 10 minutes is sheer drudgery--he has a nice way with layered vocal harmonies, which deserve more regular exposure.

Gudmundur Kristinn Jónsson's production envelops Asgeir's fragile gifts in delicately wrought arrangements.

It’s both mesmerically appealing and cacophonously repellent, a paradoxical blend repeated in the shrill, thrumming monotony of “Austerity Blues”.

The tremulous piano ballad “Young Blood” is far from the dance fodder singles of Ellis-Bextor’s past, while the sombre tone of tracks like “Until the Stars Collide” suggests that she’s re-positioning herself in the prim Nordic-diva territory of Agnes Obel and Ane Brun. A good move.

It’s pleasant enough, but let down by Jurado’s unengaging vocals.

Best of all, though, is the opener “Heard About You Last Night”. Though typically methodical, it glows with a kind of staid, epiphanic inner-beauty, the most elegant, graceful thing they’ve ever recorded.

It’s impressively wrought, but save for the more propulsive, swingy shuffle of “Feeling Alright”, there’s a Novocaine numbness about it that makes it hard to love.

Balanced by bitter barbs at modern snivellers and shysters in Time of Dust itself, the result is a compact but concentrated dose of poison.

It’s a masterful set, stuffed with brooding, industrial-synth beats.

In typical Gelb manner, it’s wide-ranging in styles and standards: he didn’t get this far by excessive quality control, so some parts have a loose feel, while firmer parameters prevail elsewhere.

[Jones'] natural ebullience still drives the splendid Give the People What They Want, a hook-laden affair keeping up the high standard set by I Learned the Hard Way and 2011’s punchy Soul Time!, as good an R&B album as any in recent years.

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

Though lacking the thematic unity one expects from Springsteen albums, High Hopes has much to recommend it, particularly the way that Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello has re-invigorated old material like “American Skin (41 Shots)” and “The Ghost of Tom Joad”.

One hardly looks to Mary J Blige for restraint, but here the combination with David Foster’s orchestrations adds an extra layer of icing to an already sickly cake

Recorded with friends in Conor Oberst’s house, it has a nice, homely ambience which allows the imaginative arrangements to work their understated charm.

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

Despite her amateur standing--she never once supposed these tapes would be made public--there's a keen poetic sensibility at work.

Fans of Led Zep III should take a thoughtful interest.

It's the original tracks that bring a new life to the form, while the standards--routine duets of "I Wanna Be Like You" and "Dream a Little Dream" with Olly Murs and Lily Allen, and a bland "Puttin' on the Ritz"-- sound like filler.

It's tense, unsettling, and a brilliantly angry piece of art.

Musically, it's the same kind of electro R&B with which radio is already awash--in large part because it's produced by the same small coterie of hip producers, with Timbaland appearing to take the most prominent role amongst the likes of Detail, Jerome Harmon, Pharrell Williams and Ryan Tedder.

Black Panties finds him getting back to his core business with rather less artistic ambition.

Things go slightly awry with the stodgy prog-rock textures of “Clockwatching” and “The 6th Wave”, but it's the work of a band obsessed with a multitude of musical directions, which has to be A Good Thing.

Midnight Memories finds One Direction fumbling the transition with clumsy attempts to adopt ill-fitting rock livery.

It gets a bit noodly-doodly at times, but with some stand-out moments, notably the lovely, meditative grace of the bass and guitar alliance in "XII."

Barlow’s generally at his best in more mainstream territory; he’s essentially a classic pop singer-songwriter in the stalwart British style of McCartney and Elton John.

Sometimes it suffers from Prince-like micromanagement, but when it succeeds, it's blissful.

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.

If it's not quite the jump from Bob Dylan to The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, it's the closest recent equivalent, a prodigious rate of development for such a tyro talent, all the more remarkable for not being reliant on significant musical progression, so much as raw songwriting ability.

It's an enchanting snapshot of British rock'n'roll at its moment of greatest revelation, the point at which the Tin Pan Alley production line of ersatz Elvises was rendered utterly obsolete.

Produced by the Coens with T Bone Burnett, the album captures well the sanctimony, bogus bucolicism and beatnik romanticism that characterised the age, along with that tang of “revolution in the air” (to quote its most successful adherent).

His flow only truly ignites through anger and reproach, and there are moments when his verbal dexterity amazes.

Musically, it's pretty much the standard modern electro fare familiar from dozens of contemporaries, from Kylie to Britney. The dubstep riffs are more tortured in places, but when David Guetta and will.i.am are involved in a track's production--as with the bullishly shallow "Fashion!"--you're not straying from the mainstream.

Opening with urgent triplets, it settles into an elegant braiding of interlaced lines that push the music forward in waves.

Arthur grossly overdoes the emotional groaning that passes for vocal expression in the album's more overwrought corners.

George hasn't been as enjoyable in ages.

Wareham's fragile delivery imparts an eggshell vulnerability to songs that track contemporary anxieties, such as "The Deadliest Day Since the Invasion Began", but finds its natural home in the lilt of the Incredible String Band's "Air".

With M Ward on guitar, Giant Sand's Thøger Tetens Lund on string bass, and Sonic Youth's Steve Shelley on brushed drums, the atmosphere is akin to a shabby cabaret, to which KT Tunstall and a sweet-voiced Bonnie "Prince" Billy add a touch of elegance.

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.

There are enough decent moments to call Demonstration a success.

It's an extraordinary collection, which demonstrates exactly why Guthrie was perhaps the only performer who could square the circle pointedly implied by the title American Radical Patriot.

Some of the guest vocalists are questionable--Shara Worden and Sam Amidon seem detached--but Vernon's delivery of Dylan's “Every Grain of Sand” has charm.

It's impressive, slick alienation for the Y Generation, but as with Del Rey, it's a one-trick-pony sort of act.

Fascinating, enjoyable and original.

The lyrics dwell on age, family and endurance, but the backporch party vibe imparts a warm glow to proceedings.

Though already condemned by Van himself, there's much to appreciate about this 4-CD expanded edition of one of the greatest albums ever recorded. It's fascinating to follow the development of a track such as "Caravan" across half a dozen takes.

Rothrock does a decent job of pumping life into Blunt's material, building a song such as "Bonfire Heart" from fingerstyle guitar opening to big, exultant conclusion by way of subtle accretions. Not that he has much to play with.