"Every Song's the Same" offers a charming series of lessons in emotional empathy; while the conceit underlying the piano ballad "Into a Pearl" seems so clear you can't quite believe nobody else thought of it first.

Fanfare offers a classy rumination on modern values--albeit something of a conundrum, in being perhaps the most sophisticated celebration of simplicity ever recorded.

Trip-hop pioneers Morcheeba continue to broaden their approach on Head Up High, incorporating dancehall, dubstep and rock elements into grooves informed by European soundtrack/library music. Remarkably, they still keep it infectious.

It's tasteful but a touch bloodless.

It's full of timid electropop anthems.

There's an uneven texture to the project. It's okay, but only just.

An intriguing mix overall and further proof that Pearl Jam play by their own rules--a fact that real fans would never want to change.

Repent Replenish Repeat follows in much the same vein as 2010's prickly The Logic of Chance: glitchy industrial-electro grooves and jerky, uncomfortable rhythm programmes, over which rapper Scroobius Pip inhabits the grey area between maverick articulacy and feral antipathy.

Compared to Chase and Status's fizzing 2011 debut, No More Idols, this sounds creatively knackered.

It's simply marvellous, an unalloyed joy from first to last, with Robbie Robertson's finely wrought storytelling songs augmented by a few well-chosen covers.

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.

On her second album, Anna Calvi has lost much of the distinctive guitar work that helped make her debut so intriguing, but gained a deeper breadth of texture and structure to carry her emotional excursions.

A true original, at his very best.

The fairly routine nature of the backing tracks means that The Fifth lacks some of the distinctive berserker spirit that characterised its predecessors.

It's all neatly-dressed, buttoned-down and restrained but sometimes suffocatingly introspective, with lyrics mining a private image bank; even so, some moments cut to the emotional quick.

The slimmed-down Yuck's sound seems svelte of style, having lost most of its rougher edges and lo-fi feistiness. What's left builds on their Teenage Fanclub-style guitars'n'harmonies approach, but takes it in a less intriguing direction.

Okay, but not much more.

Comprising as it does outtakes from the sessions for The 20/20 Experience, it's hardly surprising there should be a drop-off in quality for this follow-up; but it's a pretty steep fall.

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.

Arrows may also be trying for anyone tired of Welch/Goulding/Houghton orchestral overdrive. But it's worth fighting through that for the cacophonies of prettiness.

It reveals a broader musical and emotional palette than they've exposed before.

This debut album proper fails to develop or change-up his formula of predatory sexuality expressed in tremulous tones.

The singer has matched Bernie Taupin's best crop of lyrics for years with his own most emotively apt melodies to produce a collection that both harks back to the intrigues and interests of his earliest recordings, yet manages to break new ground, quite an achievement for an artist in his sixth decade.

Bill Callahan's follow-up to 2011's gorgeous Apocalypse finds him in the company of a small, discreet band, whose gentle shuffles are coloured mostly by guitar, fiddle and flute, as his muse flits haphazardly about him. [The Independent scored this a 3/5 in the actual printed edition not 5/5 as seen on its online edition]

His own sepia baritone summons some of that warmth on versions of “Solitaire”, “Autumn Leaves” and “You Only Live Twice”.

Another dilettante excursion with little to recommend it. [The Independent scored this a 2/5 in the actual printed edition not 5/5 as seen on its online edition]

The care and attention pays dividends on If You Wait.

It’s one dizzying burst of energy after another.

The delicate guitar and piano figures and the sombre languor of strings behind Alison Goldfrapp’s breathy vocals create something akin to a cross between the dreamlike mythopoeism of old folk tales and the lush cinematic arrangements of Michel Legrand.

She’s uniquely gifted--one’s only reservation concerns her inclination to pack everything into each track.

A significant improvement on both Humbug and Suck It and See, suggesting they’ve found a more satisfying rapprochement with the classic rock that tends to come with the territory over there.

The bawled slur that passes for Doherty's vocals is less agreeable the older he gets, while the flaccid grunge plaints and raggedy punk thrashes have diminishing appeal.

Through 14 tracks, Jordan and Harley offer a fast-talking, witty and well-meaning account of day-to-day life for sharp-eyed British youth.

With their lyrical focus on teen sex, money and the misplaced glamour of crime, at times it's like “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”, for boys.

The result is a set of gripping, euphoric grooves carrying raps that indicate a new-found maturity.

A nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live here.

Not an easy listen, but a satisfying one.

Finally, maverick genius Sly Stone receives due respect in this four-disc retrospective, as the leader of rock's first multi-racial, multi-gender, multi-genre band.

While the Bootleg Series cupboard appears as well-stocked as ever, the value of outtakes from a notoriously weak album (Self Portrait) is debatable, though there are gems among the oddments.

The cult-like enthusiasm of The Magnetic Zeros is best experienced live, where their massed forces translate into a somewhat muddy morass.

In a year already host to some brilliant albums, it seems tired and dated.

With the hindsight afforded by this monumental 17-disc career retrospective, he seems somewhat less than The One, an idiosyncratic talent undermined by MOR inclinations.

The only failure is the routine indie chugger "Children of the Future".

It manages to grip the imagination for a while but ultimately, not knowing the root cause of the action, leaves one adrift in amorphous emotional distress. But there's much to admire here.

With Warp and Weft, Laura Veirs delivers her most satisfying set of songs since Carbon Glacier, but here, the arrangements devised by Veirs and her partner/producer Tucker Martine are so much more expansive and illuminating, creating a rich tapestry of ideas and idioms.

There's no denying the power of a set stuffed with riffs like “Honky Tonk Women”, “Brown Sugar” and “Jumpin' Jack Flash”, played with that inimitable loose/tight dialectic that characterises the Stones at their best.

Drenge brothers Rory and Eoin Loveless exhibit virtually no overt blues influences, relying instead on the heavily distorted guitar riffs common to grunge and garage-band psychedelia.

"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.

It's music that slips between the generic niches favoured by broadcasters; but isn't that exactly where the most interesting music comes from?

The dazzling deftness of his fingering in the Presto and Double Presto sections evokes a kind of giddy delirium and his feathery technique wrests the tenderest of emotions from the second Sonata's Andante.

After a while the regretful, melancholy tone wearies one's sympathies.

Anthony Hamilton provides another [highlight], bringing a gospelly spirit to “Gently” Elsewhere, Raphael Saadiq and Gary Clark Jr lend their talents to the great party groove “Fun”.

A new punk classic.

This collection of re-recorded hits and newer material lacks both that album's imaginative approach and its understated nobility.

The shadow of Seventies Krautrock looms large over Danish psych-rockers Pinkunoizu, judging by The Drop, their splendidly kosmische second album.

The chief virtue is the immediacy that courses through tracks like “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton” and “Fall of the Star High School Running Back”.

The vibe on this debut for Jack White's Third Man label is pre-rock'n'roll.

If mutant garage-psychedelia is your thing, then Aussie quintet Pond's Hobo Rocket should have your head spinning.

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

Pleasant and pleasingly melodic, but lacking the risky edge that makes a band truly great, The Silver Seas are like the living equivalent of a guilty pleasure.

Though marginally better than its predecessor, BE can in no sense be considered a progression.

Blixa Bargeld's collaboration with Italian composer Teho Teardo finds him in fine fettle on a group of typically sardonic songs set to unusual string and electronic arrangements performed with The Balanescu Quartet.

Martin Simpson applies his dazzling fingerstyle technique to a broad range of material.

Mogwai's score for the French TV series Les Revenants places certain restrictions on the band's style which, it must be said, work to their advantage.

It offers an engagement with the notion of music as a lived obsession that far outstrips their mostly meagre intentions.

The combination works best on the single Attracting Flies; less engaging is the descent to playground chanting on Best Be Believing.

Originally recorded on a home four-track machine, the songs were subsequently re-done with Trevor Horn at the helm, which has applied a little polish to what still sound like under-written sketches rather than compelling pop material.

Former Hüsker Dü drummer/songwriter Grant Hart exhibits huge ambition on The Argument.

It's confessional solipsism, lacking the musical compulsion to make one care.

Thicke's wheedling tone and sylvan falsetto are engaging enough on this sixth album, though his clumsily backhanded way with a compliment deteriorates as the album proceeds.

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”.

The dominant mode throughout is tepid bluegrass, heating up a little for “Phoebe.”

It's a sound with all flesh stripped off the bone, but Lynch himself sounds like an intellectual playing bogus trailer-trash.

Wood is one of our finest songwriters, a brilliant exponent of the topical troubadour form, and rarely on better form than he is with None the Wiser.

These tracks offer a similar union of the imaginative and the inspirational, with Lee Perry and The Orb's Alex Paterson and Thomas Fehlmann making musical magic from the most minimal of resources.

It's the most simple, directly dance-oriented they've been since Disco, putting down a marker for the rest of the album.

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.

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.

Jay-Z, being Jay-Z, spends most of the time banging on about how rich he is, how brilliant it is being married to Beyoncé, and how irritating it is that some people don't find him quite as wonderful as he does.

On Between the Walls, About Group continue to explore the space between free collective improvisation and Alexis Taylor's songs.

Connick displays his versatility with the bossa nova sway of “I Love Her”, the New Orleans R&B of “S'pposed To Be” and “You've Got It”, and the sentimental country stylings of “Greatest Love Story”.

The follow-on to their beloved titular 2009 debut finds Duckworth and Lewis exploring further aspects of the beautiful game, from its amateur enjoyability and levelling qualities to the euphonious variety of its argot.

The Editors here step backwards into the crepuscular netherworld of Eighties new wave from whence they took their original inspiration.

In between, there’s nimble bluegrass picking on the chipper two-step “The Wind” Less welcome are Caribbean incursions like the tourist-reggae drivel that is “Island Song”.

This River is surely the most accomplished album yet from Florida-based songwriter JJ Grey.

Throughout, Tweedy’s arrangements are the soul of discretion, employing the merest suggestions of rhythm and texture to show Staples’ iconic voice to best advantage.

Long Way Down is stuffed with bogus sensitivity, crystallisations of emotional disquiet couched in chant choruses, and polite piano arrangements reliant on a few chord-changes.

It finds Skelly in more emotive manner than with The Coral.

It lacks impetus, panache and compulsion, just for starters.

It's always an after-hours, nocturnal experience.

It’s not quite godlike, but Yeezus certainly feels like it was created by a higher power.

Kodaline offer a musical barometer of bankable current rock trends, but display scant originality on this debut album.

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.

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

On track after track, the falsetto vocals and surging electropop pulses ultimately congeal into too saccharine a sonic experience, an artificially sweetened aural marshmallow.

A touching, intelligent work.

The Talk Talk of their era.

The Birmingham quartet's debut album bears out the promise of their early singles and Delicious EP.