Kind Heaven is an ambitious, engaging record by an artist who clearly still has plenty of fire in his belly.

Rather than imitating 2011, Inflorescent instead brings to mind the summer of 2013, overwhelmed as it is by a neutered disco-funk sound reminiscent of Daft Punk’s inescapable “Get Lucky”. Only rarely as catchy.

It is an intriguing, often brilliant, though occasionally awful record.

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.

Sweet and frothy. Probably still a little coffee shop. But not Starbucks, more the soundtrack to your local quirky independent caffeinator.

British Sea Power are bravely bringing beauty into an increasingly ugly world, whether that world wants it or not. They ought to be given a medal. For valour. For Valhalla.

This is clearly a band determined to take no prisoners, their attention condensed to a tight focus on each song’s momentum.

Former Lives shares similarities with Gibbard's Postal Service work; elsewhere his scattershot stylistic approach weakens songs.

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

It's maritime in mood.

Wolf's mix of retro soul, moody synths and backwards beats doesn't add up to his masterpiece, but the fan-stalker narrative "Colossus/The Bridge of Love" is his own "Stan".

Nothing revolutionary about From Zero, then. But certainly a re-energised return to business for a band that has been sorely missed.

Brilliant and bittersweet, Shoot For the Stars Aim For the Moon is the work of someone whose success should have been stratospheric.

Pray For The Wicked is as sinfully good as anything Panic! have done before.

There’s not quite as intense a contrast between the sweetness of the melodies and the antagonistic howls of guitar feedback on this first album in 18 years, which allows the swaggering pop charm of tracks like “Songs For A Secret” and “All Things Pass” to work their magic in less edgy manner.

It’s genuinely enjoyable. Fairly forgettable. A pleasant enough middle-lane trip down what Mayer – with knowing cliché – calls “the highway of dreams”.

For this latest incarnation of The Go! Team, bandleader Ian Parton has doubled down on the street-beat cheerleader mash-up mode of earlier albums like Proof Of Youth by searching out an actual youth choir from Detroit to accompany the marching-band-style brass that drives Semicircle. This works brilliantly on “Mayday”, an anthemic lament for love signals ignored, with the ebullient brass and chanted vocals evoking street parades, and “Semicircle Song”, in which the staccato brass lines interlace like a proper New Orleans marching band.

It's a pleasant enough ride which reveals some of Panda's tastes.

For the most part, an album of rock songs to cherish in the Pixies oeuvre, united by an eerie thread that’s hard to shake off.

Where Black America Again was notable for its sharp, observational urgency, Let Love feels far more personal, and softer in tone. Common’s optimistic nature gives it an uplifting vibe.

Summer Camp's long-awaited debut album seethes with updated teen angst set to engaging electropop grooves.

There are a few irritations--I hate the ghastly synthetic-strings sound used on “Da Next Day”, and I hate Adam Levine’s hook on “Mic Jack”, no matter how impressively Patton piles rhyme upon rhyme. The hit cuts, though, are quirky novelties.

Pink Friday 2 shows flashes of the inventive brilliance that made Nicki such an undeniable superstar, but like so many legacy sequels, it mostly just makes you wish you were listening to the original.

The arrangements are pleasurable enough, less rootsy than before, with some skilled use of orchestration; but it's a shame to find such a gifted songwriter sounding so gullible.

Norah and fellow vocalist Richard Julian bring a warm, smoky charm to their harmonies, while lead guitarist Jim Campilongo stitches together songs.

It’s not a bad album, but you still get the feeling that, as Ryder notes elsewhere, “someone who looks like me is living in my skin”.

Cropper's needle-sharp guitar fills best demonstrate the immense debt the MGs man owes to the 5 Royales songwriter and guitarist Lowman Pauling.

Instead of a too-many-cooks situation, which this easily could’ve been, Dessner and Howard find cozy nooks for everyone. The singer’s reedy voice is the drawstring that ties it all together.

Finn has a nice line in sardonic, declamatory assessments – "Certain things get hard to do when you're living in a rented room"; "I'm alive, except for the inside" – but there's little comparable imagination to the arrangements, which lean towards ironic country-rock and dispirited blues-rock.

I doubt many listeners would be able to identify these as Tomlinson songs. But this is a likable, grounded collection of sunny-side-up pop from a likeable, grounded guy.

Save for a couple of uptempo trotters like the jaunty kiss-off “It’s Goodbye And So Long To You”, it’s mostly melancholy fare.

["When It's All Over"] itself is one of the worst here, mercifully outnumbered by the merely adequate and the few standout songs.

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.

These songs are as limp as long-lost lettuce, several of them barely meriting the appellation “song” at all.

A benchmark DCFC record and, barring a surprise drop from The National, the most immersive alt-rock album you’ll hear all year.

It’s a delight, full of rich textures and subtle touches, from the harpsichord, hi-hats and horns of “Apollo’s Mood” to the sumptuous opener “Sirens Of Jupiter.”

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

Has the dense, occasionally cluttered manner of the obsessive bedroom producer.

There are moments on Degeneration Street that suggest Dears' creative mainspring Murray Lightburn is hoping to effect an Arcade Fire-style vault from indie saltmines to popularity; but it's all too little, and at five albums into their career, too late for that.

For all his personable self-deprecation, the blend of operatic pop on which his reputation is built seems strangely thin and insipid.

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.

While Martin Simpson’s peerless fingerpicking is in full effect throughout Trails & Tribulations, what’s equally impressive is the way his arrangements reflect the material with empathic sensitivity.

Ultimately, despite a few high points, LM5 is so scattershot, both thematically and musically, that it’s hard to find much to grab onto.

It feels uncomfortable for me to point out that there aren’t a lot of tunes on this record. This stuff has to come out the way it wants. It’s hardly singalong material. It is – necessarily – heavy. But it also fulfils Mumford’s intention, learnt from Beyoncé, he says, to leave us with hope.

Markedly different [from Dedication] in intent, a much lighter affair lacking the somewhat sombre, haunted mood of that valedictory record.

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.

“Rituals” is Lipstate’s tribute to Steve Reich’s Music For 18 Musicians, its arpeggiating guitar lines intertwining hypnotically, while the opening “Deep Shelter” takes a different approach, its lowing drones sliding over each other in Terry Riley-esque manner, seeking rhythmic pulses behind sheets of high, keening tones.

The Life of a Showgirl might be one of her most uneven records, but she’s as compelling as she’s ever been – the showgirl, the ringmaster and the circus all in one.

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

One can't help wondering whether this was really the album that Noel Gallagher set out to make when he contemplated a solo career, or just the one he settled for.

[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.

It's a well-crafted, stylish piece of work. But it's hard to love songs that try to hide.

Vastly talented, he brings rare articulacy to the thorny subject of black self-image, particularly the problem of breaking down the barrier of ghetto authenticity.

Ono’s continued Flower Power philosophy--“People of America, when will we see?” goes “Now or Never”--feels simplistic at a time when artists are so used to deconstructing the social and political systems that Ono rails against. And so Warzone falls into a strange dichotomy: as the album closes with a version of “Imagine” that is hymn-like enough to sound like the heralding of a new dawn, the relevance of Ono’s protests feels as if it’s faded.

It makes for some intriguing collisions of ancient and modern.

The spiky guitars and stiff, jerky rhythms signal a dedication to his old band’s sound that is commendably faithful, if ultimately tiresome.

There's always an ingenious, often unexpected, connection linking the music to the mood of a specific song.

Hewson’s songwriting is definitely up to snuff, although occasionally lapses into cliches.

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.

Van’s fellow Brit-blues icons Georgie Fame, Chris Farlowe and Paul Jones take turns to duet, in a relaxed manner which exemplifies the overall mood: comfortable rather than inspirational.

While the arrangements, built around producer Jay Joyce's shimmering guitars and Giles Reaves' keyboards and percussion, offer atmospheric settings for Emmylou's harmonies, the glistening, featherlight textures leave the album drifting in the doldrums.

The opening “Rebel” sets the tone with a country-style tale of how a good-hearted man’s attempt to live up to his father’s ideals backfires to leave him a criminal, losing his beloved’s respect and affection in the process. From there, the journey swings between ebullient celebrations of life and sombre tales of misfortune, with the shadow of Springsteen looming large over songwriter Eric Earley’s material.

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.

An elegant, understated pop masterpiece.

A smug farrago in which each track grates against the next like rusted gears. In between the nonsense – meaningless orchestral interludes and indistinguishable dance tracks inspired by Jon Hopkins and Bonobo – there are flashes of promise, mostly in the instrumentation. Even this is lost to inconsistent mixing.

Taken from a show in Pittsburgh in September 1980, Live Forever is the last recorded concert by Marley and The Wailers, but while it represents them at the broadest extent of their appeal, it by no means captures the band at their most potent.

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.

Pleasant enough, but too twee.

The Courteeners are still pretty much mired in Mancunian mores on this latest album.

AAA doesn’t give us the faintest clue as to who these women are – or why we should care.

The most potent and inventive electronica album I've heard in ages, a masterclass in punchy bleepscaping right from the low-register throb that opens "Lowly".

A concept album about early American rail disasters, The Ghost Of Hope sounds more naturalistic than many Residents albums, with plenty of chugging engine noises, and strings summoning conventional tragedy, as grisly crashes are recounted in typically sinister Residential tones. But it’s punctuated by startling musical moments.

The unambitious nature of Given to the Wild is all the more disappointing for the intriguing glimmers of inspiration furnished by their collaboration with Roots Manuva.

It’s pleasantly – if forgettably – soporific. The sort of family motorway album that tired parents can hum along to without waking the kids in the back.

Wu Block suffers from the absence of a few vital presences, in particular Wu Tang producer the RZA.

Always exquisitely unbothered, the indie-rock poster boy now sounds like he can’t be bothered.

Earth Division finds Mogwai in unusually calm and engaging mood, its four tracks for the most part eschewing their trademark surging post-rock in favour of a lighter, more reflective approach.

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.

Ani DiFranco's first album in three years finds the self-proclaimed Righteous Babe in feisty, thoughtful form.

[More of their] unchanging plastic punk aesthetic.

It certainly goes beyond his retro-jazz comfort zone, with piercing electric organ and electric piano lending a vibrant, visceral edge to several songs.

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.

It’s a low-key, subtly composed rock record that sets slow-rolling country and anthemic southern rock as its parameters, and never so much as hints that it might break beyond them.

The densely-textured arrangements can get a bit stodgy in places, and the last few tracks slip into dreary bubblebath-boudoir mode, but Bootsy's blithe drawl, the vocal equivalent of a bubble, is usually around to lift one's spirits.

Forever Neverland is chock-full of safely idiosyncratic bangers, and never misses a beat. But maybe it could have done with missing a few.

It’s a lovely, silly, serious work that draws one in despite the bursts of utopian cosmo-babble.

Some of the riffs are winners, but it's just not enough to carry the album.

As with their debut, this album feels as though you’re being allowed a brief but intense insight into his self-contained world. Yet the vein of humour that ran through those earlier songs has been replaced by a deeper sincerity.

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

Harrison has a knack for narrative and a snagging vocal that lifts potential mediocrity of this vibe into a warmer and more engaging experience. He’s at his best at his most British, when he channels the conversational intimacy of The Streets’ Mike Skinner.

A soundtrack that is always fun, if undeniably erratic – Ronson can’t decide on a consistent tone or approach, instead ping-ponging between satire and celebration, sincerity and spoof.

Solar Power finds Lorde swapping her trademark directness for tuneless detachment.

It’s an odd album, split between full-on dancefloor stompers like the euphoric summer romance anthem “Love You To The Sky” and less successful stabs at political commentary such as “Lousy Sum Of Nothing”, an overly simplistic bout of finger-wagging about how “the world has lost its loving” in respect of the refugee crisis.

It’s a solipsistic affair: and while his good intentions to smarten up his drug-sozzled, road-weary life may be commendable, they don’t necessarily make “Quit It” any more agreeable.

Oddball fun, and educational too.

Tea for the Tillerman has been updated with the aim of drawing attention and fans from a new generation. Whether these fuller versions will attract new listeners is debatable. However, there are certainly surprises here.

His 2017 debut Reaper was built around tender guitar motifs that would mesh with stuttery trap beats. There is some of this on Trauma Factory, but it’s been mostly sidelined in favour of vocal melodies that frequently sound like playground rhymes.