Stone delivers what may be his masterpiece in Broken Brights, an album that seamlessly inhabits the resurgent Laurel Canyon sound.

Caer shows that Twin Shadow’s limitless approach to pop suits him just fine.

While the one-sided “Heart’s Not In It” is crippled by blame-laying, “One Of Us Will Lose” is an edifice of aching melancholy, with streaks of slide guitar threading currents of loss and despair through its descent into the depths.

Strange Creatures is certainly packed with musical ideas.

Cause and Effect isn’t Keane breaking any new ground, but in the quieter moments it’s surprisingly good.

As ever, you’re left marvelling at Parton’s ability to capitalise on her slick professionalism without ever compromising her huge heart and sparkling spirit.

Gillespie has never quite had the voice to match his colossal ‘tude. But he can still channel the back-alley menace of a truant teen.

Whatever their origin [his guitars], he manages to wrestle compelling riffs from them.

Courage is a force to be reckoned with. It seems unlikely that more than a few of its tracks will jostle their way onto Dion’s setlist, given the decades of power ballads they have to compete with. But those that do will make their mark.

Why Are You OK finds dad-of-four Bridwell reflecting honestly on the ennui of everyday, surburban life. Unfortunately, the result is largely forgettable.

Styles has opened himself up, as best he can, to his audience, and by gathering a solid team around him to help achieve that he’s created an immersive, well-produced collection of songs that isn’t trying to prove anything in particular to anyone.

Tackling topics like technology addiction (“Disillusioned”) and the deaths of celebrities (“So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish”), the band forges a sobering look at the world with the maturity that comes from being on a long break. Despite the changes Eat The Elephant is a solid return for the supergroup.

The duet between Miss Kittin’s android vocal and a machine voice on the engagingly dystopian “Hans Is Driving” seems devoid of contact, a sad lament from a world bereft of humans. But it’s Arbez-Nicolas’s magpie ways that leaves a bad taste.

A decent collection which explores different aspects of the duo’s chosen musical territory.

24/7 Rock Star Shit has to be one of the all-time great rock’n’roll titles; but sadly, lurking behind it is an album which struggles to fulfil such vagabond promise. Rather, it seems terminally enervated: most of these songs have a shrugging, slovenly manner.

The second album from Franco-techno duo Xavier de Rosnay and Gaspard Augé is decidedly less pop-tabulous than their career highlights to date.

Way To Blue avoids the usual patchwork-quilt pitfalls of style and quality that afflict most tribute albums.

Bleachers occasionally lets Antonoff’s genius shine through, but more often it feels like an experiment gone awry.

At their most normal, “In Love” resembles Prince at his oddest; while the most likeable of a range of silly lyrics offers the promise, “I like to watch you run, but I’ll never touch your bum”.

He sounds cleansed of old complications.

It's gimmicky, sure, but also pretty irresistible.

There are enough decent moments to call Demonstration a success.

Too often their light touch turns lightweight, even wan.

His latest LP largely lacks killer tunes.

While the overall Detroit/Memphis tone is tempered somewhat on the second CD, where Steve Wickham’s fiddle is featured more prominently. Scott’s amorous enthusiasm can be a tad gauche at times, but the languidity of his riposte, in “Kinky’s History Lesson”, to an ill-judged slur on British courage during World War Two, is belied by its razoring impact.

MØ crafts consistently cool grooves but nothing that makes her stand out from the crowd.

In some cases, that sugary voice which works so well as a pop vehicle lacks the full-bodied character to carry a big ballad.

In some cases, as in "Cloud on My Tongue", the orchestrations serve as little more than swaddling blankets. But the more thoughtful rearrangements can be transformative.

For the most part, it’s a masterclass in jazz phrasing.

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

Supervision is certainly not a bad album, but it’s a far cry from the bristling pop genius of Jackson’s best work.

There's precious little of the experimentation or variety you might expect.

The free rein afforded by this latest solo effort renders most of these 15 tracks unrecognisable as songs.

Singer Julie Baenziger, aka Julie Ann Bee, whose debut album reveals a similar mix of emotional openness and affinity for the natural world as Laura Veirs, with something of Veirs's inquistive approach to musical textures, too.

Chapel Club are another retro-indie band apparently eager to re-run the 1980s, albeit in slightly more musically adventurous manner than the likes of White Lies and Interpol.

Overall: must try harder. Or appear to.

The music Kanye West reserves for his own albums is so much more ambitious than that apportioned to the collaborations on this compilation from his new label, Good Music. Which isn't to say it's not effective.

The folksy, pastel tints and subtly uncoiling emotional landscapes have been supplanted by cluttered arrangements and astringent timbres.

It’s an attractive, still beguiling attitude that courses through the album like ambrosia, offering a welcome, if unworldly, alternative to pop’s prevailing discourse of acquisitive antagonism and automated emotions.

It’s a welcome opportunity to revisit Sting‘s lengthy collaborative resume; if anything, Duets serves as a reminder that not only has the man been doing this for a long time, but when he does team up with a new artist, he strikes just the right balance in letting the featured player shine, and letting the song belong to them as well.

You’re bound to find yourself dancing to it at some point over the summer. It’s safe. Still polished. Nothing special.

Bloc Party's touchstones remain firmly rooted in their indie upbringing.

[The album] mostly eschews his usual glum ruminations in favour of pleasingly methodical instrumental trifles.

It's pleasant enough, but sometimes the words do rather get in the way.

Though drab and overlong, it has a certain rugged, whiskery charm, which doesn't extend to the concluding "God Save the Queen", a stodge too far.

On her new album, Pint of Blood – which, lest we forget, is very nearly an armful – Jolie Holland adopts a new, looser working method which isn't entirely to her advantage.

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

The blandness of the R&B pop-soul arrangements simply throws attention on to the repetitive narrowness of Bieber's delivery.

Guillemots have never been short on ambition, and Walk the River opens accordingly, with trepidation and expectation wrapped up together in the title-track's foreboding intro riff, as Fyfe Dangerfield sings of "backing out of the race".

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.

Most of the album’s tracks also date from an earlier era, four of them retreads of songs originally recorded for his 1967 flop album New Masters. Sadly, they haven’t matured well.

The inventive Diplo is a frequent collaborator, with support from Avicii, Michael Diamond and Kanye, but what’s most impressive is Madonna’s singing.

Much else here settles into comfort-zone turf.

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

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.

They're virtually unrecognisable as the band that made their game-changing debut, save perhaps for "All the Time."

As the album proceeds, it frays apart as Neil’s gaze shifts to bombs and babies in the plodding anthem “Children Of Destiny”, and to Mexican fairground fantasy in the ludicrous cod-Santana-style “Carnival”. Despite similarly sluggish, slouchy manner, young backing band Promise Of The Real fall some way short of the full Crazy Horse, trudging rather than imposing a sense of implacable destiny.

Love at the Bottom of the Sea marks a return to The Magnetic Fields' abrasive electropop, which isn't always to the songs' advantage.

Glam, anthemic and messy Father of All… may be, but “inspired” and “baddest” it is not.

It’s pleasant enough, though listeners may experience a twinge or two of deja vu.

Smith’s vocals are, of course, beautiful. Creamy and curvaceous; liquid with emotion. But I often feel their voice is searching for tangier tunes to wrap that molten wax around. Without any sharpness to offset it, listening to the repeated wobbly rise of Smith’s lovely, dollopy notes can feel like the aural equivalent of watching a lava lamp.

Americana II feels like another chapter exploring a still-living, breathing relationship with an intensely complex land, that makes for a rich and invigorating listening experience, heightened even more by the news that a new Kinks album is on the way, too.

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.

His guests include Lana Del Rey, whose affectless manner makes her a perfect match for him; though the best grooves here come courtesy of Daft Punk, bookending the album with the scudding title-track and Michael Jackson homage “I Feel It Coming”.

This ability to tiptoe between opposing positions brings a pleasing depth and grain to some of her songs.

Across two discs there are too many mediocre versions, most revering the polite preciosity of the original Laurel Canyon folk-rock settings.

Oddly, the busier things get, the less engaging they seem.

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.

He's a bona fide hitmaker with a colossal YouTube following, working in the argot and style of his own generation

As you'd expect, it relies heavily on programmed beats of spare simplicity, and layered dubstep synth riffs over which Albarn sketches his impressions of life on the road.

Here, they find unsuspected connections between disparate sounds.

The homegrown characteristics of her distinctive style have been all but washed away in a flood of R&B clichés on All of Me, a routine blend of fidgety grooves and tiresome ruminations on life and love.

To a certain extent it works, especially when Josh Homme’s on hand to lend gritty riffing and imaginative lead lines to some tracks: his spiky but fluid breaks on “A-Yo” and “John Wayne” are undoubted album highlights. Sadly, the bombastic orchestral stomper “Perfect Illusion”, a much-anticipated collaboration with Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker, is less impressive, just stridently dull.

Cliched rock band they might be, but the problem lies more with the fact that they used to be bloody good at it. Night People is a painfully disjointed album that shows a band at an impasse, unsure about which direction they want to go in.

Here, any trace of feedback or distortion has been eradicated to leave just a Fratelli-esque singalong punk-pop sheen to songs.

Shorty here offers an explosive blend of funk, blues and jazz.

Away from his favourite theme, Wiley struggles to bring interest or insight to his workaday observations, and while many of his grimey "eskibeat" grooves have an infectious, spartan quality about them, it's likely that in future they'll be more profitably employed behind other wordsmiths.

Their minimalist aesthetic can sometimes work against them, as on the spartan, diffident “The Pop Life”, but it’s tempered by a winning romanticism on “Butterflies”, where the fluttering keyboards evoke a fantasy of a dead soul becoming a butterfly, one of “a thousand souls swarming”.

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.

It’s musically ambitious, if over-stuffed at times, but unashamedly impenetrable lyrically, even with the “help” of the accompanying gobbledegook short-story and supposed Map of Eyeland.

It lacks both unity and quality.

Elysium is bookended by two of the best songs the Pet Shop Boys have written in years, but flags badly in between.

Overall, a confident, clear-headed quantum leap beyond their previous work.

Gaga's music, let's be frank, is not that much better than, or even different to, that on Femme Fatale, but she knows the lingering appeal of playing dress-up.

There are a few too many tracks on which the hook outclasses the actual rap.

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”.

Pure & Simple sticks for the most part to an agreeable neo-traditional approach.

"Moonlit Car Chase" and "Base 64 Love" come perilously close to generic technopop.

Phantom Limb have refined their sound further to more clearly occupy the kind of country-soul territory once inhabited by the likes of Dobie Gray and The Staple Singers.

He's devised a musical backdrop that subtly evokes the innocence, warmth and zoophiliac empathy of the film's message.

His quest to bring sexy back to Britain founders amid gauche come-ons ("Your aura/ It's so shiny") and strained emoting.

George hasn't been as enjoyable in ages.

For the most part the songs are full to bursting with youthful melodies that lift the weight off the more serious of topics.

[A] more thoughtful, diverse creations in which floating organ and mellotron lend a wavering melancholy to songs like “Maybe We’ll Drown” and “Lemon Memory”, pierced by contrasting guitar rages of keening angularity.

This is as close to the live iteration of Chromeo that one of their records has ever come.

Mostly this standard boyband fare, reheated, and topped with modern pop sprinkles. It just feels so unnecessary.

If you’re a longstanding Belieber by this point, you’re probably used to the tonal shifts of his adult material. But, outside of his hardcore devotees, Bieber remains more of a curiosity than a consistent, coherent creative force – Swag won’t do much to change the conversation.

There's no surprises here.