Like Comedy features their ebullient charm in large dollops.

Along with the anger and regret comes the usual hip-hop baggage of aggrandisement, recrimination and old-school reminiscence.

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.

The album plays to her strengths, as befits a woman who has sustained a career as producer of, among others, Joss Stone's breakthrough sessions.

However bleak, there's no denying the delicate mood created by [Kozelek's] charm.

Andre Williams is a renegade R'n B spirit who remains, in his seventies, as scurrilous as ever.

"Whistle", takes a sidestep with its acoustic guitar and tedious single-entendre hook, but there are plenty more brutal stompers to spare on Wild Ones.

Throughout Synthetica, an undertow of dystopian unease drags the music away from standard pop territory into darker areas.

The duo have devised a series of fascinating improvisations.

The fascination with sonic texture over tune tends to make everything sound like everything else, as if the tracks were leaking into one another.

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

It's a lovely, warm-hearted gem.

Maroon 5's sudden decline with the Mutt Lange-produced Hands All Over seems unlikely to be significantly overturned by the lacklustre Overexposed.

Imaginative and innovative in equal measure.

Mutual Friends, a loose song-cycle, is entirely winning.

It's more of a return to her roots in the feisty Eighties punk-jazz outfit Rip, Rig + Panic.

Despite restlessly exploring hitherto untrodden musical terrain, there are precious few wasted seconds in these three hours.

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

Sometimes, bigger is not better: Giant Sand's Howe Gelb has often been most potent with minimal resources, which may explain why I'm slightly underwhelmed by this major project.

He fills the Gary Moore-shaped hole in the world admirably.

An engagingly outre delight.

After a while, the sticky, repetitive swirls work their hypnotic magic: they're like The Bomb Squad mired in depression rather than revolution.

With his new Brotherhood, he's finally found the ideal vehicle to indulge his taste for "Cosmic California Music".

Patti Smith's latest album, her best in a while, is held together by a spine of pieces themed around exploration.

There's a drive and urgency about Maximo Park's The National Health that perfectly matches frontman Paul Smith's dominant lyrical theme, of taking arms against a sea of troubles in order to forge a better life for yourself.

This is such an improvement on 2010's enervated One Life Stand that one can only conclude their various sabbatical projects have rejuvenated their creative juices.

It's been a long time coming, and all the more welcome for it.

The character of the base music here is overwhelming: complex, ebullient and life-affirming, and in yoking this intricate dance music to his sophisticated New Yorker sensibility, Simon created a transatlantic bridge that neither pandered to nor patronised either culture.

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.

The confessional, autobiographical elements that are its strongest aspect also serve as its Achilles' heel: the whole enterprise depends on how fascinated the listener is with Rowland's psyche.

[TWGMTR] is pitifully thin stuff, with far too many nostalgic hankerings.

[More of their] unchanging plastic punk aesthetic.

There's a simplicity about these previously unreleased demos that's utterly beguiling, the spare settings allowing the sweeter side of George Harrison's character to shine unencumbered by studio blandishments.

The homogeneity of the album's arrangements effectively denudes the individual songs of their emotional power.

An album, that restores to R&B some of the adult concerns that powered the genre through its '70s golden era.

A comeback shouldn't sound this much like treading water.

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

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

There's no surprises here.

It might have been hoped that the album itself were more impressive.

It's all very laidback and earnest, but the endless lo-cal homilies ultimately grate.

Thankfully, he's well advised: the material is carefully chosen to exploit his abilities.

There's a bruised strength to Spx's voice, and her melodies have the stark, fatalistic tone of chain-gang moans.

Pleasantly undemanding for a few tracks, the album just seems to evaporate away halfway through, as if even its creators couldn't retain interest in it, either.

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

This 1991 album is the best of three reissues of their work – also available are their debut, Isn't Anything, and a 2CD compilation of outtakes and EPs.

Waterhouse's own voice is slightly under-recorded, but the musical settings--the understated Telecaster twang, the honking horns, the rumbling tom-toms--always churn with the right degree of roadhouse charm.

What's happened is a slight scaling-down of Ditto's approach, so as not to burst the hems of the more restrained arrangements. It's actually worked to her advantage.

As usual, guests crowd the album... less welcome, though, is the way that vast tranches of the album serve as a showcase for Willie's son, Lukas.

With Urban Turbanm, Tjinder Singh reinforces his position as one of the UK's more engaging musical minds.

There are successes here... but the overall effect can be gruelling.

Songwriter Tim Elsenburg makes great strides forward with an ambitious cycle of songs about identity and history.

Melancholy of tone, it occasionally attains the antique industry of Michael Nyman's early Peter Greenaway scores, but the overall effect is more akin to the musical equivalent of a mock-tudorbethan semi.

Strangeland marks a sad reversion to Coldplay territory after Keane's tentative experimentation on recent releases.

Richard Hawley has upped his game considerably on his first album for Parlophone, leaving behind his urbane, rockabilly-tinged retro-nuevo style for a full-blooded immersion in ringing psychedelic rock. It's totally unexpected, and completely winning.

There's a maturity about Rumer's delivery that sets her apart from all the Duffys and Adeles.

Over brutish electro-stomps and fizzy pop trifles every bit as sickly as that suggests, Marina's shrill Violet Elizabeth Bott inflections proclaim her emptiness.

If he tried to find something he liked, he might actually make something worth listening to.

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

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

Jim Moray's filtering of traditional folk music through a mesh of modern sensibilities continues on Skulk.

Listen, Whitey! seethes with righteous anger and revolutionary determination.

On Blunderbuss, he's stumbled into some nasty business. These are songs of ruthless temptresses and treacherous men, of uncontrollable desire and unbearable guilt.

Liberally spattered with sonic exclamation marks.

Paolo Nutini brings the apt timbre and weary dignity to "Hard Times (Come Again No More)", while The Decemberists' Colin Meloy has the sturdy asperity of a righteous ranter on a version of Dylan's "When The Ship Comes In".

Rufus Wainwright believes this to be "the most pop album" he's ever made, and he's probably right, so long as you're thinking 1970s pop.

Ultimately, however, despite the fizzing electronic undercarriage applied to most tracks on Electronic Earth, Labrinth's real forte may turn out to be the more traditional, earthbound musical skills.

Standouts include a heartbreaking cover of "Leaving on a Jet Plane" and the haunting murmur of "More".

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

Sweet Heart Sweet Light is infused with an uplifting lust for life.

Best of all is "The Day That We Die", Rufus Wainwright oozing mournfully with his dad about the way that familial potholes prove so difficult to repair.

An impressive show, but not one likely to persuade doubters.

The pair dovetail beautifully on the mostly traditional ballads and work-songs.

It's delivered with Bonnie's trademark kindly swagger, although her best performances here are probably the brace of covers from Dylan's Time out of Mind, "Million Miles" and "Standing in the Doorway", on which Frisell's tiny vibrato glimmer wields a subtle power to match her quiet passion.

A refreshingly non-dogmatic take on retro musical styles.

Halfway through, as guest rappers stop littering the proceedings, the album does a 90-degree shift and becomes a banging club affair, stuffed with David Guetta-style synth-stompers.

Just a series of great, swampy soul grooves, fronted by the most arresting new voice you'll hear this year, and the kind of natural songwriting that seems to contain the entire history of Southern music within its staves.

Felice fails to animate them in the manner of comparable storytellers like Johnny Dowd and Richmond Fontaine's Willy Vlautin, and thus leaves one's interest unignited.

It's not the greatest story ever told--the depth of insight runs to little more than "Friends--how many have them? How long before they split like atoms?"--but the overall warmth is engaging.

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.

Further confirmation of the enduring strength of old-school electronic music.

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.

The raw indie-punk grinds and krautrock pulses have a brutish drive and determination, though lingering this long among a cast of "wasted people in a wasted world" leaves a grim aftertaste.

The result is a dark, steamy sound that comes crawling from the Louisiana swamp like a mean-tempered 'gator.

In places, Portico Quartet's third album recalls old-school jazz-funk, from the chamber-jazz end of the spectrum rather than the party end.

With her delivery tacking impressively between sweet and smoky, "On the Road" recalls what happened when the Kind of Blue influence hit the likes of Tim Buckley and Tim Hardin.

Sometimes, the changes simply frustrate, as when Josh Homme rations out the hellhound gallop of "Mickey Bloody Mouse" too sparingly. But the additions can bring extra layers of exhilaration.

The splendid The Politics of Envy simply ratchets that process up a few notches.

The format sustains on subsequent tracks; but despite its apparent concreteness, the music is surprisingly warm.

It all comes together more fruitfully on the ensuing "Hey, Shooter." [...] From there, it gets more fecund than ever.

What's not in doubt is how faithfully he's stuck to the core deep-soul verities, with a delivery that vaults from spoken sermonising to raw, impassioned hurt in an instant.

MDNA represents a determined, no-nonsense restatement of the Madonna brand.

Debut album Up All Night consists of 15 installments of inoffensive daytime radio pop.

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

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

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.

By the second listen, it's somehow found its place in one's affections, despite its lack of obvious hooks.

It's Rose's harmonies that make the album special: warm and breathy, they seem to sidle gently into position, rather than cut with razor precision.