It’s the overall cool/warm Tropicalismo tone that’s most engaging about Mellow Waves, established through the light accretion of sparse piano, percussion, synth and guitar parts supporting his soft vocal on opener “If You’re Here”.

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

A country-gospel stab at Ellington’s “Come Sunday” badly misses the mark, and Toussaint’s innate funkiness is only lightly felt, sometimes sacrificed for too much tastefulness. There are still many American treasures here.

There’s a focus on tribal percussion and a multitude of vocal techniques you don’t expect on a pop album: folky vocables, angular melodies, overdubbing, a male choir. This is more enthralling on some tracks than others.

This second album since returning from an absence caused by lack of interest offers nothing new musically, but Manson at full-strength.

Rather than the optimistic, outward-looking The Race For Space, on Every Valley he tells the grim story of the decline of Welsh coal-mining, from the title-track’s proud proclamations, declaimed in Richard Burton’s Rushmore rock-face of a voice, through to the poignant conclusion of “Take Me Home”, a Welsh Male Voice Choir’s plea to “let me live again”.

An enjoyable diversion.

Compared with his perky previous albums Mars and Mean Love, there’s something underwhelming about this third effort from Ahmad Gallab, aka Sinkane--it feels every bit as pedestrian and dutiful as its title suggests, its slow, methodical grooves pleasantly light but laborious.

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

Oxnard isn’t quite the epic final chapter .Paak clearly craved for his trilogy--it certainly fails to compare to his 2016 breakthrough masterpiece Malibu--but you have to wonder if he really cares that much. On so many of these tracks he sounds restless, like he’s already thinking about moving on to bigger and better things.

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.

Not bad, but not brilliant.

The most effective songs here are those which reach out directly to her family.

There's no denying the aplomb with which Isaak handles even Presley's vocal parts, which are respectful without being slavish copies.

Things pick up in the latter stages, starting with the ebullient “Laughing Gas”, which wouldn’t be out of place on any Tom Petty album. As they proceed, the band’s stays seem to loosen up, and they explore different avenues with commendable spirit.

The big Brill concept doesn't work, Cahn, Cooke and Ellington not being song-factory writers.

The problem is, the album – so full of drawling balladry and anodyne lyrics – is deeply unremarkable. Listening to it is like wading through a quagmire of banality.

It’s wearily repetitive and almost aggressively underwhelming.

Things go rapidly downhill, soured by the earnest, self-important tone of songs like “Grace” and “Ego”; while “Love You Any Less” is just achingly dull, a slice of blandly sepia soulfulness that stains the songs around it.

Natural Rebel, sadly, is paint-by-numbers singer-songwriting. For a 10-track album, it feels hideously overindulgent--only two songs fall under the four-minute mark, and those still feel drawn out by plodding, bog-standard riffs.

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

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.

Musically, she strays a little too far from her folkie comfort-zone, with varied results

If the music could hold its own, No Man’s Land might make for a more tolerable listen. But the instrumentation is plodding and occasionally appropriative, while elsewhere there is unfortunate evidence of Turner’s limited vocal range.

The problem with albums about depression is that they are the most literal exposition of the principle that an artist has suffered for their work, and now it’s our turn--and doubly so when it’s a 90-minute punk-opera wrenched screaming from their very soul, as here.

Alongside some so-so newer material, this latest set revisits earlier triumphs in JD's new style, which owes more to MOR jazz than rock or country. It's not as successful as his 2009 comeback If The World Was You, being something of a halfway house.

It features blues standards remodelled as reggae skanks, bland takes on the Great American Songbook, and too much acoustic guitar and dobro.

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.

Jack White’s new solo album Fear of the Dawn is basically one long jam session. Which is fine, if that’s what makes him happy. For the rest of us, it’s a bit of a slog.

Unlike previous Vetiver albums, for The Errant Charm, songwriter Andy Cabic entered the studio with vague ideas rather than finished songs, and it shows.

A sort of also-ran footnote to the diva tropes handled with so much more panache by Mrs. Z.

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

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.

Combined with the faux-naive, fairytale tone of the narratives, it makes for an irritatingly condescending experience. The lofty aimlessness is matched by musical settings.

It's a cartoon of emotion: even when whispering, there's a stage intimacy about her delivery; and at full blast, she has the emotive subtlety of a foghorn, though that may be to surmount the barrage of thundering tom-toms and pounding pianos with which she's been saddled.

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.

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

Less structured and song-oriented than Channel Orange, it’s a long, meandering ramble through Ocean’s passing interests and attitudes, hopes and memories, alighted upon like scenes briefly glimpsed from a train window and then dropped into tracks that aren’t so much sung as delivered in an undulating sprechstimme that seems to be avoiding the difficult choice of a compelling melody.

Ultimately this is an album of shadow versions that leave you yearning for originals.

On tracks such as “Daylight” and “Fear of Heights”, he strains to fit over the futuristic “rage” sound popularised by Playboi Carti. For better or worse, the album is at its best when Drake’s not there.

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

He goes straight for the pop-rock formulae. This would have worked better over a shorter span, but yawning as it does on the same mid-tempo pacing means that tracks blur to filler and some good lines get lost in the sludge. The lack of guest vocalists doesn’t help either.

The main failing lies in the lack of distinction of the material, and the lack of excitement in its execution: the only time the album teeters on thrilling is when Neil Young’s Les Paul disturbs the peace of “Down the Wrong Way”.

Tangerine Reef gives a musical voice to these alien coral creatures and their aquatic world. If only it were a more mellifluous voice.

One can’t help thinking the ghosts and echoes of previous scandalous indulgences are rather betrayed by the project’s neat, sentimental manner.

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

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.

As the album proceeds, the band’s strident Mumfordry becomes all too wearing, these songs patently designed more for festival singalong than introspective reflection.

Sadly, WOAPD is devoid of the sly wit of Vile's early material, and consists of mid-paced alt rock, reminiscent of the Dandy Warhols in a coma.

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

The arrangements are suitably bombastic: there’s a theremin camping up the pub piano on his cover of Laura Nyro’s ”Wedding Bell Blues”. His version of Bruce Wayne Campbell’s (aka Jobriath) 1973 glam stomp “Morning Starship” really sells the wry/cosmic lyrics about a girl picking a rocket’s lock with her hairpin. ... Morrissey’s take on Joni Mitchell’s “Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow” is leaden jazz karaoke, stripping the original of all its haze and drift. The electro-stomp/harp, fading to reflective piano fade-out of his reworking of Melanie Safka’s ”Some Say I Got Devil”, makes a joke of his lifelong self-pity.

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.

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

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

The lite-jazz treatment of standards on Kisses on the Bottom seems like a misstep.

"Cockiness" is barmy enough to stand out from the routine dubstep/electro beats cooked up by such as Stargate, Calvin Harris and Dr Luke.

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

The only reliably engaging elements of the compositions are the wonderful choral arrangements that provide most of the mortar connecting Björk's voice to the instrumental parts.

While pleasant in places, there’s a lack of drive about Zach Condon’s latest outing as Beirut.

There's barely a shred of truly memorable content here.

The sort-of-romantic themes and sort-of-funk grooves lend a greater unity than usual, but save for a few tracks, the general impression is of lots of bustling, itchy industry – the scratchy guitars, the scuttling beats, the dying-firework synths – to no particularly attractive end.

Producer Hal Willner has surrounded Marianne Faithfull with some great New Orleans musicians, and got her covering a few Crescent City soul numbers. But it's not territory she occupies comfortably: she doesn't have the abandon to animate Joe & Ann's "Gee Baby", and her delivery of Allen Toussaint's "Back in Baby's Arms" is painfully stilted.

There are occasional moments of unalloyed pleasure on this, but frankly not near enough to persuade one that The Fratellis reunion was worthwhile.

Most are dully baffling.

It offers no narrative to speak of and only brief glimpses of personality. It is a blancmange of watered-down R&B, each song sliding listlessly into the next.

Sometimes, sheer ambition can render music too top-heavy to succeed. Hang, by Los Angeles duo Foxygen, is a case in point.

Three of the record’s 11 – eleven – incongruous covers, seemingly selected by lobbing darts at a Spotify genre cloud, involve Beck showcasing his sub-Dave Gilmour, cruise ship guitar work by playing the vocal lines on instrumental takes of Davy Spillane’s “Midnight Walker” and a couple of Beach Boys tunes. When Depp gets involved things often, somehow, get worse.

[More of their] unchanging plastic punk aesthetic.

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.

This isn’t so much an album that would rile you to the point of turning it off. Rather, it washes over you, with its mostly average beats (“Forever” is a rare exception) and seemingly random cluster of guest features.

The results are simply irritating, in so many ways.

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

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.

Beneath the bluster it's pretty dull fare, the brittle rock-funk beats and brusque guitar riffs carrying songs that pay eager lip-service to energy and activity but actually offer a series of fairly empty experiences.

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

Musically it’s pleasant enough, with string and wind flourishes either emboldening or offering solace from the folk-rock arrangements; but it’s all a bit samey, and after a while, rather dull.

It's all sounding terribly tired now.

Save for the opening "The Once and Future Carpenter", about a woodworker who abandons his trade to wander, this second album is pretty dismal fare.

She lacks rhythmic ingenuity: most tracks just stump along in unaccented 4/4, the spiky riffs cycling dully over and over.

Saturday Night, Sunday Morning is a cohesive enough follow-up, but Bugg still seems conflicted about the sound that first propelled him into the spotlight. ... It rankles when this album was put together by a team best known for the music he claims to despise.

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.

Ultimately these fixings lack the transformative quality to transmute depression into art.

Seven years on from Satan's Circus, Death in Vegas' prime mover Richard Fearless doesn't seem to have moved on at all.

There’s much to be said for music as a private, sublime refuge, but Holy Wave rarely hit those heights. They evoke only the mild, gauzy dislocation of dawdling in the midday sun.

Paul Heaton & Jacqui Abbott’s third album as a duo is disappointing, with Heaton’s lack of musical intrigue leaving some of his poorest songs badly exposed.

I Am Not a Dog has its moments, but they are brief and virtually lost amid the more experimental forays.

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]

He just sounds like a grumpy geriatric for whom age has brought little of the reflective wisdom of Leonard Cohen.

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.

While there's some interesting moments to be found here, for the most part Centipede Hz is a fatiguing experience.

It’s all fine: shiny and efficient pop, smelling of body oil and new car upholstery. But Payne treats each track like a rental car. He gives each song a spin and hands the keys back like a good lad without leaving a trace.

David Longstreth’s account of his separation from former bandmate Amber Coffman told through a welter of autotuned, over-treated vocals and jumble of clashing sounds that, to be generous, may be intended as an analogue of the ground shifting beneath their disintegrating relationship.

The sense of fun that propelled Perry to international stardom has been replaced by a weariness (or perhaps wariness) of the industry she once dominated.

It's full of timid electropop anthems.

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

If Scenic Drive sets out to be an easy-listening accompaniment to a late-night ride, it’s successful. But if you’re looking for something with more clarity and oomph, your car horn may be the better option.

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