There's a familiar elemental tone to the Dirty Three's latest album – except this time the oceanic influence is replaced by snow and sky and rain.

The meringue-light and snow-bright Visions is a sort of cut-up, laptronica take on the kind of sugary, girly electro-pop confections Prince produced for a succession of female starlets in the late 1980s.

The band's mix of intelligence and drive, and their blend of guitar, accordion, organ and violin, echoes Arcade Fire. Certainly, Colin Meloy's songs have a comparable ambition.

While not as immediately career-defining as Wake Up the Nation, there's no denying that with Sonik Kicks, Paul Weller is continuing the courageous, exploratory course established on 2008's 22 Dreams.

Set to a messy blend of waspish blues guitar and wild fiddle, it's a typically barbed, angry set.

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.

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

Some of the better songs lack that adhesive zeitgeist quality that used to be the group's stock-in-trade. But at its best, there's enough variety and invention to recall The Beatles, sometimes directly. [Review of UK release The Future Is Medieval]

[Wrecking Ball is] unquestionably his most potent album so far this century.

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

When it all comes together, with the sinuous, haunting grace of "Near Death Experience Experience" or the jaunty élan of "Danse Carribe", the results more than justify the sometimes obtuse methods.

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

The impression is of someone picking obsessively at an emotional scab, which is effectively what The Wall is all about.

It has a winning blend of respect, technique and humour.

Meat Loaf's latest, which covers much the same territory [as The Wall] but without any depth or desire to understand.

These 10 tracks are a masterclass in modern pop creation, pinballing from style to style without endangering their essential "TingTingness".

[The] debut album sparkles with invention and throbs with emotion.

White's albums have tendrils that imperceptibly wrap themselves around one's attention; and such is the case here.

It's Wagner's mix of the enigmatic and the demotic that dominates, his songs fill of understated apothegms and startling lines.

[Shows a] lack of development involved in either the music or the creators' worldview.

It's pleasant enough ... but somehow lacks the cutting edge.

Her best album in about a decade.

An engaging blend of slinky Tropicalia, soulful Bacharachia, and enigmatic Euro-thriller themes.

[It is] possibly the band's best album.

The arrangements on Barry Adamson's latest album seem more restrained than usual, his jazz-noir ambitions trimmed to a blues-funk palette of bass and drum grooves carrying Hammond organ or piano parts, with just the occasional solo horn part.

Speech Debelle shows some welcome signs of maturity on this follow-up.

There's an awful lot of music crammed into Plumb's 35 minutes, but it's rarely organized into the most attractive shapes - and on the few occasions it is, they alter course within seconds and head off in some less appealing direction.

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

The loss of its uplifting chorus harmonies deprives "Map Ref" of its sunny appeal, but "Two People In a Room" bowls along briskly with dissonant monochord tension.

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

Taken as a whole, it's a marvellous piece of work, boasting a rare congruence between lyrical themes and musical evocations, and fronted by one of the most broodingly characterful voices in rock music.

Pleasingly, it's all comically cosmic, as befits the host movie.

Mindset is short by Necks standards--just two tracks of 22 minutes each--but it is typically involving.

The backdrops feature dark sheets of strings and organ, the occasional lonely trumpet, and lumpy, superstitious drums driving the menacing Western mythos to its doom: not a forgiving place, but an engrossing one.

The interpretations range from the admirable to the abysmal.

If You Want Loyalty Buy A Dog is a textbook Little Axe album, stuffed with dub-blues grooves that manage to be simultaneously soothing yet unsettling.

In song after song, she offers variants on the same theme, in infatuated erotic reveries of submission to bad-boy or sugar-daddy lovers with fast cars and lots of money.

With feelgood lyrics of fellowship allied to pulsing electro twitches, Sister Bliss-style piano vamps, sample fragments and sunrise synthscapes, there's a flavour of The Beloved to "Warm & Easy" and "Bear Hug."

if it is to be his last communiqué, at least the old smoothie's going down swinging.

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

It's the sense of space that grips one's attention, sometimes just flecks of sound, like snowflakes in darkness, create a sense of brooding unease.

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.

Blessed with clear, characterful voices, employed in beautifully modulated, bell-like harmonies, the Söderbergs find beauty in the bleakness of mortality and the cyclical nature of things.

There's plenty to enjoy.

The 16th GBV album is business as usual: plangent garage rock.

It comes across as unimaginative and rather needy when applied to the singer Johnny Lloyd;s wistful inbetweeen reminiscences of fumbled romance and aimlessly anthemic pleas for decisive direction.

Laidback and tidy, but fun.

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

A few decent songs may be lurking behind all the sonic detritus; but perhaps they ought to ditch the multitracks and get themselves a ukulele.

The result is a work with greater resonance and presence, which might secure her mainstream success.

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

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 mainly brusque and strident raunch-rock, with an unappealing cajoling tone that virtually dares you not to find the songs clever and the hooks contagious.

Featuring a blend of standards and originals spiced with judicious covers of sometimes obscure indie tracks, it manages to sustain a mood and attitude throughout without offering too many hostages to homogeneity.

The blend of simplicity and sophistication is fairly well suited to the material, avoiding cloying sentimentality and religiose bluster.

The first line of the first song encapsulates the adolescent angst which blossomed over and over throughout the band's career, with varying degrees of wit, empathy, contempt and self-pity.

That he manages to express such ethical and religious principles without coming across like a sanctimonious buzz-killer is quite remarkable.

What's impressive is the consistency of approach and execution.

while Seal's voice is a natural fit, it's hard to discern what these versions add, given their general faithfulness to the originals.

Dirty Jeans And Mudslide Hymns is full of typical John Hiatt tropes: old-timers and hard times, devotion and desperation, in roughly equal measure.

A typically diverse collection.

the only real flashes of character come from the reworked riffs of Old Neneh Cherry and Ann Peebles hits used on a couple of tracks.

Olly Murs might have a lovely on-screen personality, but only the merest glimmers of character are allowed to shine through the swaddling retro-pop arrangements of In Case You Didn't Know.

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

The Roots' 13th album may be their best.

Adele's engaging ebullience is powerfully persuasive on this DVD/CD package.

There's an urgency and drive about these tracks that's simply exhilarating.

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

These 15 pieces sketch an entire world of music, coloured by the locale, and shifting between the smoothly lyrical and the propulsive rhythmic.

While "Lioness" is a far better posthumous collection than Michael Jackson's Michael, from almost exactly a year ago, it's a poor substitute for the high-octane musicality of Frank and Back To Black.

It seems a huge effort being expended to achieve so little.

It all adds up to probably the best Stones album since... well, since Some Girls, actually.

It's all as ludicrous, graceless and unlovely as the "sport" it hymns, yet there's an anachronistic boot-boy charm to Haines's depiction of the milieu that's genuinely affecting, as well as amusing.

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

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

The result is a lush, immersive work which is sonically more homogeneous than her earlier albums.

The high priestess of emotional turmoil returns to her apparently turbulent personal life on this latest album, vacillating between obsessive devotion, self-assertive morale-boosting and the kind of masochistic abasement depicted in "Mr Wrong".

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.

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

For a while on this overlong album, he brings something new to the usual hip-hop parade of brandy and bitches, lasciviousness and loyalty.

Norwegian singer Ane Brun's quietly involving music occupies a spectral space in which her delicate, tremulous voice reveals shared intimacies with a rare poise.

The songs themselves are low-key and unexceptional.

Green's delivery is too Estuary-Eminem, scattershot hip-hop asperity snarled out with a mockney menace that is too secondhand to be effective.

Soul Time! is a near-perfect expression of retro-soul style that grips from its opening bars.

As a swansong, it's as fine as might be expected given the circumstances.

Overall, it's their most spirited effort yet, and the changes have been deftly effected in a way which shouldn't alienate their core fanbase too much.

Not only did they change the course of rock music; they also sustained an inspired creativity for almost two decades, something that the career arc of this retrospective brings into focus, right down to the Bacharach-esque touches of the final unreleased tracks, which pleasingly bring things full-circle in certain ways.

Set to light, sparkling arrangements of banjo, fiddle, dulcimer, concertina, twanging mouth-bow and comically honking horns, these songs are populated with a bucolic menagerie of foxes, dogs, birds and little horsies.

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

It's not a bad album as much, but to anyone familiar with Lynch's other work, it's entirely predictable in sound and style.

Proving that it is possible to have too much of a good thing, the five discs of this outtakes-and-all edition take the (let's be honest) rather meager delights of Brian Wilson's unfinished "masterwork" and wring the life out of them.

The stark landscape of Will Oldham's album is the musical equivalent of King Lear's blasted health.

But in cementing one style, some of the possibilities offered by Lungs have been choked off.

It's not hard to see why both parties agreed to the alliance--Metallica gain artistic cachet, Reed gains an audience--but it is not an alliance that welcomes listeners with open arms.

With Björk and Longstreth sharing lead vocals, and instrumental contributions pared back to just a few drones and pulses, the result is a fascinating evocation of Orcan existence, implicitly acknowledging the entire planet as a home.

Despite the references to Nietzsche and Einstein, which suggest a cachet Stronger doesn't deserve, this is simply an overlong string of standard putdown R&B and bogus emotional turmoil, the songs blitzed with generic power-ballad overkill.

The results are smoothly pallid even by their standards, the usual modes of exultant melancholy and epic sympathy exacerbated by the earnest thrumming of acoustic guitars that punctuates the familiar piano vamps.

An album which contains no filler at all, each track blooming in its own way like a collection of strange desert succulents, with a whole lot of hollerin' and a touch of Lieber-Stollerin'.