Despite the involvement of producer Danger Mouse, the more experimental leanings of albums like Achtung Baby and Zooropa have been abandoned in favour of the all-too-familiar blend of vaunting, declamatory vocals and juddering guitar riffs; but sadly, that knack for irresistible pop hooks with which Danger Mouse helped hoist The Black Keys to superstar status is almost entirely absent here, restricted to just an occasional keyboard counter-melody like that on "California (There Is No End To Love)".

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.

“Build Music” is a fast, scuttling riff of loping bass and stabbing organ, its call-and-response lyric celebrating the act of making music; while on “Santa Monica”, an itchy but fluid guitar motif is threaded into the groove, as Nabay protests LAPD harassment--“Investigation, interrogation, yea!”--like Fela Kuti recounting oppression in a less balmy clime. But crucially, the backing vocals still sparkle lightly despite the heavy hand of the law.

This River is surely the most accomplished album yet from Florida-based songwriter JJ Grey.

Wildness is an attempt to return to form, but it’s an unsuccessful one.

Themes of anguish and otherness are littered in Davis’s frequently cliched lyrics, though some listeners will welcome such lyrical clarity.

It’s one dizzying burst of energy after another.

Though the elements don’t always hang together, there’s no shortage of intriguing ideas.

Off the Record contains few surprises, with several tracks pleasantly echoing his time as co-composer of some of the group's most glorious pieces.

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

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.

The group have been around for well over a year without arousing much of a stir, and the monumentally tedious poesie-rock of Violet Cries offers few hints that this should change.

The erosion of control is palpable as the show progresses, though it's hard to tell whether it's due to damage or just boredom.

For the most part, the mood here is pensive, the ballads plentiful and the pace glacial, with little evidence of the wild abandon that the singer supposedly longs for. It’s to Smith’s credit, but also their undoing, that they are just too damned nice.

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

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

Eminem belittles the trauma of a then 26-year-old Ariana Grande for kicks on “Unaccommodating” by comparing himself to the Manchester Arena bomber. The sour taste of this track lingers well beyond the album’s centrepiece, “Darkness”, which is intended as a searing critique of America’s toxic gun culture. Instead, his use of gunfire and explosion samples feels grossly exploitative.

As ever, it's an eclectic mix of styles.

While imparting a palpable sense of immediacy to the performances, there are some tracks that could do with more work.

The cycling, Wendy Carlos-style synth figures of "Searching For Heaven" offer brief respite, but hardly enough to rescue an album promising far more than it delivers.

It's a sound with all flesh stripped off the bone, but Lynch himself sounds like an intellectual playing bogus trailer-trash.

While Graffiti on the Train is a significant improvement, it's still something of a patchwork affair.

Deadbeat starts intimate and confessional, with what might be the best opening track of the year. .... From there, the tracks flow and blend hypnotically, tied together by the piano. Sometimes a song’s coherence is sacrificed to tranceyness, but hooks keep bobbing to the surface like lava lamp bubbles.

Things go slightly awry with the stodgy prog-rock textures of “Clockwatching” and “The 6th Wave”, but it's the work of a band obsessed with a multitude of musical directions, which has to be A Good Thing.

Head Carrier is an altogether more convincing affair than 2014’s comeback album Indie Cindy, the intervening months of roadwork having helped relocate the band’s classic mode.

Dictator is everything fans might expect from Malakian and more; a complex, thoughtful and invigorating album that nods to his own personal history and simultaneously links to the wider, tumultuous landscape of America.

Although an improvement on 2011’s The Errant Charm, this finds Vetiver mainman Andy Cabic struggling to impose greater definition on his sun-bleached West Coast throwback style.

Virtually every piece is too leisurely extended beyond its natural span.

Recorded with friends in Conor Oberst’s house, it has a nice, homely ambience which allows the imaginative arrangements to work their understated charm.

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

An enjoyable diversion.

The result is a sort of mannered, formalist rusticity that only occasionally develops a convincing momentum.

Lyrically, Horan pushes no envelopes, sticking to earnest love plaints and poignant reminiscences for the most part, and even offering to listen to his girl’s problems in “Fire Away”.

Simulation Theory seems to fall into two territories--songs are either half-hearted nods to the best of their heavier rock-opera back catalogue, or futuristic, electronic pop-heavy tracks that borrow from bands more adept at that particular sound, and the vast majority of which are burdened with Bellamy’s political paranoia. For a new listener, it’s baffling. For a former, diehard fan, it’s disappointing.

Routine would-be anthems like “Love Is Bigger Than Anything In Its Way” and the assonant pairing of “You’re The Best Thing About Me” and “Get Out Of Your Own Way” simply piggyback on tired old modes, reflecting their former glories in the way that modern glass-box buildings simply serve as mirrors for the more dynamic and beautiful architecture of previous eras.

Though the Nashville experiment is finally too half-hearted for the desired transformation, “Shelby ’68” mines Melbourne memories for a more personalised rural makeover.

Too much of the album is drably formulaic, a series of gambits shuffled into passable shapes rather than memorable songs.

Admittedly, with 15 full-length tracks, the record does run a little long. That said, there’s something alluring about such an unapologetic and candid album.

Rodgers doesn’t allow his pals to freshen the old formula, reducing them to audio clutter.

There’s plenty of talent there, but more homework is needed before they graduate to the bigger leagues.

Andrew Hozier-Byrne’s second album Wasteland, Baby! is still stuck mid-sermon, albeit emaciated from surviving solely on stale communion wafers.

KSI does well to allow his collaborators to come in and do what they do best in their respective styles. ... At times, though, All Over The Place flails in the absence of a singular distinct voice.

Her winning formula back in 2010 was blunt honesty delivered in the form of spoken-word style poetry. Back then, she doled out witty, tongue-in-cheek observations and wry take-downs with ease. Attempts to recapture this style are marred by lazy rhymes and a delivery that’s often more just her speaking over the track.

The follow-up to Let Them Talk follows a similar format of easy-rolling jazz arrangements and simpatico guest spots supporting Hugh Laurie's blues piano.

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.

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.

Their 14th studio album finds the Indigo Girls operating as powerfully as at any time in their career, on a set of uncommonly strong songs performed with the kind of typically understated Nashville polish that affords their signature harmonies the full spotlight.

It's business as usual, but with diminishing returns, on I'm With You--the result, perhaps, of sticking with the producer Rick Rubin for six albums.

The slimmed-down Yuck's sound seems svelte of style, having lost most of its rougher edges and lo-fi feistiness. What's left builds on their Teenage Fanclub-style guitars'n'harmonies approach, but takes it in a less intriguing direction.

Kelly Jones seems particularly bereft of inspiration on Keep the Village Alive, with insipid lyric clichés harnessed to settings that resemble a swift rummage through an arena-rock record collection.

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

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.

The only failure is the routine indie chugger "Children of the Future".

With songs about mountain men and sentient country houses, it’s like a more pompous (and crucially) humourless version of The Incredible String Band built around flutes, celesta and caterwauling: okay in very small doses, but unbearable at album length.

Horan is impossible to dislike, forever existing on the right side of cheesy, but the result is a record almost entirely stuck on safe mode. You can only hope its stronger moments hint at better things to come.

It all goes wrong later on, in a limp succession of ersatz disco ("Sexual Religion"), routine raunch-rock ("Finest Woman") and empty sentiments like "Pure Love", yet another gloss on Pachelbel's Canon.

"Irish" and "Jetplane" bring a late flicker of focus to the proceedings, but the band's resolute primitivism works to their detriment.

As might be expected, the favourites chosen by Mark Kozelek for his covers album are predominantly those reflecting cloudy, sometimes ambivalent emotional responses.

Overall, it’s an unexpected triumph: bright, sexy, smart and full of life, HITnRUN Phase Two is like the blind date from heaven.

As it is, these seven surviving tracks capture a group in transition from R&B covers outfit to something more significant.

Muse’s seventh album is--happily--anything but diminished.

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

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

This is a polished, well-executed effort from one of the hardest-working men in music.

The UK edition of their debut has three extra tracks recorded in a church, which damps things even further. But there is still much to enjoy here.

Not bad, and nice for Nick. But for every good 'un, there's a dull 'un too.

Lyrics have never been the band’s strongest suit, and WALLS is no exception, with the blandest of emotional expressions occasionally punctuated by simple stupidity.

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]

Despite the album’s slick production and radio-ready melodies, one wishes Pale Waves could find a more sophisticated language to express youthful enlightenment.

Actor Maxine Peake delivers the combination of historical narrative and polemic in her blackest-pudding accent, over a gamelan tinkle of synth tones and string synths that evoke the blend of grit and gentrification now surrounding these events.

His tendency to hurl the same emotional intensity into every syllable (loud, soft, high, low, new idea or repetition) gets wearing. It doesn’t help that the melodies are often simplistic to the point of forgettable and the production seldom leaves a space unfilled.

There’s no standout tune on here to match Elgar’s “Nimrod”, of course, but there’s enough soupy seasonal sentimentality to fill the Royal Albert Hall.

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.

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.

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.

Other highlights include Los Lobos’ typically confident swagger through “Bootleg”, and the unusual alliance of ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons with Colombian singer La Marisoul on a wonderfully gritty “Green River”.

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.

The first half of Speak Your Mind is undoubtedly the strongest; showing Anne-Marie no one-trick pony when it comes to infectious, dance-worthy bangers.

Secure behind the protective pop wall erected by producers such as Max Martin and the ubiquitous Greg Kurstin, there’s little room for originality here. Which may be for the best, given the mid-album limpness imposed by the gratingly wistful, cello-draped childhood yearning of “Barbies”, which oozes insincerity. Pink’s on safer ground riding the pumping pop-funk of “Secrets” and the title-track.

There's a pronounced shortfall of his usual joyous eclecticism here, with many pieces settling for basic repetitive sequences; some sound like little more than extended intros.

The songs rely on cringeworthy conceits like “Red, White & You” or rote expressions like “Sweet Louisiana”, while the refurbishing of the domestic abuse anthem “Janie’s Got A Gun” just tips it further over into queasy melodrama.

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

It’s been just over a year since Bieber released his worst album. He’s returned with his best.

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.

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

Babel bowls along with the ebullient energy one expects of Mumford & Sons, like a cider-soused hoedown at an after-hours lock-in. But while this works to the advantage of their more rousing sentiments, it tends to iron out the subtler creases in some of the songs.

The most surprising thing about Pixies’ first album in 23 years is that it holds so few surprises.

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

It's the same throughout, London relying on charm over content. But, in fairness, he makes it more fun than most.

Too many of these grooves are efficient but forgettable, and her vocal contributions likewise somewhat generic.

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

Love is a pleasant although occasionally overly earnest capsule collection of pop sounds where Diamantis proves herself to be the master of the “brief pause... and gentle drop” technique. ... Her voice skitters across songs with a frostiness reminiscent of Madonna’s Ray of Light era, and sometimes it feels like a lecture being delivered into the mirror: everyone’s just like you, no one’s happy, enjoy your life.

“The Satellites” opens the album with tart trumpets over staccato guitars, “To Us All” closes it with an oceanic excursion. In between are liquid pools of guitar and chattering keyboards.

The results evoke the fellowship of the emotionally bruised in a variety of ways.

20 songs that alternate between good and dreary.

John Martyn's valedictory recordings have a suitably weary presence that makes even such legendary laidback soporificos as J J Cale and Leonard Cohen seem positively sprightly by comparison.

As usual with Sawhney, it's typically eclectic, and surprisingly effective.