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.

There's a consistency and homogeneity about the 11 tracks (seven from The Red Shoes, four from The Sensual World) which echoes her work on Aerial, and which lends the project a character entirely its own.

Friendly Fires' follow-up to their Mercury-nominated debut is a huge disappointment.

The best tracks are the more thoughtful reflections on youthful memories, such as "Illusion" and "Snap"; the worst is the turgid pomp-rock-rap crossover "Written in the Stars", ominously scheduled as his next single.

Norah Jones and Jack White sing on three tracks apiece, respectively languid and predatory, the end result being a short but perfectly-formed portal to a different state of musical mind.

It's a soothing, chillsome experience, though some tracks do strangle themselves in repetitive accretions.

With the slight caveat that Laurie's vocals never quite cast off their Englishness (and why should they?), this is a commendable effort which at its best furnishes considerable enjoyment.

Lyrically, there's a pervasive fascination with California outsider culture that soon palls, though the troubled relationship excavated in "Marked" suggests a deeper vein of inspiration may yet be mined.

It's still suffused with a retro 1960s vibe, but this time the garage-pop influences prevail, with a sizeable side-order of psychedelia courtesy of the edgy West Coast lead guitar that streaks tracks.

With Stone Rollin', he broadens his outlook to take in various other R&B styles, without shifting more than a few years either way.

Overall, Smother finds Wild Beasts hurdling that difficult third album with some aplomb.

He's no fool: the result is an even more potent clutch of instrumentals, punctuated with the occasional vocal from Sharon Jones and some surprising male singers, including The National's Matt Berninger and Lou Reed.

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.

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.

Not a party album.

With Helplessness Blues, Fleet Foxes triumphantly deliver on the promise of their popular debut, the album that helped establish folk-rock once again as a formidable commercial force rather than just a fringe interest.

Sadly, this is about as deep as their politics go on Hot Sauce Committee Part Two, the more articulate sentiments of To the 5 Boroughs having been largely abandoned in favour of fairly standard bring-the-noise, boast'n'diss hip-hop pablum.

He's keen to please, but what's remarkable about The Lady Killer is that he manages to avoid all the bubblebath boudoir-soul cliches that litter most R&B albums.

Taken from a show in Pittsburgh in September 1980, Live Forever is the last recorded concert by Marley and The Wailers, but while it represents them at the broadest extent of their appeal, it by no means captures the band at their most potent.

Lollipop is the best Meat Puppets album since the halcyon days of Up on the Sun and Mirage, full of scudding lysergic country-rock grooves bound in twisting skeins of dervish lead guitar.

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".

The densely-textured arrangements can get a bit stodgy in places, and the last few tracks slip into dreary bubblebath-boudoir mode, but Bootsy's blithe drawl, the vocal equivalent of a bubble, is usually around to lift one's spirits.

While the arrangements, built around producer Jay Joyce's shimmering guitars and Giles Reaves' keyboards and percussion, offer atmospheric settings for Emmylou's harmonies, the glistening, featherlight textures leave the album drifting in the doldrums.

Overall, it treads an uncertain line between bombast and sensitivity.

As a songwriter, Steve Earle is blessed with two apparently contradictory gifts: the ability to animate fictional lives, and a streak of cussed, lefty sincerity that gives bite to his truth-telling.

An interesting diversion, but not much more.

Zeffira's facility with reeds, keys and strings ensures constantly interesting textural shifts, while the combination of Badwan's imperious, Scott Walker-esque baritone and Zeffira's varied vocal stylings recalls not just Lee Hazlewood & Nancy Sinatra but even the effervescent charm of The B-52s.

Her casual observations on club life and love life tumble over each other with a light, mischievous touch that's refreshingly free of grating attitude.

Musically, the 400 Unit is equally at home on Little Feat-style swamp-funk, and more countrified collations of fiddle and mandolin.

An unmitigated disaster.

While a dozen singles will probably be lifted from Doggumentary, as an album experience it's an utter dogg's breakfast – as might be expected from a project that credits no fewer than 20 different producers and 35 engineers.

It's a gentle, woozy mood-scape in which nostalgia for the candyfloss summers of childhood shades imperceptibly into the sweet melancholy of encroaching autumn.

It seems like they just ran out of interest, and gave up.

The first Union Station album since 2004 is, as usual, something to treasure.

The three-year gap between albums will ensure this tops next week's album chart, but it's a drab, unrewarding experience.

The enjoyable only just outweighs the annoying on the opener "Never Let Me Go", where the auto-tuned vocal is a let-down.

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.

Apocalypse is Bill Callahan's best release in some while, sustaining a unity and intimacy of mood throughout.

The pair have weaved Anderson's songs together with various ambient elements--traffic noise, birdsong, the tinkle of teacups on saucers--to create a song-cycle that illuminates the exceptional in the everyday.

There's something about the combination of their shoegazey, distorted drones and James Allan's cracked, sulky Scots brogue that leaves these tales of emotional turmoil oddly ineffectual: even at its most fancifully Spectorian, it sounds strangely insubstantial. And as with bad acting, it's not persuasive enough to make one care.

Despite being further from their comfort zone, this second foray into theatrical composition, a ballet based around a Hans Christian Anderson parable, is vastly more adept, involving the deft interweaving of electropop and orchestral elements within a series of impressionistic tableaux sketching out the theme of conflict between creativity and destruction.

Their problem is a lack of originality: they never suggest they'll find a new angle on well-worn roots-rock modes.

This six-track soundtrack EP of songs by Alex Turner finds the Arctic Monkey in appropriately reflective, wistful mood, as befits the hero's fanciful view of himself as a bit of a thinker.

On his first album in 13 years, Robbie Robertson resumes his fascination with the great American mythos.

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

Though inspired by Grace Jones's new-wave disco torch-songs, the results are markedly dissimilar.

Burke's presence remains as commanding as ever even when the material sags.

She harmonises piquantly with herself over the languid guitar groove, and B.o.B's rap is pleasingly modest enough, too. The same can't really be said of such tracks as "Casualty Of Love" and "Rainbow", however, both singularly unimpressive songs tricked out with the showy vocal bling favoured by R&B divas as a substitute for genuine soul.

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.

A couple of tracks feature delicate tracery of classical guitar, but the most baffling feature of the album is the inclusion of three old tracks by Can, which possess a lightness, and dynamic character somewhat absent in the rest of the score.

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.

F.A.M.E. is equal parts bubblebath boudoir soul and more bullish beat-driven floor-fillers, tricked out with familiar guests like Timbaland and Justin Bieber, the most lively of which is Busta Rhymes's babble-rap over the Clangers-style bleeps of "Look at Me Now".

Comeback albums, it seems, are not just for other bands to do.

The Kentucky combo Cage the Elephant manage to find a new wrinkle on the face of US indie-punk, thanks to an enthusiasm for yoking catchy melodies to abrasive guitar riffs that recalls the Pixies.

But it's Alex Glasgow's lament "Close the Coalhouse Door" that packs the most powerful punch, the cyclical piano like a minimalist murmur behind Becky's poignant delivery.

It lacks both unity and quality.

This is a guitarists' mutual appreciation society affair that ought to be unbearable, but is actually gorgeous, thanks to the modest brilliance of those involved.

The air of exultant expectation recollected in tranquility pervades the entire album, with Garvey confiding memories and misgivings to the natural world in "The River" and "The Birds", the latter appointed "the keepers of our secrets", while the former ultimately washes them out to the west-facing sea.

This 2CD set features one disc of early rarities, and one of sundry items from Cash's Columbia catalogue--not the most comfortable combination, but not without interest.

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

There are moments on Degeneration Street that suggest Dears' creative mainspring Murray Lightburn is hoping to effect an Arcade Fire-style vault from indie saltmines to popularity; but it's all too little, and at five albums into their career, too late for that.

The fingering and virtuoso touches, the deft harmonics, the subtle string-bends are all delivered with minimal fuss throughout, whether it's a solo piece like the wistful "Dery Miss Grsk", the Bach transposition "Cello Prelude In G", which works so well with his instrument or the jaunty ragtime of "Ugly James".

Now it's here, and it's a bit of a letdown.

Certainly, the recurrent themes of conclusion, starting over and rebuilding do lend it a muscular sense of purpose.

It's their most cohesive album in some time.

The only mis-step on the album is "Boeing 737", a pounding, splashy stomp whose brash incoherence perhaps disguises a commentary on the twin towers attacks. It seems brutish and crude set alongside the rest of the album, which otherwise has the kind of stylistic and atmospheric unity that reminds one of what albums can offer that no other format can match.

Todd Snider has the kind of audience rapport that comes only through years of one-night stands and the confidence that builds in one's character – even if that character is of an inveterate ne'er-do-well peacenik, wryly proud of his inability to grow old gracefully.

Wagner's hesitant delivery is poignantly underscored by Tidwell's more emotive phrasing, while the arrangements of neat picking and weeping fiddle are applied with customary understatement.

Blessed improves upon 2008's lacklustre Little Honey simply because it boasts a better set of songs, most of which are treated to Williams's signature style of soul-tinged country-blues, using organ and pedal-steel guitar to light her sandpaper vocal rasp.

Beady Eye may be just Oasis minus Noel, but this debut is rather better than the past few Oasis albums, if sadly no more innovative.

Yet as wretched as his characters often are, Cornog always affords them the dignity of their own volition.

It has everything the Adele album lacks: real emotional insight, couched in genuinely soulful arrangements bristling with imagination.

The simpler arrangements allow more room for Rhys's sleek harmonies to drive his whimsical wordplay: accordingly, the album has the lush, beguiling charm of a sun-kissed soft-rock album by The Beach Boys or The Young Rascals.

Arbouretum deal in an odd blend of folk and heavy rock, these seven tracks trudging along like a deep-sea diver traversing the sea bed in ten-league boots.

Like Picasso, he acknowledges that the chief enemy of creativity is good taste--which is just as well, since it's not a quality with which he seems over-burdened on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. For which we should all be thankful.

The King of Limbs sounds like the bastard offspring of dubstep and Nico Muhly, the brilliant composer whose string and choral arrangements inhabit the open spaces between contemporary classical and art-rock.

It's a dub reimagining that takes the material further out, into a soundscape whose fractured dubstep tones, sped-up samples and drum'n'bass beats only occasionally work in its favour.

The secret is their infallible way with a tune: tracks such as "Get Away" and the single "Georgia" possess a beguiling melodic charm that illuminates the lo-fi boy/girl vocal delivery of Blumberg and his sister Ilana, bringing uplift where once all might have been gloom.

He doesn't care whether you want it or not, he's going to do it anyway. And How to Compose... confirms that he undoubtedly still loves music. The problem is, it's usually somebody else's music,

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.

It's ultimately hard not to like an album that features not one but two epiphanies, one experienced lying on the "Roof of Your Car" staring at the stars, while in album closer "Lock the Locks" a dream prompts Skinner's sudden change of career--an event engagingly depicted as an office farewell party.

The arrangements are pleasurable enough, less rootsy than before, with some skilled use of orchestration; but it's a shame to find such a gifted songwriter sounding so gullible.

On what may be her best album, Polly Harvey offers a portrait of her homeland as a country built on bloodshed and battle, not so much a police state as a nation in thrall to military endeavour, however impotent and wasteful that has become.

Potential affection for this self-titled debut is likely to depend on how one takes this and similarly twee sentiments.

Go-Go Boots is the promised "R&B Murder Ballad Album" recorded concurrently with last year's The Big To-Do, and it's every bit as good as that description suggests.

A sense of awestruck wonder permeates tracks such as "Swallowed by the Night", though when Barthmus tries to deal in more human terms, with the inverse "Ebony & Ivory" schtick of "Shared Piano", the results are less successful.

Slightly laconic, slightly ironic, ["No Problem"] makes for a brilliant contrast with the production duo's galloping stutter-riff groove, heralding a run of crunching fuzz-guitar riffs that brings to mind the UK big-beat heyday of The Prodigy.

It's easily the best work Diddy's been involved with in his entire career.

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.

[There are] some decent moments on this debut album.

Things begin well enough with the single "Rolling in the Deep", with its thumping piano quadruplets and gospelly backing vocals, and continues reasonably with the galumphing Tom Waits-style arrangement of "Rumour Has It"; until, two-thirds of the way through the song, it grinds to a halt for a slower, torchy middle eight.

The T-Bone Burnett-produced Low Country Blues is Gruntin' Gregg Allman's first album in 14 years, and it's the best work he's done since the Allman Brothers' Seventies heyday.

Kiss Each Other Clean is much more focused and homogenous, but there's still a lingering sense of abundant inspiration, eager to carry the songs off to different lairs.

This Jack White-produced comeback album suggests there can be few septuagenarians keener on raising hell.

Like some hibernating agit-prop agency awakening to meet the needs of these hard times, Gang of Four are in typically brusque form on their first new material for 16 years.

Tracks like the delinquent reminiscence "How Life Changed" and the mea culpa duet with Chris Brown, "Get Back Up", teeter queasily on the cusp of boast and apology. But you have to admire the gall of a repeat offender brazen enough to feature a quote from Helen Keller in his lyric booklet.

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.

It's still northern Europe that dominates their music.