Produced by her son Cisco Ryder, it’s a family album of elegant songs, well-framed in folk-rock settings.

It’s a happy surprise to find a fresh, shiny energy-driving CWPHF. The tunes are sparkier, tempos more varied and the sonic textures cheerier, as though the band were given a clean shave and a hot lemon-scented towel.

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.

Having spent so long exploring the intensely personal, she struggles here to find the right tone for more public matters.

For someone who claims she has no words left, she manages to say rather a lot.

It may be a slightly face-flattening wind tunnel of love The Killers offer. But they still have the gale force sincerity required to blow your socks off.

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.

Valve Bone Woe is a lovingly crafted collection of covers – a surprising, successful new endeavour by an artist evidently still keen to challenge herself.

Yes, nostalgia is a fairly generic formula. But listened to as a whole, the album positively thrums with sonic invention, managing to feel both fresh and full of intrigue. Khan once again demonstrates a knack for uncanny storytelling.

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

III is Banks’s most cohesive album to date because she’s no longer restricting herself to exploring one feeling at a time.

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.

For three tracks of low-slung ambient funk (the title track), lounge jazz (“Running Game [Son of a Slave Master]”) and tired orchestral soul (“Born 2 Die”), every low expectation of the funk-pop legend’s late-career cast-offs is lived down to. ... Then he rediscovers his imaginative peak-era verve and Welcome 2 America becomes an unexpected blast.

Wu-Tang's most reliable rhymer here hooks up with Toronto hip-hop jazz trio Badbadnotgood, whose vibes, piano and grooves, augmented occasionally with strings, drape a 1970s symphonic-soul sound around his street missives. [21 Feb 2015, p.18]

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.

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.

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.

There’s something grippingly wide-eyed and manic about her performances here and on the mounting hysteria of Beth Orton’s “Alexandria”, while more reserved shades of mental imbalance are evoked in “Window”, where the petrifying effect of obsession is considered over a stealthy, furtive arrangement.

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

There is a lot to like about Rare. But it never quite gets out from beneath the shadow of half a decade of behemothic bangers.

The shadow of Seventies Krautrock looms large over Danish psych-rockers Pinkunoizu, judging by The Drop, their splendidly kosmische second album.

Balanced by bitter barbs at modern snivellers and shysters in Time of Dust itself, the result is a compact but concentrated dose of poison.

There’s a calm, reflective quality, allied to an intense involvement, about both players’ solo work, of which My Foolish Heart may be Towner’s best since his sublime 1973 debut Diary.

On False Alarm, though, they offer something that proves they’re still worth paying attention to.

At 14 tracks, the album is one of Fredo’s longest and yet it still manages to feel concise. Independence Day is another push forward for Fredo – a mostly solid follow-up from a rapper continuing to hone his voice.

Some tracks on The Good Witch serve as incantations to manifest a better lover; others spit curses on past ones. All of them, though, convincingly set Peters up as the next musician to confidently march us into another sad girl summer.

Mostly, the album comprises a series of scuttling bleepscapes lent individual character by unorthodox instrumental detail.

Romance remains their core theme, although “Rosebud” strikes out for the harsher terrain of thoughtless cruelty.