The resulting extended instrumental palette has brought a new depth to the arrangements but has added little transparency to Yorkston's often bewildering lyrics.

Skin is brilliant across the board.

Food for Worms sees Shame confidently embrace their flaws and resign themselves to the messy, beautiful chaos of their live shows. It’s all captured within this bedhead of a record.

The result is a series of huge-sounding, stadium-ready pop anthems of undeniable charm.

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

There are isolated moments of musical intrigue scattered here and there through the album.... But as 25 continues, it’s gradually swamped by the kind of dreary piano ballads that are Adele’s fall-back position.

Tales of a Grasswidow is easily CocoRosie's most satisfying, fully realised work so far.

Andre Williams is a renegade R'n B spirit who remains, in his seventies, as scurrilous as ever.

For his part, Daltrey matches Johnson every step of the way, fighting his corner just as fiercely as in his dayjob.

Combat Sports is a great return for The Vaccines, and an album that will soar at their live shows.

Whereas most 75-minute albums of short songs swiftly pall, Lux never bores because it's never making foreground demands on your attention.

The record is more fun than the lyrics suggest. Watt’s production flirts with Muse’s epic grandeur and the anthemic metal of a Red Rocks Oasis. ... But by the time he’s rhyming “asphyxiation, masturbation, degradation” on the Hawkins co-write “Degradation Rules” – the second Iommi appearance – things are getting a little ridiculous, and at over an hour the record drags.

As symbiotic as much of this album is, there are times when the combination of human and machine doesn’t entirely fit.

Despite her amateur standing--she never once supposed these tapes would be made public--there's a keen poetic sensibility at work.

Whatever style he uses on this first solo album in more than two decades, from country-blues to croon, rock’n’roll to reggae, he sustains that character as a unifying thread.

It's a more considered and persuasive analysis than most of his younger, grimier peers can offer.

The process of recovery shifts through numbness, melancholy and tentative hope in an admirably straightforward, touching manner that suggests Cohen’s previous tenure in edgy art-rockers S.C.U.M. was another world entirely.

Sometimes it suffers from Prince-like micromanagement, but when it succeeds, it's blissful.

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.

Although she’s got the makings of a great songwriter, she needs to push the sounds into sharper corners to give her narratives more distinctive definition. Because this album delivers many shades of grey but never the promised punch of black.

It can, at times, feel like you’re on an interminable carousel circling round and round again, but there are moments of pause. Every time you’re about to fall off the ride, a song will crop up grabbing your attention once more.

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

Bayley’s voice – light, airy, mournful – makes you think of Peter Pan if he were forced to grow up. Thinking of childhood in such analytical detail can throw up wonderful memories, sure, but it can bring out dark things, too – things that tend to hang around in later life. It makes for a complex, thoughtful and moving record.

Only much later, in “There Will Be a Reckoning”, does the familiar Bragg anger kick in significantly.... it's outnumbered here by more sensitive songs about things like relationship difficulties and dying.

Tegan and Sara’s last album, 2016’s Love You To Death, was a bold stadium-pop record; this one is less polished, but just as punchy. ... Most people read their teenage diary and cringe. With Hey I’m Just Like You, Tegan and Sara have painstakingly, tenderly, written theirs out again.

What she's come to realise, finally, on new Florence & The Machine album High As Hope, is that her voice is just as, if not more powerful when she holds back.

It's Rose's harmonies that make the album special: warm and breathy, they seem to sidle gently into position, rather than cut with razor precision.

Scott's overly melodramatic delivery sometimes gets in the way of the words, although his arrangements are for the most part respectful and apt.