Despite his desire to move more towards pop on this third album, Robert Ellis can’t prevent his country roots showing through.

It's Springsteen territory, occupied with pride in songs like “21st Century Blues” and the elegiac closer “Remember Me”.

It's an album as hard to pin down as fog, but redeemed by moments of transcendent beauty.

The results are often enjoyable and always interesting, with the 11-minute journey of “A3”, in particular, navigating an angular, monochromatic turmoil akin to an Arctic ice field.

With Build Me Up from Bones, Sarah Jarosz restores an earthy inventiveness to folk music--despite the violin and cello of her touring bandmates Alex Hargreaves and Nathaniel Smith tweaking the bluegrass settings with classical flavours that reflect the singer’s conservatory training

The results are quirkily, unexpectedly appealing.

Throughout, the band’s gorgeous harmonies temper the sombre mood.

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.

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

A frustrating experience overall.

With the hindsight afforded by this monumental 17-disc career retrospective, he seems somewhat less than The One, an idiosyncratic talent undermined by MOR inclinations.

Brian Jonestown Massacre’s 18th album might not be breaking any ground, or sitars, but 15 years after Newcombe nearly destroyed himself, it’s good to hear him sound so self-assured.

I Am Easy to Find feels like an old friend you’re pleased to keep around--even if, had you been introduced today, you wonder if you’d have been compelled to make the effort.

She’s still in her prime, as you can tell when she delivers a knockout vocal on the guitar-backed ballad “Broken Like Me”. .... But for all her promises to show us the “real her”, it’s a struggle to see it in the slick and sexy production of tracks such as “Mad in Love” or “Rebound”.

Across two discs there are too many mediocre versions, most revering the polite preciosity of the original Laurel Canyon folk-rock settings.

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.

It is an intriguing, often brilliant, though occasionally awful record.

Deceptively uneasy listening at times, but worth the effort.

Lyrically, the album does fall short, but then Sheeran has spent over a decade trading in vague yet universal issues. ... For the most part, Subtract is testament to the old adage that less is, often, much more.

In typical Gelb manner, it’s wide-ranging in styles and standards: he didn’t get this far by excessive quality control, so some parts have a loose feel, while firmer parameters prevail elsewhere.

Between the piano-led dreamscape of “Red Snakes”, the shimmering electronica of “Bloom at Night” and the pop-leaning “We Cannot Resist”, Animal feels restless right up until its six-and-a-half-minute closer “Phantom Limb”, which concludes with Marling’s autotuned voice reading out the album’s credits.

Nash is a maestro and, although less experimental than previous efforts, his cosmic almost dreampop Americana featured here provides proof that music comes in many sounds as well as names.

Rockstar is so long that it can feel like a bit of a slog.

Ultimately, however, despite the fizzing electronic undercarriage applied to most tracks on Electronic Earth, Labrinth's real forte may turn out to be the more traditional, earthbound musical skills.

While there’s a moreish quality to the off-key guitar of “Imperfect for You” and an unexpectedly golden flush of brass on “Ordinary Things”, Grande’s delicately conversational tone is often left having to compensate for her lack of strong melodic snags.

Not an easy listen, but a satisfying one.

SKINS is another fiery blast of catharsis, a largely metaphor-free space where depression isn't hinted at poetically but invited to throw down. ... There are no songs as refined or showing such potential as ?'s “infinity (888)” and “Moonlight”, and many of them feel like half ideas.

The Cautionary Tales... is wracked with recrimination, remorse and self-doubt. It can be bleak--the electric piano of “Lockdown Hurricane” seems a sound soaked in self-pity--but the intimate beauty of the strings and woodwinds sweetens the pill.