Thea Gilmore's 70th birthday tribute takes the form of re-recording her favourite Dylan album in its entirety, triggered by her acclaimed 2002 cover of "I Dreamed I Saw St Augustine", which sustains its solemnity despite the inclusion of congas.

A viscerally entertaining album that never lingers for more than four minutes per song. Rock’n’roll isn’t dead: it’s just been sleeping.

Ellipsis finds Biffy Clyro reverting for the most part to the core blend of melody and heaviness that draws comparisons with Muse.

The calm, methodical “Gravity Wake” blends stately Moondog-like drums with undulating synths and relaxed solo horn lines that inescapably bring to mind Terry Riley. Elsewhere, the use of rhythmic, murmured vocables in “Glossolalia” recalls Steve Reich’s Music For 18 Musicians.

Dirty Jeans And Mudslide Hymns is full of typical John Hiatt tropes: old-timers and hard times, devotion and desperation, in roughly equal measure.

It's Tunng's most direct effort yet, eschewing the “folktronic” bricolage of albums like Good Arrows; but there's plenty happening beneath the surface.

Rebooting the euphoria of their 2004 debut, Funeral, WE is a big old blast of an album. One destined to lift the spirit, inflate the soul and get fans dancing giddily through the carnage of 2022.

Erykah Badu lends a childlike charm to the sunburnt fizz of Glasper’s bossa nova version of “Maiysha (So Long)”, with Miles’s trumpet shining through towards the end.

For all his production skills, he remains first and foremost a vocal stylist of considerable ability.

It’s a burly collection, with the band’s flanged guitars and proggy synths asserting their refusal to follow any set style, and Hayden Thorpe’s bristling vocals similarly stretching indie constraints; but when the only “new” track is jerry-rigged together from two old tracks, it all seems a bit unnecessary.

Producer Royal Trux's Neil Hagerty doesn't try to rein in Blumberg's more abstruse inclinations, but finds ways of unveiling their strange beauty.

Here, the abrupt shifts between ballad placidity and animated angst underscore the theme of changing course.

Cooder requires considerable forces to realise his amalgams of blues, rock, folk, reggae and Mexican music, and here his band is expanded by the extraordinary, shrill horns of the 10-piece La Banda Juvenil.

Set to scratchy, fractured beats and sound-montages, it’s a welcome dose of no-age hip-hop in direct line of descent from De La Soul.

Hawthorne's muse is steeped in '70s influences--notably falsetto and symphonic-soul giants like Curtis Mayfield and Barry White, while trailing threads of piercing lead guitar through songs like “Wine Glass Woman” and “Corsican Rose” bring to mind Ernie Isley's work on “Summer Breeze”.

Olafur Arnalds' third album, For Now I Am Winter, is an exemplary suite of Icelandic music, blending American minimalist techniques with European sensibilities.

It's a lovely, warm-hearted gem.

For Life Love Flesh Blood, Imelda May has hooked up with T-Bone Burnett and his failsafe session crew of tasteful interpretive talent to effect a shift away from boisterous rockabilly towards more sensual torch songs like “Call Me” and “Black Tears.”

An album of fresh pleasures is the pay-off, but don’t come looking to it for substance.

Unfortunately, outside of those songs [Humility, Hollywood, Tranz, Sorcererz, and Lake Zurich] (which would have made for an excellent EP) The Now Now falls short, the grit and grandiosity of other Gorillaz records is absent.

Urgent, upbeat, demanding and funky, Lipa is a finger-snap personified throughout Radical Optimism.

It's a surprisingly enjoyable transformation for some of the tunes.

The album features slow-burning grooves that build steadily from modestly minimal to euphorically exultant.

A varied arsenal of approaches, but barely a mis-step.

Judging by The Light Of The Sun, she's expending precious little energy on songwriting and recording, allowing her natural inclination to extemporise far too free a rein.

The depth of The Colorist’s percussive range is transformative, bringing explicit form to the simple expression of romantic excitement in “Jungle Drum”, and rendering the enchantment of the new song “When We Dance.”

No song sounds over-rehearsed, and plenty sound like they were laid down on the first take.

Here for It All doesn’t exactly shake things up, but it’s a pretty, polished affair all the same, Carey sitting comfortably on top of her sonic throne and uninterested in relinquishing it any time soon.