They’re best when they work together, with the charming simplicity of the island-flavoured “Feel About You” and beach-strolling “Red Sun” contrasting nicely with the tart, twitchy urgency of “Too Far Gone”.

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

Despite this obvious recommendation, the more radio-friendly follow-up still proves hard to love.

It’s pleasant enough, though listeners may experience a twinge or two of deja vu.

Way To Blue avoids the usual patchwork-quilt pitfalls of style and quality that afflict most tribute albums.

Behind the rococo charm lurks a subtle emotional power.

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.

There is something admirable about the fact they stay so firmly planted in their lane. Medicine at Midnight is unlikely to win over many new fans, but it will make the existing ones happy.

Overall, it’s an entertaining, multifaceted set, albeit weakened by a tendency to pursue slim ideas and dead-end notions.

It's tasteful but a touch bloodless.

Things go slightly awry with the stodgy prog-rock textures of “Clockwatching” and “The 6th Wave”, but it's the work of a band obsessed with a multitude of musical directions, which has to be A Good Thing.

Though most effective as a droll raconteur, Snider here relies on covers of songs by the likes of Gillian Welch and Lucinda Williams; fortunately, guitar wizard Neal Casal is on top form.

Paranoia, Angels, True Love is too long and rambling to bring Christine and the Queens any new fans, or much action on the singles chart. Its self-indulgence may even tire some existing fans. But if you give it time to grow its wings, it can really lift you up.

The narratives are dependably punchy through this record, and they’re carried by solidly danceable Eighties and Nineties club beats. Not an original sound, then. But one that allows her more challenging or subversive thoughts to slide slyly into a night out on the town.

Ignoring the diabolical “Saviour”, which sounds like a hundred other Nashville-based bands song (featuring the chorus: “Thinking I could save you, I’ll never be your saviour”), the results are much more interesting on the second half.

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

The limp, autotuned love song “Happy” and drearily positivist “Good Morning” are lazy nods to the mainstream, but elsewhere Wretch is better served by the dark sparkle of arrangements featuring grimy sub-bass synths and itchy electro beats tinted with eerie vocal samples, thumb-piano and synthetic pan-pipes.

Cropper's needle-sharp guitar fills best demonstrate the immense debt the MGs man owes to the 5 Royales songwriter and guitarist Lowman Pauling.

Produced by the Coens with T Bone Burnett, the album captures well the sanctimony, bogus bucolicism and beatnik romanticism that characterised the age, along with that tang of “revolution in the air” (to quote its most successful adherent).

With Different Days, though, they seem to have settled into a sort of not-quite-mainstream indie-rock tinted with neo-psychedelic touches.

However bleak, there's no denying the delicate mood created by [Kozelek's] charm.

In truth, the move towards country music made on Younger Now is fraught with potholes that she and producer Oren Yoel rarely manage to avoid. The main problem is the half-heartedness of the move.

Her Scots brogue addresses the issue of “who you’ll be one day” with husky urgency, yoked to jaunty jangle-rock and prancing piano-pop which doesn’t anchor her in too parochial a terrain, giving Peroxide a broad appeal potentially akin to Ellie Goulding.

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.

It’s a remarkable departure for Amidon, who also eschews his usual traditional repertoire in favour of original material, albeit haunted by similar hints of fate, animism and violence; though the overriding impression is best summed up in a phrase about “haphazard words found in drifting conversation”.

It’s indicative of the taste for extemporisation--elsewhere reflected in the funeral lamentation “Bullets In The Street And Blood”, which yokes an explicit message to a desultory instrumental drift--which renders this album less compelling than 2012’s Landing On A Hundred.

It’s a genial set.

The widescreen south-western ambience is stippled with intriguing touches, like the shruti box and bowed guitar droning through “Gallop On The Run”, and the rhythmic rattling chains of the death ballad “Lay My Lily Down”; though the most moving performance is Weir’s plaintive solo piece “Ki-Yi Bossie”, oozing empathy for a reluctant penitent alcoholic.