On the gorgeous Jardine/Wilson weeper “Tell Me Why”, the doleful nostalgia is surprisingly clear-eyed.... Sadly, “that thing” goes missing on Kacey Musgraves’ kite-weight offering and electro throwaway “Runaway Dancer”, fronted by Capital Cities’ Sebu Simonian, with synths via McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime”.

The format sustains on subsequent tracks; but despite its apparent concreteness, the music is surprisingly warm.

The enjoyable only just outweighs the annoying on the opener "Never Let Me Go", where the auto-tuned vocal is a let-down.

Beth Ditto’s debut album is a bit of a mixed bag.

Van’s fellow Brit-blues icons Georgie Fame, Chris Farlowe and Paul Jones take turns to duet, in a relaxed manner which exemplifies the overall mood: comfortable rather than inspirational.

After a while the regretful, melancholy tone wearies one's sympathies.

It's not a bad album as much, but to anyone familiar with Lynch's other work, it's entirely predictable in sound and style.

They’ve formed their own blueprint in which the messages they purvey and the grandiose shows they stage are our main point of interest, but the music, production-wise, falls a little by the wayside when it comes to breaking new ground.

Hewson’s songwriting is definitely up to snuff, although occasionally lapses into cliches.

This throws most of one's attention on the vocals, always the most engagingly evanescent aspect of their sound.

With their lyrical focus on teen sex, money and the misplaced glamour of crime, at times it's like “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”, for boys.

Styles has opened himself up, as best he can, to his audience, and by gathering a solid team around him to help achieve that he’s created an immersive, well-produced collection of songs that isn’t trying to prove anything in particular to anyone.

As might be expected, the favourites chosen by Mark Kozelek for his covers album are predominantly those reflecting cloudy, sometimes ambivalent emotional responses.

Throughout, he's supported by Stooges guitar riffing of brutal directness and simplicity, occasionally fattened by the horns that lend an apt touch of soul sleaze to the latter track.

Oddly, there’s nothing here from Echo & The Bunnymen, despite the inclusion of borderline cases like The Damned, The Mission and Adam And The Ants, and a host of lesser bands creating the musical equivalent of smeared mascara. But there’s a broad range of tangential directions sheltering under the otherwise welcoming umbrella of Silhouettes & Statues.

It’s not bad, as such, but like Primal Scream it promises more than it delivers.

The melancholy mood pervades throughout, into the itchy, insect flurries of Penderecki's Polymorphia, for 48 strings, and Greenwood's 48 Responses To Polymorphia.

Sleep Well Beast, like all The National’s albums, occupies troubled territory. These are songs about the fleeting impermanence of joy, compared to the lingering bruise of despair, and how hard it is to live in this unfairly weighted emotional space. It’s a struggle embodied in Matt Berninger’s enervated, murmurous baritone.

As usual with Sawhney, it's typically eclectic, and surprisingly effective.

Sadly, the decision to tell Feltrinelli's story in the same period technopop music as Stainless Style sabotages its impact.

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.

Secure behind the protective pop wall erected by producers such as Max Martin and the ubiquitous Greg Kurstin, there’s little room for originality here. Which may be for the best, given the mid-album limpness imposed by the gratingly wistful, cello-draped childhood yearning of “Barbies”, which oozes insincerity. Pink’s on safer ground riding the pumping pop-funk of “Secrets” and the title-track.

The blues and soul power are real, even as racial lines are leered and sneered at, the sort of ballsiness that could make rock breathe freely again.

If the solutions offered are sometimes better than expected, they’re also, frequently, tentative and tired.

In some cases, as in "Cloud on My Tongue", the orchestrations serve as little more than swaddling blankets. But the more thoughtful rearrangements can be transformative.

Whenever thoughts here turn to love, the results are not pretty.... But when antipathy rules, things go with a fizzy enthusiasm that’s quite infectious.

Being F&M, they can’t help adding funky, syncopated twitches to break up the four-square march occasionally.

There’s a confidence and flexibility to his disparate themes.