It remains to be seen whether the band can transcend their influences and develop a sound that’s solely theirs.

His facility with the form is evident on songs like “Easy To Love”, which aptly has the smooth, easy manner of a standard, and more dramatically with “On The Waterfront”, which renders solitude in epic fashion. ... Elsewhere, he reverts to form with the rolling blues arrangement of “Love This Way”, with his signature piano to the fore, and terse blues guitar punctuating his account of being “lost inside the darkness and the howling wind”.

Babel bowls along with the ebullient energy one expects of Mumford & Sons, like a cider-soused hoedown at an after-hours lock-in. But while this works to the advantage of their more rousing sentiments, it tends to iron out the subtler creases in some of the songs.

While their retreads of "Robot" and "Thursday" come perilously close to "Bohemian Rhapsody", the makeovers of Kelis's "Acapella" and Sparks' "The No. 1 Song in Heaven" are brilliant.

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

The more often she changes, and the broader she spreads her net musically, the less distinctive her art becomes.

Tea for the Tillerman has been updated with the aim of drawing attention and fans from a new generation. Whether these fuller versions will attract new listeners is debatable. However, there are certainly surprises here.

The fairly routine nature of the backing tracks means that The Fifth lacks some of the distinctive berserker spirit that characterised its predecessors.

Produced by Sturgill Simpson and David Ferguson, the arrangements offer a feisty take on bluegrass mountain music which sets off Childers’ perkily engaging delivery splendidly.

“Windows”, with its eerie synths and squawking delivery, recalls the dark psychedelia of Cypress Hills’ 2018 record, Elephants on Acid. But that then jumps to skittery R&B with “I’ll Take You On”. Nothing joins together. Brockhampton don’t sound self-aware as much as self-conscious.

Bruno Mars is a talented chap, he's forced to demean his abilities by echoing other artists' former glories on Unorthodox Jukebox, whose title all but gives the game away.

Gently wrought from strands of acoustic guitar, mandolin, violin and harp, encountering the genteel Demolished Thoughts after Thurston Moore's more abrasive work with Sonic Youth is akin to hearing Paris 1919 after John Cale's rampaging Velvet Underground period.

It’s pleasantly – if forgettably – soporific. The sort of family motorway album that tired parents can hum along to without waking the kids in the back.

Though the Nashville experiment is finally too half-hearted for the desired transformation, “Shelby ’68” mines Melbourne memories for a more personalised rural makeover.

Although both the solid, retro stylings of The Love Invention and the more delicately dreamy Flux contain some lovely melodies and beautifully detailed production, the woman herself seems less edgily present than she while haunting 2000’s “Lovely Head” or on 2003’s “Strict Machine”.

“Cold Little Heart” builds from piano and the merest shiver of strings to a Morricone-esque pitch of intensity, before Kiwanuka himself arrives five minutes in. It’s a big, powerful statement of intent that the rest of the album doesn’t quite live up to.

It's a perfunctory affair, further fragmented on my download version by the muting of Wayne's stream of expletives, which renders large parts of it unintelligible.

The opening “Rebel” sets the tone with a country-style tale of how a good-hearted man’s attempt to live up to his father’s ideals backfires to leave him a criminal, losing his beloved’s respect and affection in the process. From there, the journey swings between ebullient celebrations of life and sombre tales of misfortune, with the shadow of Springsteen looming large over songwriter Eric Earley’s material.

Wu Block suffers from the absence of a few vital presences, in particular Wu Tang producer the RZA.

Soothing stuff; but there’s too little variety to counteract the general tendency towards stasis.

"Moonlit Car Chase" and "Base 64 Love" come perilously close to generic technopop.

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.

In between, there’s nimble bluegrass picking on the chipper two-step “The Wind” Less welcome are Caribbean incursions like the tourist-reggae drivel that is “Island Song”.

The combination of indistinct vocals and the band’s preference for meandering charm over more decisive structures tends to sap the music of potency.

The Lost Sirens actually bests its parent album, which was not New Order's finest hour.

Smith’s vocals are, of course, beautiful. Creamy and curvaceous; liquid with emotion. But I often feel their voice is searching for tangier tunes to wrap that molten wax around. Without any sharpness to offset it, listening to the repeated wobbly rise of Smith’s lovely, dollopy notes can feel like the aural equivalent of watching a lava lamp.

It’s a fascinating journey, presaged by Cluster’s 1974 shift from avant-garde to pop with “Caramel”, taking in the pulsing minimalism of Monoton’s “Tanzen & Singen”, the simplistic electropop of Die Gesunden’s “Die Gesunden Kommen” and the more sophisticated soundscapes of Yello, Vangelis and Klaus Schulze.

Courage is a force to be reckoned with. It seems unlikely that more than a few of its tracks will jostle their way onto Dion’s setlist, given the decades of power ballads they have to compete with. But those that do will make their mark.