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.

Too often, the songs are shadowed by earlier interpreters.

An album that perhaps skips too easily from one style to another for its own good, though there are other sublime moments.

Yet as wretched as his characters often are, Cornog always affords them the dignity of their own volition.

Following the largely insipid twinklings of his Beady Eye, As You Were suggests that, given the right conditions and appropriate collaborators, Liam Gallagher could become a more potent force than expected--especially if he could broaden his musical outlook beyond such predictable parameters.

Repent Replenish Repeat follows in much the same vein as 2010's prickly The Logic of Chance: glitchy industrial-electro grooves and jerky, uncomfortable rhythm programmes, over which rapper Scroobius Pip inhabits the grey area between maverick articulacy and feral antipathy.

Former Lives shares similarities with Gibbard's Postal Service work; elsewhere his scattershot stylistic approach weakens songs.

Her casual observations on club life and love life tumble over each other with a light, mischievous touch that's refreshingly free of grating attitude.

Wonderful Wonderful is an album that doesn’t let the listener look forward to the next track, because the album is restlessly glancing backwards over its shoulder, haunted by past successes of The Killers, and the great artists who came before them.

While these are enjoyable enough tracks to soundtrack your day, there’s little of the lasting emotion or progression for which we know Beck.

Hands of Glory is a smaller, more intimate work than Andrew Bird's recent albums.

Saxophonist Lovano's third album with his two-drummer quintet is a very mixed affair.

His latest LP largely lacks killer tunes.

It's Wagner's mix of the enigmatic and the demotic that dominates, his songs fill of understated apothegms and startling lines.

The record is more fun than the lyrics suggest. Watt’s production flirts with Muse’s epic grandeur and the anthemic metal of a Red Rocks Oasis. ... But by the time he’s rhyming “asphyxiation, masturbation, degradation” on the Hawkins co-write “Degradation Rules” – the second Iommi appearance – things are getting a little ridiculous, and at over an hour the record drags.

Something Beautiful isn’t quite as crazy or groundbreaking as she seems to think, but its spirit of adventure encapsulates what we’ve come to know and love about one of our most frustrating yet endearing pop stars.

While not entirely successful, this high-level summit meeting of two giant talents from half a century ago confirms that neither of the principals’ distinctive talents has suffered serious decline.

Sometimes, bigger is not better: Giant Sand's Howe Gelb has often been most potent with minimal resources, which may explain why I'm slightly underwhelmed by this major project.

Laidback and tidy, but fun.

After the refreshing change furnished by 2014’s The London Sessions, things are pretty much back to normal for Mary J Blige on Strength Of A Woman, which finds the Queen Of R&B Reproach once again embattled by amorous treachery.

Sløtface are a pleasing antidote to the cluster of guitar bands being peddled in the UK, drawing more on the grunge of Wolf Alice or the Riot Grrrl attitude of Sleater Kinney. In some cases they try too hard to sound cool.

There are lots of little things to like about Little Mix’s third album.... But there are too many instances here of registers painfully over-reached, and uneasy compromises between emotion and arrangement.

There's an uneven texture to the project. It's okay, but only just.

Fallon is never going to escape the Springsteen comparisons that still cling to him like those Born to Run leathers, but this is solid, genuinely inspired songwriting that TGA fans will enjoy.

Set to a messy blend of waspish blues guitar and wild fiddle, it's a typically barbed, angry set.

It’s all too controlled and unambitious; and just aping Dylan’s wheeze doesn’t make it any more intriguing.

Barlow’s generally at his best in more mainstream territory; he’s essentially a classic pop singer-songwriter in the stalwart British style of McCartney and Elton John.

Tracks such as the languid instrumental “Easy Blues”--which lives up to its name--and “Earth Blues”, a slippery sci-fi number, are worth the price of admission.