Compared to Chase and Status's fizzing 2011 debut, No More Idols, this sounds creatively knackered.

Ultimately, there’s something genuinely courageous and admirable about Cyrus’s ambitions with Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz. Sure, it’s way too long, and flamboyantly self-indulgent; but it’s free, and it’s fun.

Halfway through, as guest rappers stop littering the proceedings, the album does a 90-degree shift and becomes a banging club affair, stuffed with David Guetta-style synth-stompers.

You’ve Always Been Here is a carefree celebration, a win-win; the band have fun unloading on such un-precious tracks and the songs prove themselves sturdy enough to withstand the punishment. In rock or classic soul circles, it's guaranteed to raise a smile.

Some of the better songs lack that adhesive zeitgeist quality that used to be the group's stock-in-trade. But at its best, there's enough variety and invention to recall The Beatles, sometimes directly. [Review of UK release The Future Is Medieval]

A few decent songs may be lurking behind all the sonic detritus; but perhaps they ought to ditch the multitracks and get themselves a ukulele.

What's happened is a slight scaling-down of Ditto's approach, so as not to burst the hems of the more restrained arrangements. It's actually worked to her advantage.

Through it all, Middleton somehow locates the appropriate settings for Shrigley’s perverse poems (or is it the other way round?) with charging techno pulses animating the hysterical protests of a teenager appalled at the vandal antics of a “Houseguest”, and chuntering stomp-beats illustrating the grotesque primitivism of a homicidal “Caveman.”

Expect reassurance rather than revelation and you’ll find the lesser-worn pages of the American songbook elegantly traced.

Competently organised and confidently delivered, it’s an engaging set, but ultimately, like all live albums, essentially a souvenir.

Olly Murs might have a lovely on-screen personality, but only the merest glimmers of character are allowed to shine through the swaddling retro-pop arrangements of In Case You Didn't Know.

London with the Lights On is pretty thin fare, with too many tracks collapsing under the weight of excess sass.

MS MR deal in a similar kind of blandly alienated, metrosexual pop to Hurts, with Lizzy Plapinger's sultry-soulful vocals allied to Max Hershenow's electronic pop arrangements.

Strangeland marks a sad reversion to Coldplay territory after Keane's tentative experimentation on recent releases.

It's 16 years since Mariah Carey's first Christmas album, and there's nothing here to suggest she's developed significantly since then.

It’s a pretty decent album, with their trademark melange of rap stylings at their most spikily effective, each track switching between self-promotion, street-crime narrative, social commentary and cosmological speculation as different members take the mic.

The Zolas are a Canadian indie band whose outsider-pop songs evoke a keen sense of disjunction with the modern world.

Tangerine Reef gives a musical voice to these alien coral creatures and their aquatic world. If only it were a more mellifluous voice.

There is evident ambition on Play, but not a holistic or thorough one. Probing attempts to broaden Sheeran’s sound are offset by melodic and lyrical choices that are too safe.

It's hardly groundbreaking stuff, but McCartney undeniably has an ear for melody.

There are successes here... but the overall effect can be gruelling.

There's an assured balance of passion and restraint in his takes on "I'd Rather Go Blind" and "I Only Have Eyes For You", though his "Lonely Avenue" lacks Ray Charles' relaxed slouch.

Jay-Z, being Jay-Z, spends most of the time banging on about how rich he is, how brilliant it is being married to Beyoncé, and how irritating it is that some people don't find him quite as wonderful as he does.

Alongside some so-so newer material, this latest set revisits earlier triumphs in JD's new style, which owes more to MOR jazz than rock or country. It's not as successful as his 2009 comeback If The World Was You, being something of a halfway house.

It’s an OK effort overall, but far from Kelly’s best work; and it really goes to pieces in the five bonus tracks of the deluxe edition, which spin off in all directions

The absence of those usual big arena hooks proves critical through the rest of the album, when the songs don’t quite hit home.

For while there’s no denying that Low In High School is more musically exploratory than usual, drawing from glam rock, electropop, tango and Tropicalismo, the singer himself has rarely exhibited such a grating combination of spite and self-pity. ... The album’s lengthy centrepiece “I Bury The Living”, an odious slab of trundling guitar bombast, lambasts as “just honour-mad cannon-fodder” the work of soldiers whom he presumes are too stupid to understand the wars they’re involved in.

As before, echoes of classic Primal Scream/Stone Roses psych-rock underpin the grooves, which lope and stride infectiously.