The arrangements are suitably bombastic: there’s a theremin camping up the pub piano on his cover of Laura Nyro’s ”Wedding Bell Blues”. His version of Bruce Wayne Campbell’s (aka Jobriath) 1973 glam stomp “Morning Starship” really sells the wry/cosmic lyrics about a girl picking a rocket’s lock with her hairpin. ... Morrissey’s take on Joni Mitchell’s “Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow” is leaden jazz karaoke, stripping the original of all its haze and drift. The electro-stomp/harp, fading to reflective piano fade-out of his reworking of Melanie Safka’s ”Some Say I Got Devil”, makes a joke of his lifelong self-pity.

Coup De Grace is Kane’s best work to date: punchy, cohesive and lots of fun.

The standard dips slightly in the later stages, but the grooves throughout are sleek and snappy, and CeeLo himself has rarely sounded better.

Dan Croll’s follow-up to Sweet Disarray suffers from a kind of creeping anonymity: immediately after hearing it, it’s virtually impossible to recollect the salient features of any track.

Now it's here, and it's a bit of a letdown.

Over brutish electro-stomps and fizzy pop trifles every bit as sickly as that suggests, Marina's shrill Violet Elizabeth Bott inflections proclaim her emptiness.

With Peace Trail, Neil Young slips into self-parody again, with a set of desultory peacenik songs too simplistic and patronising to be taken seriously.

It’s wearily repetitive and almost aggressively underwhelming.

Though neither particularly new nor classic, Iggy Azalea’s debut album proper (following two self-released mixtapes) reveals enough smarts and skills to sustain the Aussie rapper’s momentum.

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.

Saturday Night, Sunday Morning is a cohesive enough follow-up, but Bugg still seems conflicted about the sound that first propelled him into the spotlight. ... It rankles when this album was put together by a team best known for the music he claims to despise.

Music of The Spheres isn't Coldplay at their Viva la Vida finest, even if their undeniably upbeat attitude remains hard to resist. The Pythagoreans believed that music purified the soul. This album offers a more superficial spiritual shower. A fleeting invigoration.

The riffs throughout this album are catchy enough to keep the beanie heads nodding along. But producer Travis Barker (Blink 182) repeatedly fills out the sound to the extent that the exposing angularity required to express true anxiety is lost.

With his fifth studio album, Timberlake isn’t re-inventing the wheel, but he solidly continues to experiment with R&B, funk, pop and soul, with Americana creating an interesting layer.

Lavigne might not have found a musical identity that truly becomes her, but Head Above Water is an effective, and occasionally affecting, album.

Ultimately, however, despite the fizzing electronic undercarriage applied to most tracks on Electronic Earth, Labrinth's real forte may turn out to be the more traditional, earthbound musical skills.

Kylie’s Christmas is wearyingly hard going at times.

They may talk it up as a brave new step forward, but their first album in over eight years can't really be viewed as other than a retrograde move for Jane's Addiction.

Walker drizzles bluesy, Hozier-like soul bombast and nebulous folk tunes with Bond strings and EDM sizzles; tracks so thin and flavourless they go down without chewing.

The Editors here step backwards into the crepuscular netherworld of Eighties new wave from whence they took their original inspiration.

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.

A fond indulgence, perhaps, but there’s nothing on Déjà Vu that will take your breath away like “I Feel Love.”

"Whistle", takes a sidestep with its acoustic guitar and tedious single-entendre hook, but there are plenty more brutal stompers to spare on Wild Ones.

Maroon 5's sudden decline with the Mutt Lange-produced Hands All Over seems unlikely to be significantly overturned by the lacklustre Overexposed.

The new instrumentation affords a more nuanced approach, from the thrumming bass, piano, tom-toms and subtly tingling guitar evoking the resolute support of “Broad-Shouldered Beasts”, and the keening, spacious synth textures of “Tompkins Square Park”, to the unison guitar thrash that opens “The Wolf.”

Green's delivery is too Estuary-Eminem, scattershot hip-hop asperity snarled out with a mockney menace that is too secondhand to be effective.

They've certainly lost much of their vocal character to the dreaded auto-tune, without gaining much by recompense.

The result is a series of half-formed, indifferently performed tracks on which even gifted guitarist Hugh Harris struggles to locate the inspired touches that made Konk so impressive.