Robinson’s blues-rock background gives the CRB a soulful edge evident here in the funk shuffle “Behold The Seer”, where liquid guitar licks and quacking clavinet carry his invocation to “put on your dancing shoes, we got nothing to lose, it’s only space and time”.

It’s the overall cool/warm Tropicalismo tone that’s most engaging about Mellow Waves, established through the light accretion of sparse piano, percussion, synth and guitar parts supporting his soft vocal on opener “If You’re Here”.

The free rein afforded by this latest solo effort renders most of these 15 tracks unrecognisable as songs.

Unlike their earlier tyro works, the simplicity is rarely matched by killer tunes on this album, which yokes together the first-ever stereo mix of Wild Honey with a tranche of outtakes and fragments, and an extra CD of efficient but uninspiring live performances.

For his debut as Mr Jukes, former Bombay Bicycle Club frontman Jack Steadman uses deftly-applied jazz samples, restoring his youthful interest in that genre after years in the indie salt-mines.

The quiet piano pieces of Eirenic Life are intriguingly low-key.

The group’s most ambitious work yet. ... Elsewhere, “The 55 Quintessence” castigates “fascist terrorists with hashtags”, while a modicum of counterbalance is provided by the romantic throbs of “Julian’s Dream” and especially “Effeminence”, a hypnotically shuffling, sensuous piece which demonstrates that Quazarz is just as vulnerable to the lure of the ladies.

The group’s most ambitious work yet. ... As if heard through alien ears, the arrangements have a weird, woozy character, with the abstract beats and trickly, liquid synth parts punctuated by unusual instruments like the bass clarinet on the opening “Since CAYA.”

The Queen Of Hearts, a sublime collection of old songs given contemporary heart transplants without ever betraying their essential original truth and spirit.

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.

Jupiter’s songs remain daringly iconoclastic, from the anti-monarchist critique of “Benanga” to the anti-materialist slant of “Pondjo Pondjo”; but there’s still plenty of room for pure pleasure, as per the dashing, ebullient celebration of dancing, “Ekombe”.

Rather than the optimistic, outward-looking The Race For Space, on Every Valley he tells the grim story of the decline of Welsh coal-mining, from the title-track’s proud proclamations, declaimed in Richard Burton’s Rushmore rock-face of a voice, through to the poignant conclusion of “Take Me Home”, a Welsh Male Voice Choir’s plea to “let me live again”.

For all the broken dreams, what’s impressive about the album is the way that BSS balance tones, textures and themes.

These songs are as limp as long-lost lettuce, several of them barely meriting the appellation “song” at all.

It’s a typical contacts-book R&B exercise, with an impressive cast of guests (including Frank, Pharrell, Snoop, Nicki, Katy, Ariana and others) on a fairly underwhelming series of grooves.

Former Only Ones frontman Peter Perrett sounds as languidly wasted as ever on How The West Was Won, though thankfully it’s the kind of wasted that demands the devotion of his sons, both involved in this solo debut, and sparks insights and locutions that enable him to make sense of his life.

The results range from the soothing yacht-rock soul of “Don’t Believe” to the soft, weightless folk-soul momentum of “I Would”, which, with its acoustic guitar arpeggios tinted with strings, resembles an outtake from Nick Drake’s Bryter Layter.

His songs are clusters of dark, foreboding images--“Spray your days with coffin nails”; “Entrails made into garlands to welcome my way”--reaching an apogee in “Greatness Yet To Come”, a mystic vision akin to the Crossroads Myth. But the darkness is spiked with sweetness in songs such as “The Hermit Census.”

An album heralding a talent as intriguingly fully-formed and distinctive, in its own way, as Marling, Mitchell and Bush.

For all its apparent homogeneity, there’s considerable diversity in approach, with the resonant, vibes-like tones and cyclical guitar waves of “Strand” a continent apart from the shadowy, almost Krautrock manner of “Fog March”.

His band certainly nails Jennings’ trenchant country-rock tread on the title-track, a warning of the downside of the outlaw lifestyle for which Earle’s joined by Waylon’s old buddy Willie Nelson.

Evolve involves mostly devolving back into the hoariest of tired rock cliches (including what sounds like roto-toms), and plodding grimly towards the summer’s festivals.

For Together At Last, Jeff Tweedy revisits choice items from his back catalogue in solo unplugged mode. It’s a brave step, given the imaginative depth with which Wilco animates this material, but it does allow the songs’ core characters to come through more strongly.

There are a few irritations--I hate the ghastly synthetic-strings sound used on “Da Next Day”, and I hate Adam Levine’s hook on “Mic Jack”, no matter how impressively Patton piles rhyme upon rhyme. The hit cuts, though, are quirky novelties.

A late-career lapse into gimmicky covers of “Silent Night” and “Can Can” aside, this compilation is a marvellous confirmation of pop’s fringe possibilities.

Fuelled by a black humour that’s almost become her trademark, there’s heartbreak and ecstasy, desire, fear, uncertainty, acting on impulse, making mistakes and (maybe) learning from them. And those are tunes we can definitely dance to.

They’re still sculpted from the same small portfolio of sounds--basically, buzzing distorted guitar riffs and harmony chants borne along on pummelling drum barrages--which tends to impose too narrow an emotional range on the album. It’s like being hectored loudly by a bore.

Perhaps reflecting the three years spent touring after their marvellous Music In Exile album, the excellent Resistance finds Malian desert-rockers Songhoy Blues forging firmer bonds between their native modes and Western styles.