Compared with his perky previous albums Mars and Mean Love, there’s something underwhelming about this third effort from Ahmad Gallab, aka Sinkane--it feels every bit as pedestrian and dutiful as its title suggests, its slow, methodical grooves pleasantly light but laborious.

Powerful and personal, it’s a persuasive protest tribute straight from the heart.

“Rituals” is Lipstate’s tribute to Steve Reich’s Music For 18 Musicians, its arpeggiating guitar lines intertwining hypnotically, while the opening “Deep Shelter” takes a different approach, its lowing drones sliding over each other in Terry Riley-esque manner, seeking rhythmic pulses behind sheets of high, keening tones.

Things go rapidly downhill, soured by the earnest, self-important tone of songs like “Grace” and “Ego”; while “Love You Any Less” is just achingly dull, a slice of blandly sepia soulfulness that stains the songs around it.

The British producer/singer, already a low-key presence on albums by Solange, Kanye and Frank Ocean, not only employs a fresh palette of sounds--from the harp-like pluckings of “Plastic 100ºC” to the beguiling Celtic-flavoured organ of “Timmy’s Prayer”--but also applies them to matters beyond romance: notably here, the process of bereavement.

Elwan (Elephants), perhaps their most powerful album since Amassakoul, confronts their situation head-on, in songs musing on the values of ancestry, unity and fellowship, driven by the infectiously hypnotic cyclical guitar grooves that wind like creepers around their poetic imagery.

The confidence of the performances benefits strong contemporary material dealing with issues from outreach to domestic abuse.

Garwood forces the listener to adopt his pace--a sort of aural equivalent of the “slow food” movement. But it works.

Movingly prefaced by Gillian Anderson reading the novelist’s suicide note, its gently absorbing string undulations, with a faintly keening soprano occasionally audible amongst the oceanic swells, bring fiction and real life together in a deep, powerful manner.

Butler performs miracles as producer, sprinkling flute like pollen over “An Angel’s Wing Brushed The Penny Slots”, and haunting “Nothing And Everything” with spectral backing vocals. Eitzel’s glass-half-empty attitude, however, grips the songs too tightly.

An album which focuses their stadium-alt-punk sound to its sharpest edge yet.

While not quite as impressive as 2012’s Traveling Alone, there’s much to enjoy about Tift Merritt’s Stitch Of The World--not least the inspired contributions of her top-notch accompanists.

In a career spanning more than two decades, Elbow have always taken things at their own pace, and this shows in Little Fictions’ pleasing rhythms.

[A] more thoughtful, diverse creations in which floating organ and mellotron lend a wavering melancholy to songs like “Maybe We’ll Drown” and “Lemon Memory”, pierced by contrasting guitar rages of keening angularity.

The duet between Miss Kittin’s android vocal and a machine voice on the engagingly dystopian “Hans Is Driving” seems devoid of contact, a sad lament from a world bereft of humans. But it’s Arbez-Nicolas’s magpie ways that leaves a bad taste.

The creepier explorations of infantile eroticism--the lollipop metaphor of “All Day Suckers”, the fairytale allusion of “Baby Teeth, Wolfy Teeth”--are voiced by Harvey himself, allowing guest singers like Jess Ribeiro and Sophia Brous to indulge the sweeter romanticism of songs such as “The Eyes To Cry” and “Prevert’s Song”, where Gainsbourg’s musing on the poet’s work prompts a moving reflection on transitory love.

Sometimes, sheer ambition can render music too top-heavy to succeed. Hang, by Los Angeles duo Foxygen, is a case in point.

Where his recent albums have leant more towards long-form improvisation, 50 focuses on songs, with the warm drizzle of Chapman’s gnarled Yorkshire burr lending a bluff, worldly-wise character to American tableaux.

Thankfully, Burn Something Beautiful confirms his own fund of creativity is far from drained, the collaboration with Buck and McCaughey resulting in all three’s best work in years.

His light, understated tenor blends well with her piquant tone on the blithe, buttoned-down yacht-rock grooves he creates for Little Wings’ “Look At What The Light Did Now” and Frank Ocean’s “Thinking Bout You”; but an affectless version of Barry Gibb’s “Grease” is less successful.

Endlessly entertaining.

Oddly, the busier things get, the less engaging they seem.

It’s a lovely, silly, serious work that draws one in despite the bursts of utopian cosmo-babble.

Cliched rock band they might be, but the problem lies more with the fact that they used to be bloody good at it. Night People is a painfully disjointed album that shows a band at an impasse, unsure about which direction they want to go in.

For the most part the songs are full to bursting with youthful melodies that lift the weight off the more serious of topics.

Norwegian musician Thom Hell’s eighth album is an inventive meditation on growing up.

They are exciting precisely because they refuse to reveal everything about themselves, and because there is an ambiguity to be found in lyrics that come across as bluntly personal. It’s a talent that was present in their first two albums, only this time, they’ve let the light in a bit.

Killer Mike and El-P bring typically sharp, visceral observations, chugging beats and superb guest artists onto their most successful studio effort to date.