In typical Gelb manner, it’s wide-ranging in styles and standards: he didn’t get this far by excessive quality control, so some parts have a loose feel, while firmer parameters prevail elsewhere.

[Jones'] natural ebullience still drives the splendid Give the People What They Want, a hook-laden affair keeping up the high standard set by I Learned the Hard Way and 2011’s punchy Soul Time!, as good an R&B album as any in recent years.

Wig Out at Jagbags finds him reverting to type, with willfully obtuse sonic strategies that strive to wrong-foot even the most devoted listener.

Though lacking the thematic unity one expects from Springsteen albums, High Hopes has much to recommend it, particularly the way that Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello has re-invigorated old material like “American Skin (41 Shots)” and “The Ghost of Tom Joad”.

One hardly looks to Mary J Blige for restraint, but here the combination with David Foster’s orchestrations adds an extra layer of icing to an already sickly cake

Recorded with friends in Conor Oberst’s house, it has a nice, homely ambience which allows the imaginative arrangements to work their understated charm.

It’s entirely delightful, and Andy Bell has never sung better, discovering his “inner choirboy” again.

Despite her amateur standing--she never once supposed these tapes would be made public--there's a keen poetic sensibility at work.

Fans of Led Zep III should take a thoughtful interest.

It's the original tracks that bring a new life to the form, while the standards--routine duets of "I Wanna Be Like You" and "Dream a Little Dream" with Olly Murs and Lily Allen, and a bland "Puttin' on the Ritz"-- sound like filler.

It's tense, unsettling, and a brilliantly angry piece of art.

Musically, it's the same kind of electro R&B with which radio is already awash--in large part because it's produced by the same small coterie of hip producers, with Timbaland appearing to take the most prominent role amongst the likes of Detail, Jerome Harmon, Pharrell Williams and Ryan Tedder.

Black Panties finds him getting back to his core business with rather less artistic ambition.

Things go slightly awry with the stodgy prog-rock textures of “Clockwatching” and “The 6th Wave”, but it's the work of a band obsessed with a multitude of musical directions, which has to be A Good Thing.

Midnight Memories finds One Direction fumbling the transition with clumsy attempts to adopt ill-fitting rock livery.

It gets a bit noodly-doodly at times, but with some stand-out moments, notably the lovely, meditative grace of the bass and guitar alliance in "XII."

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.

Sometimes it suffers from Prince-like micromanagement, but when it succeeds, it's blissful.

Minor Alps is a collaboration between American indie stalwarts Matthew Caws (of Nada Surf) and Juliana Hatfield, an alliance so congruent that Get There is surely the best work of their careers.

If it's not quite the jump from Bob Dylan to The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, it's the closest recent equivalent, a prodigious rate of development for such a tyro talent, all the more remarkable for not being reliant on significant musical progression, so much as raw songwriting ability.

It's an enchanting snapshot of British rock'n'roll at its moment of greatest revelation, the point at which the Tin Pan Alley production line of ersatz Elvises was rendered utterly obsolete.

Produced by the Coens with T Bone Burnett, the album captures well the sanctimony, bogus bucolicism and beatnik romanticism that characterised the age, along with that tang of “revolution in the air” (to quote its most successful adherent).

His flow only truly ignites through anger and reproach, and there are moments when his verbal dexterity amazes.

Musically, it's pretty much the standard modern electro fare familiar from dozens of contemporaries, from Kylie to Britney. The dubstep riffs are more tortured in places, but when David Guetta and will.i.am are involved in a track's production--as with the bullishly shallow "Fashion!"--you're not straying from the mainstream.

Opening with urgent triplets, it settles into an elegant braiding of interlaced lines that push the music forward in waves.

Arthur grossly overdoes the emotional groaning that passes for vocal expression in the album's more overwrought corners.

George hasn't been as enjoyable in ages.

Wareham's fragile delivery imparts an eggshell vulnerability to songs that track contemporary anxieties, such as "The Deadliest Day Since the Invasion Began", but finds its natural home in the lilt of the Incredible String Band's "Air".