After a while the regretful, melancholy tone wearies one's sympathies.

Anthony Hamilton provides another [highlight], bringing a gospelly spirit to “Gently” Elsewhere, Raphael Saadiq and Gary Clark Jr lend their talents to the great party groove “Fun”.

A new punk classic.

This collection of re-recorded hits and newer material lacks both that album's imaginative approach and its understated nobility.

The shadow of Seventies Krautrock looms large over Danish psych-rockers Pinkunoizu, judging by The Drop, their splendidly kosmische second album.

The chief virtue is the immediacy that courses through tracks like “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton” and “Fall of the Star High School Running Back”.

The vibe on this debut for Jack White's Third Man label is pre-rock'n'roll.

If mutant garage-psychedelia is your thing, then Aussie quintet Pond's Hobo Rocket should have your head spinning.

The trio's manipulation of euphoric rave dynamics on tracks like “Therapy” brings a fresh approach to a tried-and-tested form.

Pleasant and pleasingly melodic, but lacking the risky edge that makes a band truly great, The Silver Seas are like the living equivalent of a guilty pleasure.

Though marginally better than its predecessor, BE can in no sense be considered a progression.

Blixa Bargeld's collaboration with Italian composer Teho Teardo finds him in fine fettle on a group of typically sardonic songs set to unusual string and electronic arrangements performed with The Balanescu Quartet.

Martin Simpson applies his dazzling fingerstyle technique to a broad range of material.

Mogwai's score for the French TV series Les Revenants places certain restrictions on the band's style which, it must be said, work to their advantage.

It offers an engagement with the notion of music as a lived obsession that far outstrips their mostly meagre intentions.

The combination works best on the single Attracting Flies; less engaging is the descent to playground chanting on Best Be Believing.

Originally recorded on a home four-track machine, the songs were subsequently re-done with Trevor Horn at the helm, which has applied a little polish to what still sound like under-written sketches rather than compelling pop material.

Former Hüsker Dü drummer/songwriter Grant Hart exhibits huge ambition on The Argument.

It's confessional solipsism, lacking the musical compulsion to make one care.

Thicke's wheedling tone and sylvan falsetto are engaging enough on this sixth album, though his clumsily backhanded way with a compliment deteriorates as the album proceeds.

Hawthorne's muse is steeped in '70s influences--notably falsetto and symphonic-soul giants like Curtis Mayfield and Barry White, while trailing threads of piercing lead guitar through songs like “Wine Glass Woman” and “Corsican Rose” bring to mind Ernie Isley's work on “Summer Breeze”.

The dominant mode throughout is tepid bluegrass, heating up a little for “Phoebe.”

It's a sound with all flesh stripped off the bone, but Lynch himself sounds like an intellectual playing bogus trailer-trash.

Wood is one of our finest songwriters, a brilliant exponent of the topical troubadour form, and rarely on better form than he is with None the Wiser.

These tracks offer a similar union of the imaginative and the inspirational, with Lee Perry and The Orb's Alex Paterson and Thomas Fehlmann making musical magic from the most minimal of resources.

It's the most simple, directly dance-oriented they've been since Disco, putting down a marker for the rest of the album.

Producer Royal Trux's Neil Hagerty doesn't try to rein in Blumberg's more abstruse inclinations, but finds ways of unveiling their strange beauty.

The songs on Me Moan are steeped in sinister intimations of bad desires, wanderlust and dark secrets, essayed with varying degrees of intelligibility over arrangements that mostly eschew the commonplace.