Connick displays his versatility with the bossa nova sway of “I Love Her”, the New Orleans R&B of “S'pposed To Be” and “You've Got It”, and the sentimental country stylings of “Greatest Love Story”.

The follow-on to their beloved titular 2009 debut finds Duckworth and Lewis exploring further aspects of the beautiful game, from its amateur enjoyability and levelling qualities to the euphonious variety of its argot.

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

In between, there’s nimble bluegrass picking on the chipper two-step “The Wind” Less welcome are Caribbean incursions like the tourist-reggae drivel that is “Island Song”.

This River is surely the most accomplished album yet from Florida-based songwriter JJ Grey.

Throughout, Tweedy’s arrangements are the soul of discretion, employing the merest suggestions of rhythm and texture to show Staples’ iconic voice to best advantage.

Long Way Down is stuffed with bogus sensitivity, crystallisations of emotional disquiet couched in chant choruses, and polite piano arrangements reliant on a few chord-changes.

It finds Skelly in more emotive manner than with The Coral.

It lacks impetus, panache and compulsion, just for starters.

It's always an after-hours, nocturnal experience.

It’s not quite godlike, but Yeezus certainly feels like it was created by a higher power.

Kodaline offer a musical barometer of bankable current rock trends, but display scant originality on this debut album.

It's Tunng's most direct effort yet, eschewing the “folktronic” bricolage of albums like Good Arrows; but there's plenty happening beneath the surface.

It's an album packed with Wordsworthian sturm und drang.

On track after track, the falsetto vocals and surging electropop pulses ultimately congeal into too saccharine a sonic experience, an artificially sweetened aural marshmallow.

A touching, intelligent work.

The Talk Talk of their era.

The Birmingham quartet's debut album bears out the promise of their early singles and Delicious EP.

In expressing all of these [themes] without tumbling into absurdity, it helps to have a klaxon whine like Ozzy's delivering them, while Tony Iommi cranks out those trademark slow, molten-lead riffs that trundle through 13 like tank tracks.

It's his band's most musically diverse effort.

It's quite easy to envisage entire arenas punching the air to songs like these and the pounding “You're Gonna Get It”, one of two tracks featuring Paul Weller.

Now, it appears to have been reduced to simply a checklist of familiar sounds and effects, harnessed to the dullest beats imaginable, and dependent on outside collaborators for interest.

Produced in understated manner by Tucker Martine, the songs' clean pop lines are revealed with the minimum of decorative detail.

London with the Lights On is pretty thin fare, with too many tracks collapsing under the weight of excess sass.

Tales of a Grasswidow is easily CocoRosie's most satisfying, fully realised work so far.

Throughout, there's a fresh impetus to Tricky's musical muse that enables his dark imaginings to connect again with beautiful simplicity.

Stephen McRobbie's wan vocals remain an acquired taste, but the way the music lightly folds in dark and light, innocence and experience, reserve and euphoria, lifts the likes of "Slow Summits" and "Summer Rain".

Once I Was an Eagle is a work that demands to be taken as a whole, another reminder of the peculiar power of the album form, despite frequent premature declarations of its redundancy.