That Cabello is clearly a fine singer hasn’t stopped producers smoothing her with Auto-Tune. Romance is state-of-the-art pop yet it lacks the real romance of music made from the heart. If you feel like you’ve heard it before, it may be because you literally have.

As if set free from seriousness, they knock out some polished, off-kilter pop gems about inadequate individuals.

The new version certainly sounds fuller, brighter and deeper, but unless you are a committed audiophile with studio standard hi-fi, most listeners could achieve a similar experience by turning up the volume, or perhaps investing in a pair of decent headphones. All interest therefore lies in extra tracks, which are not so much outtakes as works in progress – as the Beatles settled on arrangements, they would continually build on their chosen version. ... The truth is that the Beatles released everything they considered worthy whilst they were together, leaving nothing of outstanding quality in the vault.

Everything I Thought I Was is certainly not the career defining masterwork Timberlake seems to think it is, but nevertheless it’s enough to get him over that mid-life bump.

Mascara Streakz may not reinvent the wheel, but it does stand confidently among their greatest hits while making a compelling case for having that fifth shot of tequila.

This is bold, weird, beautiful stuff, but the listener has their work cut out getting to it. Ironically, the core of I Am Easy to Find is not particularly easy to find. At all.

A nice comeback album.

There are songs where it feels like there’s been a huge step-change in Nesbitt’s writing, as on When You Lose Someone. ... Some songs, however, fall right back into the clumsy patterns of Nesbitt’s earlier work

Full of groove and grit, it's raw and enjoyable.

It's all an interesting time capsule and what makes it worthwhile for Cash fans is that there are 26 previously unreleased tracks. Disc 2 sounds a tad more produced but a song about dismissing a former lover--Wide Open Road--and the jaunty Five Minutes To Live are treats.

There are striking contributions from an eclectic range of guests, including veteran British rapper Skepta, sound wizard James Blake and singer-songwriter Deb Never, and it all sounds intriguingly modern, with a pleasingly discombobulating bent. Yet, when stripped of political context, it exposes the emptiness of Slowthai’s wordplay, all sound and fury, signifying nothing much at all.

She still packs too many showboating notes into each songs. But she’s also finding a unique vulnerability on ballads like Loud, where she effectively confronts the haters with her humanity.

Upon the first few listens, it’s a confusing album: there’s plenty of their usual sing-song melodies and musings on modern dissatisfaction, such as on When We Were Very Young. ... But it’s the synth-laden, poptastic I Don’t Know What You See In Me that seems glaringly out of place.

An over eagerness to keep up to date has resulted in making Twain sound less mature than her successor. On Queen of Me, Twain comes across as Swift’s over eager auntie, charging onto the dancefloor, determined to prove she still has the moves to cut it with the kids.

It feels more like a primer for live shows rather than an end in itself, a set of water colour sketches to be inked in later.

It could have been mawkish but it's a simple, affecting and lovely tribute.

ADespite occasionally drawing blood, The Haunted Man doesn't live up to its stripped and dangerous cover, often retreating to gambol about in the backwaters of Khan's imagination.

Only a couple of cumbersome yet oddly elegiac acoustic ballads push the Stooges outside of their comfort zone.

Not as cohesive as their very best work, R.E.M.'s 15th album is still as smart, sonically rich and emotionally resonant as a guitar band can ever hope to be.

She attacks old soul numbers with gusto, turning them into cheery Stones-ish romps, but is at her best on pared-back material heavy with world-weary pathos.

This highly enjoyable celebration of the Lord is co-produced by country star Jamey Johnson.

It’s emblematic of the album itself, which sees Burna Boy unsure whether he wants to be a gangster or a lothario. Fortunately, there’s just enough highs here to justify the listen.

Given that it's for dancing, Butler's production tends toward the cool--even plodding--but his polishing up of 20-year-old stylistic tics still entertains.

Although some of his anecdotes could drag on repeated listening, he is an engaging raconteur.

This is a brave album both sonically and strategically. Mendes’ previous four albums topped the US album chart so changing lanes is admirably risky. But I’m unconvinced this represents a great leap forward.

This is not an album that will make The Strokes new friends, but it might satisfy the faithful. Sometimes it is enough just to sound great.

Sting sounds earnest and isolated: like a man singing bleakly out to sea. But he veers towards hammy at times, laying his Geordie accent on a little too thickly.

On the whole, My Soft Machine lacks the clarity of Parks’s exceptional debut, and can veer too often into repetition; there’s a lack of journey in the individual songs, meaning you end in much the same place as you started. Her lyrics are, as ever, expertly crafted, but they deserve much more musical supporting oomph.

FLO’s debut has one glaring problem: it fails to make these girls seem real. They’re excellent singers, yes, but there’s no introspection, no personality, that shines through Access All Areas.

An uneven yet entertaining album.

Lopez’s voice is technically fine but has a thinness that doesn’t really suit the exposure of digitally clinical modern production settings. She jettisons all Latin flavouring, which might have been her superpower.

Hardwired is two CDs, 12 tracks and 80 minutes of in-your-face, punch-to-the-guts, dense, harsh, shouty rage with absolutely no let-up. Frankly, if it was half as long it would be twice as effective.

Everything on this flashy, melodramatic album punches its weight. If it had come out in 1985, it would have ruled the world.

Mostly this is a gimmicky album with ill-fitting techno and electro influences on plastic, poppy songs.

Archive seem strangely restricted, dulling their more inventive edges with a black-and-white quality of mood, texture, rhythm and melody, that leaves you craving emotional colour.

Fairport Convention are like the Stanley Matthews of folk music--age does nothing to erode essential quality.

Pitched somewhere between his two most famous albums, Play and 18, it's hardly groundbreaking but is enjoyable none the less.

The opening four tunes are extraordinarily catchy, yet each is marred by queasy allusions to sex (Zombie Love) and drugs (Dirty Luck), which’ll be a turn-off to many listeners.

Rod Picott achieves his aim of making an authentic studio version of his live shows in his new album Fortune. The material is sometimes contemporary.

She hits the mark with stripped-back Room Service, but the more mainstream, hook-laden numbers Antichrist and Into Your Room don’t measure up to her earlier anthems Scarlett and The Wall is Way Too Thin.

Her soprano singing is a little derivative of Krauss's but is still sweet and clear and is surely a work in progress given her youthfulness.

Not really a blockbuster, it’s the kind of album that makes most sense in the small hours, after the party is over.

This appealing set of 12 short, sweet, heartfelt songs rattles along with gorgeous vocals, silvery guitar lines and perky bass and drum rhythms, stirring a jaunty singalong spirit of friends on a mission. But if the Lathums truly aspire to be the indie voice of a new generation, they are going to have to sharpen their quills or invest in a rhyming dictionary.

It's a fully-acoustic affair (guitar, piano, upright bass, drums, etc), with a luxurious, live-combo presence and some gruff musings on time, humanity and music.

His songs are charming but inconsequential, resolutely old-fashioned, drawing influences from offbeat singer-songwriters of a certain vintage.

It can be a little underwhelming but it is music with its heart in the right place.

The affection is winning, as is Metheny's mastery of the guitar and harmonic subtlety, but the tone of ruminative gentleness does start to seem unvaried.

Without the hip-hop beats that peppered her first album, the songs here lack a sprinkling of brashness--a little of the Kim and Kanye touch would have helped.

The songs are catchy, the emotions are sincere, and it is all driven by an intense desire to connect. But somehow Yungblud always sounds as if he’s trying too hard.

Although something of a melting pot, this is an original and accessible album, blending world influences with old time American music.

The 14 songs ooze energy and style and feature long-term collaborators such as Alan Kelly, Ian Carr, Roy Dodds and John McCusker.

This began life as an art project at Somerset House, with Harvey composing and recording in a makeshift studio before a viewing public. Such pressurised circumstances might explain the absence of any sense of real pleasure in the finished work. I don’t hesitate to hail it as impressive but it does feel more civic project than classic album.

If you like Knopfler’s flavour, One Deep River will be a treat. Indeed, if you walked into a bar and caught this outfit in action, you’d surely stop and pay attention, nodding along in gentle pleasure at the veteran musicianship and easy-on-the ear ambience. Yet in the context of his own discography, it lacks the imagination, ambition and stratospheric guitar playing that made Dire Straits one of the most popular bands of all time.

Buddy Miller organised a Grade A country guitarist convention, threw in some wonderful guest vocalists and then recorded, as if live, an impressive album.

Any hint of Coldplay ever having had rock inclinations has been blasted away in a blaze of pop hooks. There is little of the fragile intimacy of 2000 debut Parachutes, none of the rock angst of 2002’s Rush of Blood to the Head or the epic grandeur of 2005’s X&Y. It is the upbeat, poppy Coldplay honed to a gleaming EDM point.

It’s a long way from the rocker's angry persona, but he’s always had a soppy side. Sometimes the lyrics are also sloppy.

Unfortunately, this time around, the lyrics tend to be too opaque to pack quite the same punch. ... That said, there are plenty of songs sure to please diehard Sports Team fans.

This is an album you admire rather than love.

The quintet's debut is pretty good fun, fusing Stones-y raunch with brash Caribbean rhythms.

McRae is primed for success, though, and while her songs can verge on self-indulgence – there’s a fair amount of navel-gazing at play – they’ll surely speak to a teenage audience. This is well-made, ear-wormy pop music, guaranteed to hit a nerve.

Concrete and Gold is an ambitious and entertaining album. But when it comes to a comparison with Sergeant Pepper, it doesn’t earn its stripes.

Recorded in just three days, it suffers many of the problems familiar from blues or jazz jam sessions, a sense of introversion as musicians focus their attention on each other rather than the listener, producing overlong grooves full of technically audacious moments and no overall purpose.

A sense of sisterhood is a huge part of Haim’s appeal, yet the humorous camaraderie and rocky swagger they present on stage all but vanishes in the studio.

The record could do with more tunes to make use of that talent, but it’s still nice to see him back.

If the production is too clean, it does at least reveal Johnson in glorious high definition with his Telecaster, simultaneously stabbing the chords while letting the licks bleed out with liquid heat.

Play it soft, and it drifts into the background. Play it loud and something much more vigorous and compelling emerges.

The album feels longer than its 12 tracks, and frequently verges on overblown. But perhaps that’s the point. Surrender leans so hungrily into its sonic vision of maximal catharsis that the album soon embodies its title – and propels you into doing the same.

Fans will find much to enjoy here, but it might be time for Knopfler to push himself out of his comfort zone.

There are nice nuggets aplenty here. .... But, my goodness, some songs leave a bad taste

Less successful is spongy new song One Heart, One Voice, on which Streisand, Ariana Grande and Mariah Carey ladle up sickly sweet lyrics and vocal sprinkles about onto the bland whipped cream and jelly of a sub-Disney love trifle. .... Bob Dylan makes more effective conversational space for himself on the 1934 jazz standard The Very Thought of You – the five o’clock stubble of his devoted rasp leaning into her silky sass as a breezy harmonica blows a fresh dynamic through the old tune.

Lurking behind the sisterly triumphalism, though, is a conflicted message about being rescued from the shelf (“All before I lose my faith/ Just like magic, he came and saved my fall from grace”), and it has the unfortunate effect of turning a march of the Valkyries into a last stand of the spinsters. But sexual politics aside (and we will get to that), All Saints’ new album is pretty great, one you wished they had made back in 2001, when people might have cared.

Yet for all its exuberant DIY spirit, Young Fathers’ songs sound like another bunch of interesting demos, full of passion, spontaneity and left-field inspiration, but too often failing to really nail the song or message down.

There is a neat cover of Creedence’s Have You Ever Seen the Rain but the best songs are her own heartfelt and brooding country ones.

The infuriating thing is that there is a great album lurking here, one that a disciplined editor and more sonically adventurous producer might have uncorked.

If you take this album in the spirit of throwaway fun in which it seems to have been concocted, it is harmlessly engaging, although all of these tracks have been delivered more persuasively before.

While Touré acquits himself imaginatively in a variety of settings, the whirring, jangling opener Sokosondou, with just his own musicians, feels the most compelling track.

Styles’s curveball is more eccentric but more appealing, with an endearing quality of relish in its musical adventures. It is so old-fashioned it may actually come across as something new to its target audience.

Her crisis of faith provides a sharp edge to Evanescence’s formulaic grandstanding.

It is quirkily appealing without quite being convincing. Lacking an emotional centre, it’s not really deep and dark enough to posit Ellis-Bextor as a sensitive singer-songwriter.

Clocking in at over an hour, it’s a classy work which doesn’t try to reinvent its star, so much as give her a space in which to shimmer, simmer and occasionally simper her way through a surprisingly subtle and inventive spectrum of musical moods.... Lyrically, there’s often a lack of narrative, but Jackson succeeds in reining in the badly written sex talk which let down her last few records.

The results are always interesting and fun, but often hard to get a hold of – a slippery confection of influences that never stay still for too long lest they reveal a lack of depth.

Across a baggy 18 tracks, Egoli maintains a sense of purpose, but only comes into sharp focus when a particular artist grabs the reins.

Unwanted calls to mind a Jacqueline Wilson novel transposed into an LP format, its 12 songs relentlessly circling over ‘difficult emotions’ – awkwardness, rejection, and, yes, it’s okay to express your anger. And these, of course, are well-worn teen-pop topics already.

Simple but lovely.

The covers of their favourite maverick songwriters more than matches for the originals.

It's something of a connoisseur's collection (steering clear of some of the big hits such as Release Me) but has treasures such as Making Believe.

There’s nothing challenging about this record. But it offers undemanding companionship, toe-tapping tunes and a timeless reminder that all you need is love.

Goldfrapp hark back to the bombast of a time when electronica was all about man (or woman) versus machine. On Silver Eye, the machines are ascendant.

His fifth album, however, finds him still in peak form, voicing socially aware hip hop and outré electro-disco, all with an eloquence which often eludes the newer generation.

Easier to admire than to care deeply about, Youth should confirm his status as the go-to rapper for people who don’t really like rap music.

Madame X sounds like three different albums fighting for space. There’s the Latin pop album, in Madonna performs straight-up sexy dance duets aimed at the world’s fastest growing music market. There’s a strand of trendy, low-slung, sensitive trap pop that lacks the majestic swagger you expect from a grand dame of the game. And neither of these elements sits comfortably alongside the Mirwais spine of fizzy art pop marrying mad production with inflated lyrical themes. Madonna says she is fighting ageism but she is fighting on too many fronts at the same time.

Its 14 overloaded songs jostle awkwardly together in a cornucopia of conflicting impulses, shifting from beatboxing punk to beatnik poetry, ambient moodiness to sophisticated showtunes, peppered with snappy couplets and gilded with gorgeous melodies.

There is a flowing sense of melody and dreamy atmosphere to mid-tempo songs (Actual Daydream, Nowhere to Run, Don’t Stop the Bleeding, Ease Me On) and a fistful of thrillingly raucous rockers (Nothing to Do, Hesitation Generation).

Halfway in, Vannucci finds his feet with the bluesy No Whiskey, before an impeccable run of spry, sun-kissed alt-country numbers announce him as Las Vegas's answer to Tom Petty.

It’s moderately uplifting, all pretty easy going and easy listening.

Built around pianos and acoustic guitars, with lots of strings and harmonious backing vocals, it feels sleek but self-contained, akin to a Carole King album glossed up for modern listeners.

It’s an amusing debut albeit she will have to develop skills, depth and substance if she hopes to be more than a flash in the pan. Just like in the kitchen, a little spice goes a long way.

High point Honest Town, gives a slick, new-Millennial pulse to all the retro heartache. But title track Big Music is a wince-inducing reminder of naff, leather-trousered bombast.