One Breath may not be a masterpiece but it does enough to suggest she has a chance of making one someday.

The Fifth sees Dizzee dropping his aitches between generic, anthemic, autotuned American choruses.

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.

The pair bring a gritty stiffness to Tim McGraw's Open Season on My Heart and Harris brings a searing power to Patti Scialfa's Spanish Dancer.

Only the schmaltzy If I Could Believe left me unmoved. Otherwise, this is a very cool, politically charged collaboration which finds the Roots and Costello at their thrilling best.

The content is lovingly packaged in a box neatly dressed-up as one of those giant beat boxes hipsters used to lug around before the advent of the Sony Walkman and the digital revolution that followed.

What a wild and wonderful listening experience this is: bristling with ideas, constantly shooting off at different angles but always replete with earworm melodies, plush with glittering sounds, charged with intelligent and emotional lyrics and underpinned by a syncopated rhythm section that shifts gears effortlessly from tightly coiled to blazingly expansive.

Rizzle Kicks are evidently clever, well-mannered fellows. Refreshingly, they don’t pretend to be anything else.

Some of it is boring and the two songs from his George Harrison session chug along forgettably. But I’d swap my unloved copy of Self Portrait for this box set any day.

It's nice. A bit boring. The melodies are likeably predictable, warm and gentle.

Producers Dave Kaplan and Dave Darling have sanded the new arrangements of smooth oldies such as Gentle on My Mind down to the rough grain. The result is a deeply moving record--a warm, valedictory squeeze of the listener’s hand from the cowboy hunk.

The Civil Wars offers up 12 perfectly elegant, subtly arranged Americana songs of bad love, misplaced emotion, cheating hearts, fighting and fleeing.

What you get is pure and fluent Simpson musicianship.

Arrangements are simple and sparse, everything lightly touched, with only swells of strings and brushes of horn, harmonium and other instrumental colours buoying up her guitar and clear voice.

You Are Not Alone, her 2010 collaboration with Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, won Staples her first Grammy. The follow up is even better.

Electric is the second really fantastic pop-dance blast of the year.

The New Yorker's music has become less urgent and original ... This album sounds the musical equivalent of being chauffeur driven around Jay-Z's kingdom in an air conditioned, bullet-proofed executive limo while the man himself reclines his plush leisure seat beside you, casually pointing out the scenes of his former glories.

After The Ball, a classic waltz in 3/4 time and a song of heartbreak as powerful today as it was more than 120 year's ago, is just one highlight on this super musical history lesson.

There are neat pedal steel guitar threads, horns, electric guitar and it's clear she is entirely comfortable with her producer, Tucker Martine.

There's also something a little too contained, cling-filmed and... Keane-ey about it's measured percussion and guitar swells. Which leaves you feeling that although this is a very good record by a very talented young artist, it's probably not a patch on catching him live.

At first listen it sounds messy, but the more you play it, the more inspired and essential each brutal interruption becomes.

The collective’s strength lies in their snakelike energy: all coiled muscle, hypnotic sway and dangerous unpredictability. The flaw is that it can all get a bit lairy.

American Kid is a triumph of songwriting and expressive singing.

With the hard-hitting yet loose-limbed playing of Rage Against the Machine drummer Brad Wilk, there is a real sense of top professionals at work.... Osbourne’s singing, by contrast, is strangely unexpressive, perhaps because there is no real possibility of emotional connection with lyrics that strain for grandiose effect but are flattened by clunking phrases and trite rhyming schemes.

There’s nothing very new about the sound, but there’s a freshness and intelligence in the Lawrence brothers’ discovery of it.

Once I Was An Eagle is a masterpiece, and, at 23, she’s still only getting started.

Their return should be heralded from on high, because it is the boldest, smartest, most colourful and purely pleasurable dance album of this decade.

Agnetha: still as seductively normal, beautifully boring and enigmatically familiar as ever.

While they make no claims to be a wildly original band--they listen to Black Sabbath and they have been described as the all-female Joy Division--what makes them so compelling is their fierce focus.

Arrangements are marked by clarity, one thing easing into another in a beautifully measured fashion.

Mike Bub (bass) and Kenny Malone (percussion) make up the tight musical unit on 13 enjoyable songs, which were recorded in Nashville.

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

Simple but lovely.

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

Elusive and ethereal, it hints at the late night soulscapes of the Blue Nile but remains boldly, if at times frustratingly, out of focus.

Tape Deck Heart unfolds as an album of emotional revelation, full of elegantly melodic, perfectly formed, lyrically astute songs that always find that little bit extra.

The 58-year-old, who is writing his memoirs, is as busy as ever, and he's still got what it takes.

The country singer turns 80 at the end of the month and although much of the album saunters along, Nelson can still fill a song with emotion, as he shows on his own composition The Better Part of Me.

The Australian singer-songwriter's fourth album evolves into a sweeping, original aural landscape through which she embarks on an involving journey of self-discovery.

It’s infested with the collective naughtiness and layered irony of a B-movie all-nighter.

It’s an adventure.

It is music of emotion and imagination, shifting perspectives in ways that are deliciously intangible, intent on moving the heart rather than the feet.

In 2013, if rock is going to survive, it surely has to encompass the bleeps and beats of electro veterans who sound like the future is still catching up with them.

Grant brilliantly skewers his own depression, addiction, bitchiness and heartbreak throughout a record which finds him mixing his penchant for corduroy, laid-back melodies with a new, rawly exposed synth-pop that feels like it's seeped up from an underground carpark, all hard concrete and cold, flickering fluorescents.

It’s only once you can give this album a little time and space that you begin to realise that the low-slung 20/20 Experience is really a rather refreshing and assured kind of a sit-down.

Bloodsports is bleeding good.

An album of real class.

It is an enormous pleasure to report that the new David Bowie album is an absolute wonder: urgent, sharp-edged, bold, beautiful and baffling, an intellectually stimulating, emotionally charged, musically jagged, electric bolt through his own mythos and the mixed-up, celebrity-obsessed, war-torn world of the 21st century.

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.

There's a confident, bouncy feel to Give Me All You Got.

Freighted deep with lugubrious rolls of oily bass, sandy inhalations of desert strings, holy intonations and salty lust, Push the Sky Away is the audio equivalent of bathing in the Dead Sea.

Dealing frankly with love, rejection, frustration, self-doubt and self-acceptance, almost every one of the 10 tracks is catchy and distinctive enough to become a hit.

Those same multilayered textures [in Loveless] are all here, and if anything there are more finely chiselled planes of fresh variation: there is a discipline as well as wildness behind the distortion.

If you're already a Biffy Clyro fan, Opposites might be your idea of a masterpiece. If you're new to Biffy, it'll just give you a headache.

While these songs are like discarded pub furniture, Bramwell sounds like a wiley old alley cat, sat on top of it and looking up.

As with previous Tarantino soundtracks, this is an enjoyable, carefully constructed set, throwing up more hits than misses--and the occasional gem--but ultimately its songs will be brought to life on the big screen.

Each thoughtful sonic soundscape washes elegantly into the next, toward the long, lush finale.

This anthology provides a marvellous opportunity to revisit Mitchell in her glorious prime. Indispensable.

These soft shoe shuffles sway up and down the same few notes, with the affectionate embrace of mother of the groom dances.

Scrub away reputations and this album is so much stronger than the latter-day works of many of Fay's contemporaries.

Hegarty has mastered the art of turning performance into a kind of ritual ceremony and the magic of these symphonic concert recordings blows their previously released versions out of the water.

Overall the compilation makes its way towards a bigger story of many ideas, emotions and textures.

All 12 are of a consistently high standard and sung with feeling.

It is not unimpressive, with energy and attack and flashes of wit but there are too few of the kind of mad pop moments that make you stop in your tracks and not enough evidence that Williams is stretching and growing as a songwriting talent.

The central weakness is that, no matter how good the songs, you don't get swept away with the emotion of great (hit) lyrics.

She wants to deliver good, solid, heartfelt slabs of it. And on those terms, her fifth studio album is her best record in years.

It's a mixed bag.

While the Stones may not have struck oil with these songs, their energy remains undimmed, their back catalogue endlessly renewable.

This is an album of rare truth and grace.

Cee Lo openly parades his retro tastes, but his outrageous personality invests them with a contemporary edge.

It's a loose album, an indulgent album, and not all likeable but, unlike any other outfit of their tenure, they maintain a raw punch as if recording in a local bar for the sheer blast of it.

It's frustrating, then, when Swift reverts back to type. Too many of the songs on this bloated 16-track album revisit the gently strummed verses and characterless choruses of her previous work.

The highlight [of Mystic Pinball] is an affecting ballad called No Wicked Grin. It's Hiatt at his tender best.

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.

Muse's rather absurd spaceship may be welded together from bits of other acts--but it still flies.

This is an uplifting concert--and here's to the next 50 years of The Preservation Hall Jazz Band.

The 13 songs, written between 1972 and 2001, show off the range and subtlety of Lowe's songwriting.

Her second album, however, belatedly delivers on all Goulding's latent promise.

She infuses this crepuscular collection of songs by the likes of the Rolling Stones, The Band, Neil Young and Gnarls Barkley with a compelling voodoo.

Too much of the record sounds like generic, Katy Perry-esque power-pop.

She's continued to move away from electronica, but these rich, emotionally sophisticated songs (which will appeal to Cat Power fans) still have a strong rhythmic core.

They may have been left in the band's boot for a while, but there's nothing dead about them.

Some of the noisier blues are cheesy, but, in the main, this is a warm, authentic and durable record: the musical equivalent of a well-worn plaid shirt.

There's definitely real talent with LeBlanc but he needs to forget about having an image created for him and concentrate, as one of his musical heroes Townes Van Zandt might have put on, on writing for the sake of the song.

Flush with stirring, singalong melodies, they construct exciting, catchy songs that draw on the dynamics of stadium rock established by classic bands.

Coexist may not sound as dramatically original as their debut but it is every bit as other-worldly, like eavesdropping on intimate conversations between forlorn lovers on a space station orbiting around a distant planet.

Andy Cutting (accordion), Jon Boden (Hields's partner and the Bellowhead frontman is on fiddle, guitar and double bass), Sam Sweeney (fiddle, viola, cello), Rob Harbron (English Concertina and fiddle) and Martin Simpson (guitar, banjo) provide the classy framework for Hield to interpret 11 traditional songs.

While this is in one sense African music like they don't make it any more, there's nothing precious or retro about it: its energy feels entirely modern.

The album is full of great music, the sort of bluesy, R&B material master guitarist Cooder does so very well.

The familiar is as classy as ever.

For every perfectly observed vignette of English life (Sunny Afternoon, Autumn Almanac) and pithily satirical narrative (Village Green Preservation Society, Dead End Kids) there's a clunking, unwieldy, elaborate novelty song (Supersonic Rocket Ship, Skin & Bone).

The five and a half hours of unreleased demos/live recordings do give a warmly inclusive insider's feel but there's nothing I'd listen to more than a couple of times.

On a production level, this album is cutting-edge, on a lyrical level it is brutally brilliant. It will melt your ears and your heart.

All 11 songs are of high quality.

Channel Orange is as dazzling as it is baffling, rarely staying still long enough to get a grip on.

The 'Revue Boys'--Jonny Bridgwood (double bass & rhythm guitar), Robin Gillan (harmonica), Jason Steel (guitar), Dave Morgan (percussion), and the two Paleys --swing nicely across a range of styles and songs.

Sonically adventurous and genre hopping.

All [songs on Ashes & Roses] command attention because of Chapin Carpenter's warm, weathered, unshowily authentic voice which has a kind of peace at its core.