They have done Ray Charles proud.

14 songs over an hour's running time is a lot of nonsense to digest. For the Chili Peppers, songwriting is a medium without a message, unless it's just to let your inhibitions go and dance.

There are still a little too many US FM radio pop-metal vocals, but happily there's also plenty of fierce, melody-laced drum & bass action that will please festivals and dancefloors the world over.

Though the materials accompanying Nobody is Listening insist that it’s Zayn’s most personal record to date, and the one over which he’s had the most personal control, it’s hard to find much trace of him here.

The glossy results lack any particular character. Peppered with hooks and catchy melodies, everything sounds like something you might have heard somewhere before, which in the case of Ed Sheeran soundalike single No Judgement you almost certainly have.

They’ve tried to update the quintessentially Eighties sound of the original to make it fit for a modern audience. The result is often a strange hybrid, which is enjoyable only as long as one doesn’t expect to hear too much Miles Davis.

Most of the songs here do somewhat merge into one, long, party soundtrack that is enjoyable to listen to and yet entirely forgettable.

While the tricksy chord changes upon which most tracks are founded may be clever, or possibly ground-breaking, these recordings seriously lack oomph.

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

Amidst skyscraping Queen harmonies and portentous Pink Floyd melodrama there are sensitive touches, with some elegant, slow-unfurling lead guitar reminiscent of Dire Straits.

It sounds like a romantic gift to his new wife and a sentimental salute to his own childhood--a minor gem from a major talent.

Division is by far Sheeran’s smoothest collection.

It may not be his most cohesive collection but when it comes to concocting sad bangers artfully combining bittersweet emotion with mesmeric dance grooves, Moby is too good to dismiss.

At a time when hip hop has become the default music of choice for the masses, it’s a reminder of the genre’s subserve roots--and evidence that, deep into middle age, Slim Shady’s power to shock, offend and amuse endures.

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

For Kings of Leon to remain interesting and relevant, they need to stop trying to be the band the music business seems to want them to be and start following Caleb Followill’s muse wherever it leads.

Throughout, the arrangements are as relentlessly upbeat and playfully retro as the album’s Alan Fears-designed artwork, stuffed with vocoders, peacocking basslines and laser-beam synth sounds. They’re also wildly referential, and largely fail to add anything either fresh or memorable to the conversation.

Sheeran sounds like a supercharged David Gray. Grown-up. Energised. Forget Autumn, this feels like an album of bright new dawns.

The results sound as if Lynch's old protégé Chris Isaak had taken a left turn into lyrical eccentricity, pulsing synths and sinister atmospherics.

Inevitably, 51 minutes of melodrama becomes draining. But it captures Del Rey's mystique perfectly.

It's wholly derivative, yet the tuneful, instantly gratifying choruses often trump one's desire to play spot the influence.

It contains Frankie Knuckles-era house music, hip-hop breaks and some interesting electronica. However, the band are not the genre-defying pioneers they think they are.

A guest spot for Little Dragon's Yukimi Nagano adds spice to this unexpected feast.

Although it's a bright and buoyant effort--with recognisable touches of ska and reggae--her new album lacks the left-field flourishes that make her special.

The problem with Justice is that Bieber thinks his music is more powerful than it actually is.

Set against jarring synths, the macho, sexualised lyrics sound seedy--or worse, menacing--and what prosaic hooks exist are obscured by the dirge.

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

The result is not bad: though you miss the unpredictable blasts of raw hellfire from the cult classic Surfer Rosa era, the band find some gritty, grindy melodies in the bigger, slicker vein of 1991’s patchy Trompe Le Monde.

It’s a shame to see a talented guy rushed into making the wrong record.

Business as usual, then, with few new thrills.

The production doesn't always give Nicks's gothic imagery enough waft, but fans will love puzzling over which of her paramours she's recalling on Secret Love.

It is an album bursting with epigrammatic phrases, ridiculous rhymes, huge melodies and provocative opinions. The sound is brash and arresting.

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.

An all-killer, no-filler approach ensures every track pulls its weight, yet the album never quite adds up to more than the sum of its pleasant parts.

Pound for pound and hook for hook, Duck is as strong an album as they have ever made: a bright, giddy, colourful collection of pop anthems to raise the spirits.

Forever is exactly the kind of record you’d expect from Jon Bon Jovi at this stage of his career: reflective, lightweight, a bit tinnier than those glam-metal hits. It’s an album that will remind some why they can’t stand Bon Jovi, and others why they love the band.

It doesn’t let up for a moment: all 10 songs open with clever soundbite hooks as they push hard into verses that sound like choruses, bridges that sounds like anthems, and choruses that sound like Chris Martin, Ed Sheeran and Elton John got together to write the ultimate Eurovision jingle.

If Art Official Age is a juicy reaffirmation of Prince pop basics, Plectrumelectrum, his collaborative album with 3rdEyeGirl, represents a more intriguing departure, even if it too reaches back into the past, making a bold connection with a time when Jimi Hendrix was the last great black American rock star, before funk really left rock 'n' roll to the white man.

There are big, generalised emotions: hurt, love, loss, transcendence. But none of the tiny, idiosyncratic observations that make and break relationships.

It's a mixed bag.

What makes this a really exciting debut, however, is the Kanye West-style genre-bending on Grenade, The Other Side and Our First Time, which joins the dots between between Michael Jackson and Bob Marley.

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

They're still chronicling gangster life, albeit a former one, but the beats are now funkier, offering a surprisingly accessible counterpoint to the cinematic, bloodthirsty narratives of star rapper Ghostface Killah. His caustic delivery propels the best tracks here.

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

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.

For now Birdy remains a novelty. Her rich, malleable vocals suggest, however, that she won't be caged for long.

The foray ultimately fails because Laurie's voice is no more than adequate.

She doesn’t do anything wildly original with them [musical genres], but she has fun.

His overdue follow up is absolutely stuffed to the rafters with another round of big, weepie ballads about how miserable his love life is.

Folky stand-outs like Monochrome cast a warm glow, and Carry On concludes with the expertly poignant wordplay and emotive refrain which will surely have Anglo-American audiences weeping. Five albums in, the Mumfords will, indeed, carry on.

She sounds like a woman, and an artist, who’s finally found herself.

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.

The Kooks have come out fighting though, completely re-evaluating and overhauling their sound and the result is an exuberant fourth album bristling with character.

Their once-ebullient anthems have been replaced by a collection of mid-tempo, uninspiringly ponderous tracks.

For the Wu-Tang purists, twitchy for a return to the raw Only Built 4 Cuban Linx sonics, the music here isn’t exactly going to quench your thirst. But it’s further proof that what the RZA truly savours is stepping outside of his comfort zone, and it's a relief to once again hear a little weirdness in rap.

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.

An unadventurous set list reworks some of his most thoughtful and sombre songs with a selection of classic covers, all given a lush production gloss by the late Phil Ramone. What lifts it to a higher plane is Michael’s smooth and expressive singing.

Sheezus should confirm Allen’s status as a national treasure, reason enough to be cheerful.

Lyrics and delivery suggest Imagine Dragons adhere to old-fashioned rock band idealism, but nothing is allowed to get in the way of a sparkling hook.

A fizzy lifting drink of an album.

A hazy collection of groove-driven vocal tracks featuring singers and rappers.

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

Most tracks here aim to be an anthem, but none has the requisite melodic clout. It's hard to see them entering the super league on this visit.

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.

Throughout, the band’s big, bittersweet sound is, as ever, wonderfully immersive: whalesong cycles of electric guitar echoing through a buoyant soup of synths that sound both pleasant and forgettable.

Low in High School, his 11th solo album, is as dazzling and infuriating as anything in his canon, full of the stuff that has made the 58-year-old former Smiths frontman one of the most provocative and adored stars of our time.

At least half of The Heavy Entertainment Show is made up of amusing dance tracks that never quite hit the spot.

Wilson’s vocals are endearingly shaky, as if he is too proud to submit to the autotune and chorus effects that make every modern pop star sound the same. But if, at times, it sounds like a band trying too hard, it is surely better than not trying at all.

Wilson has nothing wildly original to say about the state of modern Britain, but sounds authentically angry on behalf of people on minimum wage or zero-hours jobs.

Delta is their best album yet, spiritual solace wrapped in secular anthems.

This feels more like a palette cleanser, a statement of intent that Stone has ditched the commercial gloss.

The most devoted of devotees will get a kick out of this album, but even they will struggle to ignore its flaws, or how genuinely fed up – rather than his usual showboating – Morrissey sounds at times.

It is all so swaggeringly confident and honed to a perfect point, it is hard not to be caught up in its own sense of conviction.

To some tastes, Sheeran will be corny and trite. Yet what he does well is essentially inarguable: provide songs that fulfil the emotional needs of universal moments.

She just needs to read more self-help than she spouts, and show us that she has more depth than bass.

You can hear his love and enthusiasm bursting out of these grooves, not just in the way he roars over the top of melody lines but in the spaces he creates for other musicians to shine.

This is an album that underlines the greatness of Dark Side, rather than challenges it.

This is the closest he has ever got to recreating the mesmeric intensity and emotional release of Urban Hymns. He has thankfully ditched the electronic effects that tried to lend 2016's These People a vestige of pop modernity.

Coated with a West Coast varnish and filled with radio-friendly melodies Hope St will provide great background music for warm evenings in the garden. With continued listening, however, it's liable to leave you cold.

It is a lovely Valentine record, if you favour melancholic songs about missed chances. The set feels overfamiliar, though, drawing heavily on classic Seventies ballads by the Carpenters, Eagles, Elton John and 10CC.

Making music by numbers shouldn’t be this tiring.

I worry about where they can go next with such a restrictive musical template, but here they have managed subtle refinement without sacrificing the essence of their primitive appeal.

Although the 18 tracks (12 of which are co-credited to Wright) are short on catchy tunes, it’s still an effective 53-minute trip.

Love Frequency only occasionally sets the pulse racing.

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.

You don’t come to Katy Perry for depth. What’s made her special in the past is that lightning jolt of emotion that rushes through the layers of sugary-sweet pop; that’s what made lusty adolescent hormones surge as you listen to Teenage Dream, what made donning a leopard print two-piece seem like an empowering move on Roar. It’s there on Smile but you have to work for it.

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.

Their sixth album, however, sticks too rigidly to the formula.

You and I lacks the depths and textures of Grace--the intoxicating communion with other musicians, the wild strangeness of his own nascent songwriting and the assuredness that came with locating his place in music. Yet, even without all that, Buckley’s raw talent alone remains an astonishing thing.

As Watson sings about love, kindly and thoughtfully, the whimsical delivery and outdoorsy imagery recalls his fellow Oxfordians, Stornoway. At times it gets too pretty and shallow.

Hucknall appears to have got some of his mojo back, with added sincerity.

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.

None of it will set the Saturday dancefloors on fire with pouting thrills, though it may sound cool enough over coffee in the cafes of Sunday morning.

Sheeran has delivered a solid commercial showcase of the power of contemporary pop music brands. It is a case of Superstars Assemble. A fan base shared is a fan base multiplied.

If it doesn’t all quite hit past heights, the gorgeous, elegiac album closer The Last Song is a reminder that Wilson set the bar particularly high.

If a great cover version should reveal new dimensions in both song and singer, then this album is filled with them.

It is bright and busy, peppered with guest appearances. But the risk is that this extremely versatile star winds up sounding like a guest at his own party.

Her overemphasised enunciation puts Boyle firmly in the Julie Andrews stage show tradition but, at her best, she rises above inoffensive background music to gently brush the emotions.