Ultimately, this is a brilliant record about clearing out the emotional crap and stripping things back to their essence – the perfect soundtrack to lull us out of our collective wintering and into some mental spring cleaning.

Playing piano and acoustic guitar, the 44-year-old takes listeners on a bittersweet journey balancing the melancholy of the medium with a healing message. Stand out songs Closer and Lose My Way have a meditative sadness but there is real warmth in choral backing vocals, subtle grooves and Brun’s melodic instincts.

Wrecking Ball may be his angriest and most overtly political collection, yet the fury is contained in some of his most uplifting and celebratory music, so you can never be quite sure if he has come to raise the flag or to burn it.

Accessorised with Staxy horns and handclaps, the resulting album has a genuine groove and glow.

Its low-budget weirdness will have you laughing into the new year.

The new Rolling Stones album is the best thing they have made since their Seventies glory days. Which, it might reasonably be argued, de facto makes it the best rock’n’ roll album of the past four decades at least.

There are many absolutely gorgeous moments, including a reconfiguring of Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major as a ballad of gender fluid love, melancholy dance song Tears Are Soft, the lovely piano ballad Flowery Days and delicate electropop True Love (featuring 070 Shake). But the overwhelming mood is oppressive as it proceeds at a relentlessly mid tempo pace like a kind of stately march towards ecstatic sexual release.

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

Her command over that mass of bodies remains.

Wild Beasts have shed a lot of excess, offering a stripped-back amalgamation of analogue Eighties synths, snappy machine rhythms and industrial rock guitar buzz, coloured with great swathes of harmonic panache, that is lean and mean enough to pass for modern pop. This newfound purpose is the real revelation of Wild Beasts’ strongest album to date.

They don’t quite sound like the finished article, but there is a virtuous sense of their trying to make music in service of something profound.

A brew of sinister synth waves nearly stagnates where we want it to cascade, and harmonies twine around one another where we want them to soar into anthems. In short, a potential blaze delivers a fizzle.

The focus is always on the smart, economical, classically constructed songs, boasting memorable verses, catchy choruses, intriguing lyrics and peppered with tremendous instrumental breaks. This is an album of conviction and purpose, from a band you can believe in.

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

Lisa Hannigan is on confident form in her second solo release since the split from Damien Rice.

Beautifully nuanced collage of soulfully rocking flavours.

With dreamy lullabies, hypnotic love songs and pointed politics all delivered with emotional stridency, Saint-Marie blends rich musicality with the force of righteous conviction.

Inspired playing by Sam Sweeney (fiddle), Rob Harbron (concertina), Roger Wilson (guitar, fiddle), Ben Nicholson (bass), Toby Kearney (percussion), and guests appearances from Jon Boden (guitar, fiddle) and Martin Simpson (guitar) add to a delightful album.

It is the second half of the album that actually shows why country persists against all odds: at its best, it is unafraid of telling stories that dig deep into ordinary lives.

The full band arrangements are tastefully understated, and the 47-year-old sustains a mood of gentle sorrow and hard-earned wisdom that is easy on the ear. It is well trodden territory but Jurado is a class act.

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

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.

Technically Gibbs is a flawless emcee and it’s great to see more of his melodic range on SSS, something that will deservedly bring in new fans. But for his next album, it would be interesting to see Gibbs explore the roots of his “hustler mentality” even further, and start to subvert some of gangster rap’s more impish clichés.

The timeless appeal of Carnival is echoed in Keep Your Courage, which speaks volumes for the cohesive, eternal quality of Merchant's ability to weave romantic, folk-rock ballads rich with organ, brass, and tidal waves of strings all anchored to simple piano melodies.

If I have a caveat, it is that it is all so single minded, it lacks the dizzying splendour of Monae’s earlier epics. But on its own down and dirty terms, The Age of Pleasure is sheer pleasure.

This sounds like the work of an artist who knows he is at the head of the hip hop pack, laying down a gauntlet to the whole of rap music.

This confident and assured album surely ranks among his best.

Her charismatic force keeps things afloat. Music destined for a group workout class or M&S Christmas advert, maybe, but executed to a high standard and providing precious confidence and joy to a lot of people – and really, who can argue with that.