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.