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.

It’s an assured and at times impressive debut for a blonde determined to have some fun with her image and her music.

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.

As packed and punchy as Black Eyed Peas on steroids, this is the sound of the overground.

This record falls into all the icky, celebrity duet traps.

There have been many great sci-fi concept albums before, but Coldplay’s offering is not so much about exploring the outer limits as continued world domination. It's Zippy Starburst and the Earworms from Marketing.

Mainstream Sellout portrays MGK as a victim of success; it gleams like a fancy ornament on an industry merry-go-round – then the music hits you, not with a roar, but a very loud meh.

Man of the Woods pitches unevenly between town and country, with folky campfire songs about the joys of nature arranged around electronic rhythms and electro funk. The two strains don’t really get along. When it’s bad, it’s cringe-inducing. But when it’s good, it’s world-beating.

Pink Elephant doesn’t have quite the same swagger as earlier albums. It is almost too personal, like listening to a preacher begging for forgiveness from his flock. Yet the sheer power of Arcade Fire in full flight should be enough to restore any sinner’s faith in rock and roll.

The songs are weak, the sounds cheesily overfamiliar and a slightly second-rate string of collaborators (he wanted Lady Gaga and Rihanna but settled for Kylie Minogue and Britney Spears) fail to sprinkle the beats with any magic.

There are a few tasty future-pop moments, but mainly it's predictable r&b, weighed down with tiresome, ersatz sexiness.

There may be nothing particularly original here, but the gritty ambience of electric instrumentation suits Mumford & Sons’s way with melody, emotion and dynamics. Simply put, the Mumfords rock.

His second album is a regression. A year on, the gaudy guitar loops and sleek hip-hop beats sound mundane.

Sparer instrumentation and slack tempos mean that singer Luke Pritchard dominates, and his reedy voice fails to enliven trite lyrics about lust and fame.

Packed with gospel choirs, church organs and soulful ululations condensed into a typically bravura tableaux of obscure samples, warped synths and spooky slabs of vocoder harmonies, Jesus Is King sounds as scintillating as anything in West’s considerable canon.

The more time you spend with each song, the more it sounds like a variation on something you’ve heard done better before, a formula in search of a hook.

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

A legion of co-producers attempt to recreate the slick dance-pop for which she is famed, but too often her husky voice and arch delivery are given short shrift by bloated house beats and perfunctory hooks.

He is, it is true, a singular talent and his inner monologues crackle with an undeniable dark alchemy. And yet, like a sermon that goes on too long, Kanye’s stream-of-conscience observations on Jesus, Kim Kardashian and the importance of being Kanye suffer for an absence of breathing space. Full of sound and fury it may be – but West’s latest ultimately lacks direction.

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

They know how to knock a tune together and have delivered a pop party album thrillingly in tune with contemporary listening habits.