A brilliant tribute album, showcasing properly Lead Belly's cultural legacy.

There are songs about baseball, weather and enduring domestic love, acutely observed and delivered in tones so smooth they slip past in a soft blur.

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.

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.

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

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

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

The record could do with more tunes to make use of that talent, but it’s still nice to see him back.

Welch still has the love--and the tunes--we need to see us through.

There is a lot to take in on this big, bold, madly ambitious album, but Rocky has made a frequently dazzling spectacle, another reminder that hip hop is currently setting the bar very high indeed.

You feel each artist shares your yearning to hear Dalton sing each song herself. Haunted and haunting.

Easily the best thing she has done since her album of Muscle Shoals sessions, New Routes, which she made in the early Seventies.

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.

Every track offers up a smart blend of snappy lyrics and catchy hooks, and at least half are absolutely glorious.

Saturns Pattern is an album to wallow joyously in, even if the songs are as whimsical as Weller’s approach to punctuation.

She elegantly smudges the borders of a brass and banjo-driven sound with sophisticated little experiments in rhythm, production and arrangement.

This is music that is following its own agenda, whose funky energy is innate. It’s been absorbing external influences for centuries and is keeping on doing so in today’s crazy, accelerated postmodern world.

Life has been a struggle for the son of Steve but the closing track, Looking for a Place to Land, suggests there is some light at the end of the tunnel.

Canadian band Great Lake Swimmers excel on I Was a Wayward Pastel Bay, a gentle song which shows off frontman Tony Dekker’s country music skills.

It's a sprawling beast of an album and a remarkable piece of creativety from 68-year-old Russell.

The sticking point for some might be Broderick’s voice, which shares a boyish sweetness with singers like Jens Lekman and José Gonzalez--perfect for country ballads but which struggles to carry some of the slighter compositions.

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.

The weirder moments--the molten strings and xylophones--redefine the band as a powerful and original force.

A sparse, mid-tempo acoustic account of lost love, almost the definition of a sensitive singer-songwriter album. Yet it is so focused in intent and precise in performance, it seems to mark an advance rather than a retreat, the mature arrival at the realisation that sometimes less really is more.

[A] bravura masterpiece. There is no sugar rush of digital synthetic beats and radio-friendly hooks. This is a dense, intricate mesh of free-flowing jazz, deep Seventies funk and cut-up hip hop with a verbose, hyper-articulate rapper switching up styles and tempos to address contemporary racial politics in a poetic narrative built around a long dark night of the soul.

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.

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.

The Magic Whip turns out to be a triumphant comeback that retains the band's core identity while allowing ideas they'd fermented separately over the past decade to infuse their sound with mature and peculiar new flavour combinations.