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.

An enjoyable and soulful album, the highlight of which is the title track Indian Ocean.

His long gestating third album is every bit as fantastic as earlier offerings, stuffed with narratives of contemporary bohemian life; wordy, free-flowing verses giving way to singalong choruses, spiced up with perky, lateral hooks.

Failing to commandeer some stormy rockers, Faithfull proves most evocative on a couple of tender, stripped back ballads, Love More Or Less (written with Tom McRae) and Nick Cave collaboration Deep Water.

Gospel choirs hum and swell tenderly beneath the rougher edges of his riffs. They add mature, universal gravitas and often a holy ecstacy to an intense, youthful lyrical tangling of religion and romantic obsession that regularly finds him poised "between love and abuse".

A genuinely superior slice of small hours electro-pop.

Tomorrow... deepens on repeated listening, with Yorke locating moments of beauty and calm in the eye of his anxiety.

What makes it so compelling is a classic rock Americana set up deftly interweaving lazy twin guitars and splashes of Hammond organ over steady rolling chord progressions that gather power with each repetition.

It is all quite delightfully nuts.

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.

It is as self-indulgent as Seventies progressive rock, albeit filtered through a 21st-century indie-rock sensibility that keeps things taut and edgy, with virtuoso posturing at a minimum.

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.

It's great to have Lee Ann Womack back with such a sad and lovely album.

Cohen’s triumphant return to the live arena is reflected in the growling assuredness of his vocals. An absolute treat.

There is a maturity and conviction to this album that makes it a step up.

A fizzy lifting drink of an album.

Still channelling Lynyrd Skynyrd, REM and the Band, the rest of the Crows keep the tyres on the tarmac like pros.

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

At times it does sound like it is trying a bit too hard to please. But it's more pop than Pop ever was, and it certainly does the job it apparently sets out to do, delivering addictive pop rock with hooks, energy, substance and ideas that linger in the mind after you’ve heard them.

This is not jazz for the purist but it is a heartfelt and entertaining tribute to one of the musical greats.

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.

She shows in Everything Changes that she can keep up with the times.

There is a joyful exuberance to Revival, which has U2 and Coldplay arranger Rupert Christie at the helm.

If (oh dear) you haven't got a Richard Thompson album in your collection, then this is a great way to get to know a truly inspired songwriter. But even if you know his work inside out, then you will still find much to enjoy listening to a master re-touch some of his best works.

Track for track, it’s the equal of anything Petty has released in a long and righteously distinguished career.

Sparks, Fun., Norah Jones and Jarvis Cocker imbue pithy vignettes with their own personalities, Jack White and Jack Black play with chirpy nonsense songs and Swamp Dogg’s soulful take on America, Here’s My Boy is heartbreaking. This is certainly more than an academic exercise.

Given Lewis’s age and retro-musical instincts, major stardom may now be beyond her grasp, but if you like your pop music grown up, she’s up there with the big boys.

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.