The result is not bad: though you miss the unpredictable blasts of raw hellfire from the cult classic Surfer Rosa era, the band find some gritty, grindy melodies in the bigger, slicker vein of 1991’s patchy Trompe Le Monde.

While Caustic Love is clearly the work of a maturing singer-songwriter (shedding jaunty charm for depth and ambition), it finds the 27-year-old still skittering around in search of an artistic identity.

His smooth but expressionless voice can be a little bland for a frontman (and is always improved by Thorn’s occasional harmonies) and his carefully considered lyrics have a tidiness that sometimes verges on the prosaic. Yet the gentle mesh of flowing melody, woven instrumentation and mood of hard-earned contemplation adds up to something quite profound.

These abandoned sessions probably would have been ignored had they been released when first recorded. But to ears and sensibilities realigned to Cash’s brilliance, this really is a lost treasure.

Strangers is his most measured and thoughtful album to date.

It may be nothing new but her punchy, uplifting set of pastiche Sixties and Seventies soul, r’n’b and disco is perfectly pitched with just an appealing hint of exaggeration.

There is the odd failure (23 is a saccharine ode to her husband, the footballer Gerard Piqué), but Shakira still traverses musical styles like few others.

Wilson has nothing wildly original to say about the state of modern Britain, but sounds authentically angry on behalf of people on minimum wage or zero-hours jobs.

The album never quite catches fire like their live performance but it gets close.

An unadventurous set list reworks some of his most thoughtful and sombre songs with a selection of classic covers, all given a lush production gloss by the late Phil Ramone. What lifts it to a higher plane is Michael’s smooth and expressive singing.

Full of sparkling hooks, the results do a good job of melding Minogue’s effervescent pop grooves with the dense, heavily treated vocals and deep sub bass of modern electro dance trends.... Subject matter and delivery are strained by coquettish pandering.

She brings excellent phrasing to Haggard's powerful lyrics and there are two standout songs [Sing Me Back Home and Someday When Things are Good].

The results are fantastic: an album of world-beating standard yet still intimate and friendly, an epic of the everyday, a romance of the real.

These songs are the strongest she’s written to date, with terrific hooks and melodies throughout.

This record is rammed full of fantastically fresh and challenging beats and bears the hallmarks of Cherry's streetwise style.

Beck has always been hip. Even on his 12th album, he manages to make the dawn sound like where it’s at.

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

Lakeman again shows off his fine multi-instrumental skills--songs such as The Wanderer buzz--and there is a delightful slow lament called Portrait of My Wife.

The 14 songs ooze energy and style and feature long-term collaborators such as Alan Kelly, Ian Carr, Roy Dodds and John McCusker.

This is an elegant, mature work of a songwriter and performer at the height of her powers.

Not really a blockbuster, it’s the kind of album that makes most sense in the small hours, after the party is over.

Vega’s enduringly classy knack for quirky rhythm, sleek ideas and direct-but-detached delivery shines through much of this album, though it does suffer at times from the leaden, ye olde phrasing hinted at in the title.

Assured and still in thrall to the spinning lights, Little Red confidently and unpretentiously reflects Katy B’s transition from eager young clubber with a curfew to a mature young woman with a home of her own and the ability to hold a little something in reserve.

She’s at her best channelling the mature, suburban melodrama of vintage Tammy Wynette on Stay at Home Mother and the all-out D.I.V.O.R.C.E.-style heartwrench of Waterproof Mascara, on which a little boy’s mother thanks God for a cosmetic that “won’t run like his daddy did”.

It feels more like a primer for live shows rather than an end in itself, a set of water colour sketches to be inked in later.

A gorgeous noirish set of cinematic songs with a bittersweet emotional core.

It is quirkily appealing without quite being convincing. Lacking an emotional centre, it’s not really deep and dark enough to posit Ellis-Bextor as a sensitive singer-songwriter.

There’s a lot of great stuff on here, but it doesn’t hold together and doesn’t come close to being one of Springsteen’s great albums.