This album continues the striptease of Britney’s career. But behind each discarded veil there is just another veil, an insubstantial gauze masking teams of (presumably unphotogenic) producers, writers, stylists and sloganeers.

It is all so swaggeringly confident and honed to a perfect point, it is hard not to be caught up in its own sense of conviction.

It is, I suppose, all very tasteful and yet it retains the original’s inherent oddness.

She doesn’t do anything wildly original with them [musical genres], but she has fun.

The result is as swaggeringly confident, brash and modern as any mainstream hip hop being produced anywhere in the world right now.

It is exhaustingly, daringly, bafflingly brilliant, but you might want to lie down in a dark room after listening.

She sounds like a woman, and an artist, who’s finally found herself.

The range of the album is impressive.

This album proves his talent is timeless.

It's expensive but for Martyn fans it will offer hours and hours of fresh enjoyment of one of British folk's true greats.

One Breath may not be a masterpiece but it does enough to suggest she has a chance of making one someday.

The Fifth sees Dizzee dropping his aitches between generic, anthemic, autotuned American choruses.

Sting sounds earnest and isolated: like a man singing bleakly out to sea. But he veers towards hammy at times, laying his Geordie accent on a little too thickly.

The pair bring a gritty stiffness to Tim McGraw's Open Season on My Heart and Harris brings a searing power to Patti Scialfa's Spanish Dancer.

Only the schmaltzy If I Could Believe left me unmoved. Otherwise, this is a very cool, politically charged collaboration which finds the Roots and Costello at their thrilling best.

The content is lovingly packaged in a box neatly dressed-up as one of those giant beat boxes hipsters used to lug around before the advent of the Sony Walkman and the digital revolution that followed.

What a wild and wonderful listening experience this is: bristling with ideas, constantly shooting off at different angles but always replete with earworm melodies, plush with glittering sounds, charged with intelligent and emotional lyrics and underpinned by a syncopated rhythm section that shifts gears effortlessly from tightly coiled to blazingly expansive.

Rizzle Kicks are evidently clever, well-mannered fellows. Refreshingly, they don’t pretend to be anything else.

Some of it is boring and the two songs from his George Harrison session chug along forgettably. But I’d swap my unloved copy of Self Portrait for this box set any day.

It's nice. A bit boring. The melodies are likeably predictable, warm and gentle.

Producers Dave Kaplan and Dave Darling have sanded the new arrangements of smooth oldies such as Gentle on My Mind down to the rough grain. The result is a deeply moving record--a warm, valedictory squeeze of the listener’s hand from the cowboy hunk.

The Civil Wars offers up 12 perfectly elegant, subtly arranged Americana songs of bad love, misplaced emotion, cheating hearts, fighting and fleeing.

What you get is pure and fluent Simpson musicianship.

Arrangements are simple and sparse, everything lightly touched, with only swells of strings and brushes of horn, harmonium and other instrumental colours buoying up her guitar and clear voice.

You Are Not Alone, her 2010 collaboration with Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, won Staples her first Grammy. The follow up is even better.

Electric is the second really fantastic pop-dance blast of the year.

The New Yorker's music has become less urgent and original ... This album sounds the musical equivalent of being chauffeur driven around Jay-Z's kingdom in an air conditioned, bullet-proofed executive limo while the man himself reclines his plush leisure seat beside you, casually pointing out the scenes of his former glories.

After The Ball, a classic waltz in 3/4 time and a song of heartbreak as powerful today as it was more than 120 year's ago, is just one highlight on this super musical history lesson.