U2 producer Flood marshals the band's bulldozing energy into an altogether slicker sort of bombast, and admittedly there are moments (Dream Dream Dreaming and the seemingly endless build-up of Lots Sometimes) where the songs sound in danger of losing their way in the middle of it all.

Try as he might, Barat can run, to Europe and beyond, but he will always find it hard to hide from his past.

This is a charmingly youthful and exuberant album, featuring a fine selection of vocalists.

Although this statement sounds very much from the heart, and many of these songs make you smile while other make you sour, it’s a shame that this album’s playfulness very often comes across as pretentiousness.

Better Living, Flats' 34-minute debut album, is a commendably cacophonous outpouring which contains not the slightest germ of future commercial gold.

Bad Blood is a really gratifying debut that feels like a solution.

You want the mix to jump and pound and excite. But it doesn’t, and the choruses feel hung out to dry. This makes for a frustrating listen, because the talent is there – damn, even the songs are there.

Get these cuts [I'll Never Let Go and Called Out In The Dark] out of the way, though, and Fallen Empires settles down and improves.

Whether Goodbye Lullaby was all a tad over thought, or whether she's just holding back, the finished product falls significantly short of Avril Lavigne's own capabilities.

Too patchy to warrant genuflection just yet, thanks should nevertheless be given for the exquisite moments that Young the Giant serve here.

At times Credo sounds like The Human League of today trying to be The Human League of the past, which makes for uncomfortable listening. That said, it's probably still better than it has any right to be, given the time between the group's hits and their missing out on chart positions nowadays.

It's the contrast between these points--the brilliantly familiar and the boldly flawed--that ensures I Love You, Dude stays on the right side of lazy revivalism.

Album proper or not, there's no denying this is greatly entertaining stuff.

Much has been made--often unfairly--of Gray's awkwardness and lack of convention. But after several stabs at clumsy conformity, it finally feels like it's something she's embracing, and that's massively evident here.

Style and gravitas are all very well--if Hurts could also have been consistent with the substance, Happiness would have trounced its 80s counterparts and many of its contemporaries, too.

More quality grime would be nice, but Winner Stays On proves Roll Deep are no longer an underground crew trying to make pop: the charts are there for the taking.

They get full marks for effort but, unfortunately, not for the end results.

A hugely entertaining dance-rock romp.

Strange or otherwise, this is an intriguing but confused curate's egg of an album that will probably delight as many people as it repels.

Remember Who You Are is the sound of a band not so much rediscovering their past as recycling it.

So don’t come to this thinking you’ll get the inside scoop on a celebrity divorce, but as a soundtrack to rampancy in general, it’s hard to beat.

That Panic of Girls gives way from innovation to imitation is regrettable--but in an era in which bands are content to simply wheel out their back catalogue in return for a fat pay check, it's admirable that Blondie are still here and still looking forward, even if only fleetingly.

Nobody's Daughter, despite its lengthy and troubled gestation, is a rich and emotionally searing addition to that canon, effortlessly besting her haphazard solo album.

It may have taken Geldof a while to get here, but as he prepares to collect his bus pass it seems wisdom and reflection have finally overtaken venomous splurge as his choice of artistic cloak. And it's a very good look for him.

Taken as a whole, this release offers enough revelations to suggest the original album is worth revisiting.

Until Now is best experienced with your critical faculties compromised.

Of the nine songs that aren't singles already, four are cut from the same cloth as the hits: each one desperately vying to be the tune you most want to be dancing to when the realisation hits that you're out, the night is young, and everything is brilliant.

This is a far from perfect album, but at its peak it’s highly mature, seasoned music. Exhaustion clearly seems to be beneficial to McRae’s unique sound.

This 17-track set is a worthy document of Soundgarden's glory days. There's certainly nothing here which hints at a group on the road to self-destruction.

Lupe remains a singular hip hop voice, and Lasers is still worth a listen.

Electra Heart manages to balance the ironic and the heartfelt, the quirky and the mainstream, the real and the fake with remarkable aplomb.

In order to get that these three people from Bordeaux and a drummer from Berlin are the genuine maverick article, one just has to grab a listen. And be confused. And delighted. And frustrated. And appalled. And strangely aroused. And then listen to track two.

The arrangements are dense and intricate and, together, Chief make an accomplished, purposeful noise--but it's rarely matched by depth of melodic imagination. For a slow-burner, Modern Rituals needs a little more fire.

By the end of these 17 tracks the head is heavy with images of the Smash robots battle-rapping against a crew from whatever planet The Clangers call home.

This is a fine album that warrants serious investigation from any and every rock circle.

The lyrics mingle optimism and deliberate naivety, with even the downer moments coming across as exultantly miserable rather than genuinely forlorn. Rhodes is undoubtedly sincere, but maybe at the expense of potential humour and irony.

If at times the impression left is too breezy (the elephant in the career that is You’re So Vain sounds almost embarrassed to be here), at others it’s extremely potent.

A disappointing return from the former Mercury champions.

This self-contradiction makes him as human and vulnerable as the rest of us, and that is this album's true charm.

Maddeningly tame, neither replicates the whiskey-soaked sleaze and instantly classic riffs that have earned Slash his deservedly legendary status. Thank goodness, then, for three reliable road warriors, who ride in on a much-needed rescue mission.

This is music that rings shrilly with a deafening hollowness, an unashamed fakery akin to a dream-state where fantasy and reality have become mixed and hopelessly muddied.

Whether you could go so far as to call Guetta an auteur might be pushing it, but it's a cohesive effort, if not quite a work of art.

Two or three songs slip into Jack Johnson-ish blandness, but for the most part The Sound of Sunshine makes good on the promise of its undeniably appetising title.

The strange thing is, for all that it is all over the place, compilations of lost songs and outtakes are not supposed to hang together this well. Or be anywhere near this much fun.

Ultimately, A Dramatic Turn of Events probably isn't too far from what this band would've created even with Portnoy in the ranks. It still sounds like a Dream Theater album, and that's all anyone's ever going to ask for.

Glossing over realisations that the second half begins to drag, Hologram Jams won’t appease anybody who rates music to decimal points or regularly orders their record collection alphabetically. Instead, it’s fun in the same manner as a night out necking Lambrini and cheap cocktails.

Mine Is Yours occupies an unremarkable middle ground somewhere between their bluesy, abrasive tendencies and the kind of staidly proficient indie-rock that surely wasn't part of the plan to begin with.

Twin Atlantic no longer stand out enough from the host of similar power-pop and emo acts that have flooded the airwaves in recent years, and Free is depressingly characterised by unimaginative, one-paced hollers like The Ghost of Eddie and Time For You to Stand Up.

While Labrinth makes the right kind of noise, and provides a window into himself as an artist, at a fleeting 10 tracks Electronic Earth doesn't exactly give away the farm.

While this is a confident and at times sharply written debut, there's little to suggest that Dog Is Dead bring anything new to the table.

Sometimes the production is too slick, but Morissette avoids blandness because she's so idiosyncratic.

Perfectly serviceable, but this band missed their chance to make a third great album decades ago.

A ramshackle beast largely informed by the tension between the pair's aforementioned psychedelic styles.

Nick has a great pop voice--high and clear and strong. It isn’t a great rock voice though, and his desire to smash it into shape by spirited bellowing alone can curdle things, just as they should really start cooking.

Warm and confident throughout her second album, Hilson is becoming hard to ignore.

Otherwise every passing second is a vocal battle against a declining attention span, like a clicked finger in the face, forever.

If there is a heaven, and if Tupac, Cobain, Presley et al made it through the gates, chances are they're consoling a wincing, visibly embarrassed Jackson, cursing his inability to bolt the demos drawer in Neverland's vaults just that little bit tighter.

Visions of Trees are enjoying themselves, which is evident throughout this atmospheric and surprisingly tight album.

A depressingly compromised second LP from an artist yet to meet his early promise.

There's very little drive in Junk of the Heart, just a messy selection of meandering verses that surely can't be the product of three years' work.

If you know how Rod Stewart sounds, and are aware of these songs' traditional arrangements (sole new number aside), then you already know what Merry Christmas, Baby has in store. And whether or not you're going to want to pick it up from one.

So faithfully have Collins and his confreres recreated the Sound of Young America--shimmering tambourines drowning out drums, bass compressed to a fat, distorted throb--that it's hard not to be swept along.

The wooziness is reflected in Adam’s voice, which is whisper-soft, quiet and nasal, like a man whose parents sleep lightly and have to get up early for work. All of which makes Ocean Eyes a frustrating listen, or an enchanting one, depending on your stomach for meadow-skipping whimsy.

With the exception of the always inventive playing of guitarist Wes Borland, here Limp Bizkit sound like a band whose time has passed. Given that this is a group that boorishly exemplified the empty materialism and crass self-centredness that lurked at nu-metal's core, this is surely no bad thing.

California 37's peculiar teenage stance offers as many toe-curling moments as it does pleasant surprises.

Despite the contemporary co-writes, in an age where Take That work with Stuart Price and Nicola Roberts embraces Diplo's electro cool, this album comes across as a selection of competent B sides surrounding the fantastic Starlight.

There weren't too many opportunities for Jones to arrange or conduct during the course of this project, which is angled towards the vocal performance, whether sung or rapped. Its instrumental contributions serve mostly as a backdrop to the posturings of its guests.

It's exhausting, and somehow impatient. Swedish House Mafia don't earn their big moments, they throw them in whenever the ideas pot runs dry.

[The Midsummer Station is] a brave and bold addition to what is increasingly looking like a catalogue to relish.

The Awakening is lacking the grandstanding moment it needs to elevate it above reserved recommendation--it's a safe, steady affair, but about as revelatory as a Chris de Burgh best-of.

It's fun, but not a lot to show for four years work.

Somehow, like James Blake and SBTRKT before them, Stubborn Heart have forged strikingly contemporary pop from an alternative future.

Ultimately you have to admire the precision tooling, the cunningly-gauged parallel levels of bigness and blandness, the ruthlessness – the only-too-plausible machine.

Despite their attempts to court the teenagers across the land, it's questionable whether this music has enough quality, variety and ingenuity to truly compete with others who have emerged from the talent hotbed of south Wales, let alone the rest of the world.

An unexpected but endearing valentine to the 1940s and 50s.

So, while he fails to reward those fans who are everything to him with a great collection of pop-RnB, Brown at least gives them reason to believe.

There's intelligence, individuality and character in abundance. But all too often it's caked in dollar-store body glitter and choked by feather boas.

It all adds up to a sassy, splashy modern pop album that rattles through its 10 tracks in a dash under 35 minutes.

These all-star gatherings are more fun for the artists than the listener.

A Moving Picture proves a more nakedly ambitious--in the humdrum sense of the word--follow-up, which struggles to strike the right balance between street cred and pop appeal.

What it's not, though, is a collection that confirms the arrival of a significant solo talent. It's too patchy, too hurried, the powers behind it too eager to capitalise on the artist's current chart success.

The band struggles to dredge up any sort of sparkle, no matter how finely-forged the hook.

More often, however, Orbits has too much going on rather than too little.

The band's weakness is an unfortunate tendency to drift occasionally into MOR territory, and sometimes generic boy-meets-girl lyrics fail to keep the arrangements above water.

The production--by chart-grabbing Fraser T Smith (James Morrison, Taio Cruz, Cee-Lo)--can only bring so much depth or variety to unadventurous songs which are bellowed and wailed with all the subtlety of Florence Welch giving birth to a rhino.

What Good Charlotte don't seem to have picked up along the way are any startlingly new ways of delivering their honeyed ramalama pop-punk. Which could prove troublesome for them in the long run, now that the punk bubble has once again popped.

They sound like a pub soul covers band allowed to let rip on a few originals.

They're probably the only band in history whose latest album would sound better if they did not appear on it.

Talent burns through old-skool rap bangers, ferocious electro body-poppers and teary teen anthems – never a dull moment, never an irritating frat-girl with a “bottle of Jack”.

The 2011 incarnation of Incubus is a depressingly dull and sterile proposition and, really, we wouldn't wish these bland wet blanket anthems on anyone.

The Beginning is a depressing listen, not because the music's that bad, but because it implies that even the most successful pop producer on the planet can't afford to indulge in anything that might be construed as intelligent or interesting, lest the masses run away screaming in terror.

It's dumb for sure, but knowingly so, and its incessantly upbeat vibes do provide something of a lift.

Expectedly inconsistent, Almost Alice is a great idea some distance short of being properly realised.

It is full of catchy melodies and hooks. It is extraordinarily lame. Think of Keane, and remove the grit.

Margins struggles to rise above the ordinary. Fans of Maxïmo Park will not be disappointed, but it's frankly hard to see anyone else caring very much.

While Lopez has claimed that her new public image showcases the real her, she never could pull off the idea of being a real human being with actual emotions on record.

The Devil's Rain, then, is a slightly mixed bag of tricks, treats and travesties.

Much advance word of Lou Reed and Metallica's excursion has been one of bewilderment and dismissal. It may well be, though, that in the fullness of time this is an album that is given the praise it deserves.