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

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.

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.

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

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”.

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.

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.

It might not always succeed in its style-swapping, but The United Nations of Sound is certainly as bold a record as Ashcroft's ever made.