Hi Beams is an album that delights and baffles in almost equal measures.

To The Happy Few is precise and calculated. It lacks the irrationality and selfishness that gives a record its soul.

Ultimately though, they don’t commit enough to the sonic range which they eventually bring to bear, focusing too much on middle-of-the-road indie-folk.

The tracks themselves work if you can get past the contrast. That might even be what makes you love it rather than hate it. The problem is that if you’re going to have a deep concept behind your pop tracks then it really needs to be stronger or more current than something that has gone before.

The aforementioned 'The King' is a string-laden lament on changing times and love in their small pocket of the world, and it's better than most of the songs that precede it. But it’s not enough to pull Once Upon A Time In The West out of it’s own lumpen mediocrity.

Mr M is an honest but tough old ride.

On the surface it’s all nicely put together but almost all these covers lack the passion.

While the songs aren't exactly good per se, they're certainly not hateful. You'd dance to them. Maybe you'd have to be drunk. Maybe you'd have to be in Reflex. But you'd dance to them.

In general, the songs that began life as full band, large productions numbers undergo Young’s intimate reimagining far better than the already bare-boned tunes.

Both songs [Vapor and RIPP] provide interesting interludes in an otherwise pretty average album.

Listening to Barbara is like watching the England football team; expectations are high at the outset and true to form, things get off to a rousing start. However, after the halfway mark normality sets in, there's an alarming sense of underachievement and long before its conclusion, you're dismissing them as hapless failures.

A solidly built celebration of interchangeable ordinariness.

It’s purely incidental material that goes nowhere for a dozen tracks and ends with just as much fuss as it began, i.e. none.

All too often, I'm From Barcelona are either forgettable or just beyond cloying.

For the most part, though, debut album Between Places cuts and pastes a series of well meaning but unengaging pop vignettes.

There’s this frustrating sheen over everything--likely from Fitz and Joy’s formal training--which makes the violins too syrupy to be sweet, the steel guitar too rustic to be real. By the same token, Joy’s lyrics also lack any lived-in landmarks.

One Way Ticket To Hell...And Back is a sturdy rock album with some saucy titles and odd instruments, but sadly it is less than it could or should be.

Nothing Is Wrong would have been a better record had that time been spent eking the emotion out of their own lives, rather than their record collections.

Still as irksome and tuneless as ever.

You know those radio jingles in which they stick a bunch of current tunes into a big-beat mess? This has the same effect – a whizzbang confectionary, serving more to advertise the band’s back catalogue than to be any kind of durable document.

The downer is that nothing here can touch the early pop gems that can still see even the more stringently alternative spill their JD and cokes, and without that it's all too easy to start thinking this record is a lot worse than it actually is.

White Wilderness feels like a record that could have become a compelling collection of wonky strum-along pop songs with imaginative and colourful instrumentation, but ultimately it's indebted to an over-complication of ideas in a collaboration that struggles to flourish the way it should do on paper.

It’s a real shame Witness has come out as a bit of a disjointed mess, as there’s a decent record somewhere in there, but it gets lost in the fog of endless guest productions and co-writes that miss the point entirely.

Gone is the rawness of his debut and the innovation of its two follow ups. More worryingly, he’s missing the emotion that made those records so potent.

The album only features nine tracks, but somehow still contrives to feel over-long and lack cohesion.

I wouldn't go as far as saying that Elson's debut is a flight of fancy, but it just doesn't engage the listener in any meaningful manner. An engaging artist should be inviting you to step inside their bubble, they shouldn't really need you to stand outside and wait for the pop.

There is no such contrast on this album, nor much of a sense for a distinctive or special musical moment.

Lyrically, Later... veers between juvenile and baffling.

This debut--while not a technically poor album, boasting as it does pop hooks aplenty if you truly focus in, beyond the sometimes irritating vocal tennis--sags where it should soar, dips where it should peak.

They’re still an incredibly likeable band, unashamed of being rabble-rousing without ever resorting to lowest common denominator tactics, but The Cribs have toned down the things that made them great.

Some of these songs would spring to life if they were less restrained, and adding a tactful but solid rhythm could be one way to achieve this. As it stands, there is enough here only to convince listeners of Selway's emerging talent as a songwriter if he sticks at it.

Bainbridge’s intentions are of course only known to himself and perhaps his collaborators, but there are enough moments here to make the listener believe that staying the course with Kindness, regardless of his seemingly wilful obtuseness and contrastingly puzzling adherence to cliché, might be worth it in the long term.

There are no bad songs on Inner Classics,, no painful moments, no dodgy production or misjudged directions. But there's not much else either.

A few highlights aside, it’s hard to understand why at least a half-dozen of these over-glossed R&B-lite numbers ever made it out of their maker’s mind.

With Monochrome, Hamilton seems to have realised that stepping away from the majors and their requisite studio production sludge can only be a good thing. Now, if he can find a new direction to blaze in rather than re-tread thrice-covered ground, he may be on to something.

Ultimately, it seems that the likes of Springsteen, Dylan, and the rest of the well-worn idols, call many more of the shots than Blitzen Trapper as an independent entity.

To put into context, it’s a damn sight less disappointing than the new Duran Duran folly, and over time even many of the lesser tracks begin to sink in to the psyche.

These old balladeer's tales are fleshed out with metaphors and all the tricks of a great writer. The burble of guitar lines complement it all artfully. That doesn't mean the criticisms go away--there is a lack of invention within any genre, and too often the lustre dulls.

On the whole City Club is full of the type of synth funk nonsense that should have been left alone in the late Noughties.

The formula established in track one is repeated in the combined half hour of the other two tracks here to less devastating effect.

On the one hand, it seems that she wants to stick to her roots and make a country record, yet on the other hand, she wants to put on her engineer hat and make an album that is sonically interesting.

Babyshambles once promised to keep the Arcadian dream alive. Instead, they’ve fizzled out in a fit of mediocrity.

It’s an oddball groove-rock album, played very well, imprinted with Homme's undeniably interesting personality. Yet when all’s said and done, it's not particularly memorable and entirely lacks the type of yee-haw exuberance that might have made it a sloppy treat.

There is certainly something interesting about it, but it’s also a bit hard to embrace wholeheartedly.

In between there are definite moments, but the preponderance of very long songs makes it a slog to this day.

A number of plays through and it’s still not clear who, exactly, the band are taking the proverbial out of: themselves, playfully and absolutely intentionally, or us, fans who’ve become conditioned to not expecting the best from a band who, personally, have been a shadow of themselves since that first ‘sequel’ release.

Enough signs are pointing in the right direction, but Romance At Short Notice isn’t brave enough to follow each road to its end.

Until Coco can hit upon this kind of refinement of her influences in a more general sense, she seems destined to be known firstly for who her father is and only secondly for her own artistic achievements.

Musically Weaves is a hodgepodge. It opens with surf-pop synths that later give way to meaty, big and bouncy bass lines and bright colours shooting from guitar lines that slip and slide all over the place.

Restarter is a severely underwhelming return from one of the foremost breakthrough guitar bands of recent years.

Eclipse blacks out nuance of every kind, resulting in a record which achieves its ambitions for sheer, bludgeoning vastness, but falls down on actually engaging the listener in simpler, more relatable ways.

The milquetoast, wholegrain rock of My Old, Familiar Friend never really rises out of the mire to become anything other than a pleasant and forgettable toe-tapper.

On the moments that they commit to one priority over the other, Crushed Beaks show an energetic flair which most likely translates to a blistering live sound. But when they try to split the difference, the results are middling on Scatter.

There’s a lot here that’s nice, but nothing that really screams out its demands to be listened to.

Oh Land, however, inhabits a tepid middle ground between the two extremes – offering neither gilded Scandi chart-pop (Robyn, Annie) or the artistic mettle of Scandi indie bands, most of whom are able to turn out sublime pop anyway.

It's a pleasant enough experience on the whole, but could've been so much more--and that is what's so frustrating with Rituals.

It’s not as good as its makers’ first, given the flatness of the overall production which falls well short of capturing the dynamism of the band’s live show.

Athlete seem to have found a formula in the studio and left the autopliot in reverse.

Far from implying that mind-expansion = mesmerising creativity, jj no 3 unfurls like it's going through the course of a drug-induced reaction.

Musically, the song structures are as bog-standard as Britpop, the lyrics constantly teeter on the edge of nonsense, while the lack of any real change in style save for rotating the guy on vocals means the tracks continue to merge into one another even after a few listens.

Nina Persson may have dropped the guise of A Camp, but Animal Heart is too emotionally unengaging to leave you feeling like you know her any better for it and compared to Colonia’s more colourful palette it feels, if not quite beige, then at best a dull taupe.

While Hooded Fang's two-and-a-half minute pop songs are absolutely fine, you'll struggle to find the time for them when there are already so many better ones out there.

Too often songs come across as a pastiche of the Atlanta group, with none of the splashes of colour, none of the real sense of building atmosphere.

Computers and Blues, ultimately, just passes the test with a studious recount. It is neither atrociously bad nor staggeringly good: no stand-outs, no teeth-clenching clunkers. It is just okay.

There is plenty of decent stuff going on in the duo's third record, but it still never really takes off into any rarified territory.

Master of My Make Believe has the feel of being made deliberately difficult to listen to; obstructionist for the sake of being obstructionist, confrontational without really having anything to argue against - except what might, ultimately, be self-imposed expectations.

Though occasional glimpses of that trademark Beta Band brilliance appear, Astronomy For Dogs fails to act as much more than a reminder to listen to Anderson and company’s former glories.

The combination of Emmy and Tim's vocals is also a consistent issue throughout the record; partly a result of a seeming refusal to harmonise, but mainly because are both blessed with mellifluous tones that, whilst effective on their own, offer little variation or texture together.

It is, ultimately, an unimaginative album from a promising band. Better records may lie ahead for them, but for now they will struggle to reach far beyond their existing fanbase.

It actually feels quite sterile in a lot of places; a bit too afraid to show its cards, a bit too afraid to get its hands dirty.

While it's obviously been personally cathartic, you have to think that it's far from the best record Benjamin could have put out.

This isn't a character assassination (honest), more an explanation why an album that's actually pretty accomplished, musically, should, in the end, prove so forgettable. Even though guitarist Robbie Stern's classical training has been put to good use with some of these arrangements, all too rarely are other band members allowed to shine.

It’s OK, it’s not bad, but it’s largely standard Weezer and the stand-out tracks are fewer and further between.

There's an absolutely great EP somewhere amongst the length of Darwin Deez's debut, it's just unfortunate that it's been distilled into a sub-par full-length.

As an album, The High Country is a little disappointing, as fans of Richmond Fontaine might wish for something a little more traditional in the structure, or at least for the story idea to have been realised better.

AM lacks that character empathy: rather than being detached--ie, cool, wry, transverted--Turner is removed (impulsive, anxious, dull) and it is this subtle distinction that shoots AM down in its shiny leather metal-toed boots.

Rules may not be the shape of what’s to come, but there’s also little offence to be found in its unobtrusive ways.

Whatever the case, for Christina Aguilera, the x-factor has gone. The daring single minded focus has apparently been lost.

Double albums are necessarily somewhat hit and miss. That's part of their pick'n'mix charm. But M83 mostly miss me here.

Had this been a debut album perhaps it would have been better received, however, the shadow of the successful first album looms heavy here and may just have listeners reaching for the older material rather than the current.

There is the potential for something more than a mildly decent album in Sleep Forever. It's the arrogant self-indulgence that really holds the album back from being what it could be.

While World Wide Rebel Songs exudes confidence, its execution is like attempting to cross too many "T"s with your eyes closed: odds are that you'll get one or two right, but it's impossible to consistently hit the mark.

It has an idle drifting quality that suits casual listening very well. Whether that's all you want from an album is another question.

Planet Earth’ll leave you feeling decidedly short-changed.

It holds some charms, but Peeping Tom is overshadowed by Patton’s previous work.

If you come to Safe Trip Home without expecting the big hits or a surprise collaboration with a rapper, you’ll be disappointed. If you’re a Dido faithful who’s just endured five years of hell, you’ll find she’s is still the perfect soundtrack to your life.

The tracks may not be anything particularly bold or new, but this formula has been honed for long enough to make them successful, largely at least.

It is the preponderance of bland dance tracks (the inane 'Go Hard (La.La.La)', 'Twerkin'' and the abysmal 'luV haus' et al) lacking the wit of her previous singles, which consign this debut to a failure.

‘Songs For The Deaf’ worked because it had the tunes to handle the drama. It dared you to hate it at first so that it could eventually win you over, which made its triumph all the greater. But with ‘Lullabies To Paralyze’ you’re waiting a long time to be won over, and when it finally happens, it’s far too brief.

The majority of this record meanders along like a fuel-starved express train whose driver has taken an extended lunchbreak; experimental noise follows more experimental noise.

This self-titled album isn’t bad, and certainly far from unlistenable. But in refusing to risk being something other than middle of the road, they have become arguably worse. It’s boring.

Like a lot of great records, Masters Of The Burial is minimally arranged, slowly performed and quietly recorded; but there's never a spark here because Millan doesn't give enough of herself to it.

On occasion, it’s actually borderline thrilling but those moments are too few and far between.

Unfortunately, the hour-long main section of Jojo Burger Tempest is too hollow to be of much merit. The great variety of timbres on the album creates a psychedelic vibe, but the songs themselves are simply lacking in focus.

It’s not going to convince anyone new to pick up Duran Duran's records and it doesn’t surpass their previous work.

Unfortunately these familiar sounding highlight aren't enough to raise Bad Lieutenant above the level of any other New Order side-project and they in fact fall some way short of Sumner Electronic.

The album is a sprawling, confusing, self-indulgent mess. Nonetheless, there are real glimmers of brilliance here.

Sadly, there’s little to add to that post-Bracket mixtape here; aside from the single and 'UnBiloTitled'--a track that first appeared on internet forums years ago. Sedated by Street's production, the band lose the wild, rubbish quality that Mick Jones' incompetence presented them with just as they're learning how to write focused songs.