It's easy to excoriate this band for producing another corporate-rock album, dominated as ever by Jon Bon Jovi's increasingly leathery bark and Richie Sambora's relentlessly uplifting guitar lines, but it's hard to slate them for still feeling kinship with their own blue-collar backgrounds.

Some tracks (the Rick Springfield-augmented The Man That Never Was) sound like Foos-by-numbers. However, Grohl and Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic have coaxed a jewel from Paul McCartney: the raging, White Album-ish Cut Me Some Slack must be the rawest thing he's recorded in over 40 years.

The sound of The 20/20 Experience is complex, rich and rewarding.... Then there are the album's lyrics, which are awful.

These songs are atmospheric, but feel calculatedly so, especially set against the overwrought poetry of Tonra's lyrics.

[Dear's] followup offers more of the same, but with studio polish.

For the most part, the album is a testament to the sonic eloquence Lloyd discovered on his comeback via ECM at the end of the 80s.

On their 13th album, Depeche Mode are as hamstrung as ever by their refusal to admit even a chink of light into their world of gloom.... The flip side of the coin is that the austere music that accompanies all this darkness is often very beautiful.

For all its aggression and pop-culture pilfering, Sempiternal frequently feels like the work of a band satisfied to slide down the surface of heavy music rather than engage with its true heart.

Shaking the Habitual's problem is that the Knife seem to have dismissed the idea of making your point concisely as merely another affectation of a decadent and corrupt society.

It's a pleasant, if limited set, and though there are echoes of the mesmeric style of Tinariwen, he sounds more like the attacking Vieux Farka Touré with less ambitious guitar work.

The album sags when the songs fall back on traditional tropes and are unable to match the performative bombast.

Moon's puts a scratchy guitar line atop juddering drum-machine beats, while he quavers and hollers the vocal line in 50s fashion.

There are legitimate bangers, such as First Class and So Alive, but few of the tracks have that wild Wiley kick, because he hasn't produced any of them.

It's hard not to feel a nostalgic pang for their youth. You glimpse it in the chugging riff of A Baby Got Back on Its Feet and in the needling notes of Low Black Clouds, but only PKR maintains the tension.

Although the words to the song Afraid might suggest the Neighbourhood's singer and main lyricist, Jesse Rutherford, can't be older than 14, this LA outfit are actually in their 20s. And there's more in the same pubescent vein as their debut album progresses.

Ready to Die becomes really good when he stops trying.

This time their subject is the Italian publisher and leftwing activist Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, and that satisfying feeling of sound enhancing story is missing. What you get instead are some ridiculously buoyant tunes advocating social justice.

You catch several moments of inspiration but overall there's the sense of things having been made to a template.

It's hard not to yearn for the melodies to be served by a little more clarity.

It intrigues, if never quite soars, and reinforces the sense that there must be something going on here, even if you can't fathom quite what it is.

Most of the tracks on In Technicolor could have slotted neatly on to any of the Total 12 compilations the label has released since 1999, but this is top-notch execution of an aesthetic that will always be welcome.

Only the faintly niggling sensation of this being a classically authoritative Potter jazz set with some suitable concept-exotica embroidery blunts The Sirens' impact.

His musings on sex, death and sleep paralysis so overblown they're likely to induce giggles. And yet, and yet...there is much about this album--its self-possession, its vaulting ambition, its shameless melodrama and showmanship --that, with time, grows hard to resist.

The album certainly has its flaws--some plodding AOR arrangements, and so-so songs--but he hasn't sounded this engaged with his music in a very long time.

With its strong opening and ending, there's a distinct sag in the middle--More Light is a very long album--and Bobby Gillespie's lyrics still read like he's been playing with his urban apocalypse fridge magnets.

It's a beautifully played project, but perhaps a shade on the tasteful side for some jazzers.

Like all the band's recent output, Re-Mit isn't going to win over anyone who isn't already a Fall devotee.

His bursts of euphoria and delicate phrasing--with echoes of Prince and Stevie Wonder--suggest he may yet have a great album in him, even if this isn't quite it.

Clarietta is exactly the sum of its parts, which makes it a breezy listen, but never more than that. Now the challenge is to become more.

This second collaboration with the versatile Californian singer Beth Hart is remarkable for its bravery.

Their first full-length album in 16 years displays an unexpected new maturity.

Francis's insistent yelp is certainly the main event here. Without him, the 11 quickfire tracks would have decidedly less personality, though even then there are moments so featureless that you could be listening to any bunch of second-tier janglers.

Osbourne has talked, a little more realistically, about wanting to end his recording career with Black Sabbath "the right way", as opposed to with 1978's Never Say Die, an album he was too incapacitated even to finish. For all 13's flaws, it would be churlish to suggest they haven't succeeded in that aim.

Avalanche proves a middling followup to that first collection of airy, experimental R&B.

Sadly, despite the instrumental samples that appear to have been plucked from all continents (maybe excluding Antarctica), much of the rest of the album is difficult to engage with.

All told, there's a lot of bodice-ripping emotion to take in, and it's this, rather than the lack of original ideas, that makes In a Perfect World hard to take in large doses.

Ice on the Dune is a pretty impressive pop album. But it's hard not to wonder what might have been had just a bit of the fanciful imagination that goes into the visual side of Empire of the Sun been allowed to seep in.

He may yet rise above the glut of similar-sounding Sheehans, Buggs and Mumfords, but hasn't yet found his voice.

Rowland's pendulum has swung away from her Guetta-dance flirtation back to her R&B roots, but this set is still a grab-bag of Janet Jackson homages and bedroom-eyed midtempos on which Rowland's come-hither lyrics remain at odds with her slightly prim delivery.

The mood is sombre, the pace slow-to-mid and Staples means every word she sings.

Half the songs on their debut album sound much better than they are.

He's still worth checking out, though more for the musical experiment than the admirable, though now predictable, message, which veers towards easy sloganeering at times.

It is yet to produce anything quite as lovely as his 2002 minimal classic, Maria.

Between those two poles ["Bound For Glory" and "Kingdom Of The Lost"] falls plenty of enjoyable melodic hard rock, never poor, though not always scaling the heights.

A six-tracker feels a bit slight, but he sounds on the verge of finding his own style.

Throughout, bursts of radio interference, gentle guitars and even classical music make effective and sometimes welcome moments of calm before the storm.

The problem being that a voice this washed-out makes everything sound lackadaisical, rather than filled with conquer-the-world ambition.

Packed with cleverly crafted production, Where Does This Door Go may be a sonic adventure, but it's not quite slick enough to challenge the current crop of R&B luminaries.

A stolid lack of poetry combined with Dermody's flat intonation could make Any Port in a Storm hard-going, were it not for his evident, dogged attempt to be Jonathan Richman fronting the Stooges, and a stoic faith in the goodness of life and the value of human endeavour that brims with hope.

From the electro-punk opener Birthday onward, she's competent and entirely impersonal. But that's no impediment to enjoying the record, which darts efficiently from EDM to Bollywood to--Beliebers, look away now--sappiness inspired by her on-off boyfriend, Justin Bieber.

His songs are, in places, bleaker than on his previous two albums.

Samba has a style and a message of his own, and his latest album of desert blues is a reflection on the continuing upheavals in his country.

Longtime songwriter Max Martin has cooked up a title track that ranks as one of the blandest songs of his career.... Most of the first half carries on in this fashion, with the exception of the strummy anti-bullying ballad Madeleine, a showcase for AJ McLean's sweet voice. The second half is more interesting, making more of their spot-on vocal harmonies.

In come motorik krautrock/Velvet Underground rhythms, a brass band, disoriented guitars and an eerie narrative on man's capacity for destruction featuring the words of a murdered French Revolutionary.

It doesn't all hang together--sometimes there are just too many ideas jostling for supremacy and Aloneaflameaflowe gradually gets lost in a garage haze. They're at their best when they ease off and allow their psychedelic majesty to shine through.

As in the work of Simon Le Bon and Jim Kerr, an amalgam of which singer Harry McVeigh theatrically channels, dumb lyrics can be mitigated by robust anthems.

These lyrics are all...wordy.

So constant is the wearied, somnabulant mood, so unvarying is McKee's soft, unassertive baritone, that most of the 10 songs drift by without leaving footprints in the mind.

While nothing sounds destined for the ubiquity that once allowed them to stage a famous Top of the Pops food fight for 2001's Sing, the fanbase will be overjoyed to have them back.

The tender vocals contributed to Wildfire by surprise guest Frank Ocean are easily the most striking 85 seconds on the record. But the biggest talking point here will be Paper Doll. Apparently aimed at another ex, Taylor Swift, it's a washed-out ballad that takes the concept of "too much information" to a new level

Something of a gentler, more Americana-style Snow Patrol, Tired Pony's songs provide space for Lightbody's lyrics and imagery to breathe.

It's a good album, but somewhere in Archy is a remarkable one.

Cee-Lo looms large over the album: perhaps the reunion took place on his terms, but the imbalance of ideas here is frustrating.

Doherty sings repeatedly about holding his head up high. With this unexpectedly united offering, he has earned that right.

Tales of Us is slightly more mesmerising soundscape than collection of genuinely outstanding songs.

This pairing of the ethereal and the visceral makes for an interesting enough album, albeit one that sometimes begs for a kick in the backside.

By padding it so shamelessly, however, the label is hastening the day when there's simply nothing left to release.

The album succeeds because it has a freshness, raw energy and attack reminiscent of the way Mama Rosin re-work Cajun music.

It's lightweight stuff, and the artier items on the list don't add ballast. Taken as the simplest of pleasures, though, Imitations succeeds on anyone's terms.

The unvarying mood can get a little tiring.

While it feels more a "project" than an album--mainly because urbane Sting never quite nails the protagonists' desperation--he tells their stories with kindness and care.

The fact that they are the strongest efforts here suggests that, despite his admirable ambition, perhaps he should focus on what he does best.

It sounds like the work of a band that have plenty of good ideas, but increasingly can't tell them from their bad ones--or won't be told.

Not an entirely joyless album, but certainly a rather mature one.

Overall, there are more hits than misses.

It's the airier, less belligerent songs that prove most memorable.

Glasser has a masterpiece in her, but this isn't quite it.

In striving to prove they're the same artists they always were, Chase and Status have ended up suggesting precisely the opposite.

A few ponderous moments aside, this is a sturdy return to great form.

At its worst, on Everybody Out There, this desire [for contemporaneity] manifests itself in thumpy post-Mumford faux-folk and Coldplay-style massed "woah-oh" vocals.... At the other extreme, there are moments when McCartney has clearly allowed his younger producers to push him into areas that are intriguing rather than infuriating.

The first half of the album is a similar campstravganza [as single Woman's World]--Take It Like a Man indeed--but the second peters out into MOR.

The carapace of violent noise that encases each song needs breaking before you can appreciate how fascinating it is musically.

Their recognition of pop's ability to articulate its listeners' feelings, boost morale and offer guidance is the best and worst thing about them: they come across as honest and unaffected, but also self-regarding in their homespun wisdom, and far too quick with a cliche.

If only Leaneagh's vocals weren't so mutated with effects that render some of her more poignant lyrics indistinguishable, Shulamith's impact might be all the greater. Nevertheless, it's a beautifully melancholic record.

The single Roar is ruthlessly efficient in its bid to get the drunk and recently dumped member of the girls' night out party up on the table, using her WKD bottle as a microphone, and the rest of the album follows suit: if the ballads are standard issue, the faintly trap-inspired Dark Horse sounds like a hit single, as does Birthday and, for better or worse, the new jack swing parody This Is How We Do.

The politeness to his beats won't suit everyone. But there's just enough subtle power for the dancefloor, and enough movement and melodies for Quarters to operate in any environment.

If the music is broad, the characters in each song are acutely observed.

Clarkson takes the view that Christmas is as much about wistfulness and unfulfilled wishes as it is unbridled joy.

This bratty nostalgia trip is the best thing she's done in years.

It's a decent, if flawed, pop album, its good bits good enough to keep her filling stadiums as big as the gulf between her ideas and her music.

The finished product is almost a reinvention.

They're quieter and less raging than they were, but retain the nagging pull of their creator's creative disturbance.

Ultimately, the vast bulk of Midnight Memories remains emotionally charged rather than carnally inclined, with not a soupçon of R&B anywhere and love songs galore.

Toy sound cheeringly like a band who are slowly maturing, working out what they want to do and where they want to go.

It's not that these songs are bad--the arrangements are glorious, though occasionally a little florid, and the melodies are present and correct--more that they don't sound quite right.

Gambino is observant and often funny, and his loose-limbed flow can sting.

Derulo's clubby hooks are infernally catchy, and he adds a touch of freshness with buoyant forays into rock and salsa.

Until Snoop's next reincarnation, this is a welcome diversion.