The noise onslaught can grow a bit wearying, and it’s something of a relief when Lou Barlow takes the reins for two tracks: mournful closer Left/Right and album standout Love Is, which brings to mind the Folk Implosion at their most soulful.

Pigeonheart is a dense and immersive listen imbued with an odd spirituality; but unlike, say Age of Adz, the heart and warmth within sometimes remain frustratingly buried beneath layers of alien affectations.

Scratch the surface, though, and some crushingly average songs lie beneath. Lots of interesting sounds, sure, but these collide rather than connect.

The fusion is at its best on Poze, which eases from chanting vocals to a blues-rock guitar riff, and Pa Bat Kòw, which includes a rousing percussion workout.

It’s worth noting that what Blossoms lacks in edge or depth, it makes up for in well-turned melodies and the odd deft production touch.

Furnaces is quite clearly not the record Harcourt thinks it is, but it’s an interesting enough one nevertheless.

Robert Schwartzman, who writes, produces and performs almost all the songs here, bringing varying moods to a default mode of sunny powerpop.

Impossible Dream undoubtedly boasts the kind of bright melodies, satisfying hooks and nice turns of phrase that can worm their way into your psyche. Whether Bonar’s songs are distinctive enough to leave a mark there, though, is not quite so certain.

At times it feels just a little too on the nose, more a lovingly recreated period piece than something adventurous and new.

A collection of classy, retro pop that showcases her chameleonic voice. It’s not a style that holds a huge amount of excitement any more, as indicated by the album’s more banal junctures, such as the rather stale Elizabeth Taylor and various cod-Adele moments. But Maguire proves it can still be startlingly fruitful.

It’s an album engulfed by bittersweet nostalgia.

Snoopies, featuring David Byrne at peak David Byrne, have excellent elements wasted, by being crudely cut-and-shut together. But the way Pos and Dave rap, letting rhymes spill over bar intervals and beyond, is the biggest pleasure, and the straightforward hip-hop tracks such as Pain and Property of Spitkicker.com are perhaps the best.

You might sometimes wish Barnes would curb his more outlandish impulses; when focused, he is a fine songwriter.

None of it bad, just a disappointment after that phenomenal opening.

Warm and nourishing, but bereft of an artistic statement, In Waves feels like a musical stop gap--a temporary vacation rather than a home.

It’s hard not to hope White explores this direction further in future, but for now Beulah will do: mainstream and commercial, but odd and cranky with it, an album that sounds like it wasn’t so much written and recorded as got off his chest.

They’re best known, though, for the swamp-rock they adopted from 1982--distorted, grimy, seedy and just a little psychotic; Swampland was as memorable a manifesto as you could hope for. But there is an awful lot of it here, and you might well find that a little of their midnight-flavoured Birthday Party-meets-Suicide-meets-Iggy stew goes quite a long way.

There’s a lot here that’s really terrific, where the oddness of the lyrics and the mood of the music match perfectly and disconcertingly, as on In a Chinese Alley. But the missteps, when they come, are jarringly horrible.

The end result is something that feels retrograde and entirely inessential, but enjoyable enough on its own terms.

Some great songs, some not-so-great songs, an impressively sharp realism that gets submerged beneath corn and goo: perhaps this album does offer pure Dolly Parton after all.

The result is an album that, while impressively intense, lacks the human urgency of their earlier work.

While its slick production makes it more subtle than rap-rock alliances past, it comes off like a bid to musically supervise the next hit HBO drama. If that sounds great, walk this way, but mind the unrelentingly average songs as you go.

As ever, so much depends on your tolerance for Treays’ desire to make “big statements”--the noise assault of Drone Strike feels a little too on-point--but this at least feels like Jamie T is being himself again.

Freeze and Yeti are not without invention, but sound like they’re covering familiar sonic territory--and this time without intending to.

The mixtape itself isn’t a huge change in direction.

It sounds as if AIM was made exclusively for MIA’s benefit: one final eruption of inventive and sometimes incoherent ideas.

A fragmented, frustrated mindset has contributed to a sprawling, inconsistent album with brief flourishes of verdant beauty.

This makes for a very agreeable summer cocktail--aptly, it was originally scheduled for a June release--but comes up short if you prefer breeziness to be sometimes clouded by messier emotions.

A leap out of their respective comfort zones has produced something really different.

They’re more than train songs, and brim with tales of capitalist enslavement and hopes of freedom.

Few lyrics are particularly arresting (on My Favourite Part, new girlfriend Ariana Grande is told that she doesn’t know how beautiful she is) and there’s some mid-album filler as Miller struggles to add hooks to cosmic G-funk.

He does lush, spacious things with piano, organ, solo cello, string quartet, string orchestra, voices and crackling electronics, and the arrangements are sensitively done, though I can’t say I found much compelling drama in it.

Goat are admirably untroubled by questions of cultural appropriation or authenticity.

There’s still a tendency for things to get a little sixth-form common room, particularly in the empty sloganeering of the title track (“legalise the truth”; “anti-social media”), but it’s good to see that there’s life in the old punks yet.

With much of the album sounding like the sort of music that might play in a futurist casino, Blank’s sonic palette stretches from eastern pipes to Balearic comedown music to (gulp) sexagenarian dubstep.

Mostly The Altar is claustrophobic with try-hardness. Banks doesn’t sound empowered, she sounds stretched.

If this idea seems baffling, it makes no more sense at all in the listening, and by turns hypnotises, frustrates and dazzles. This obstreperousness will only further alienate the doubters, but you cannot fault Jaar’s preposterous ambition.

Overall it feels like a kind of gentrified pop: synthetic and nondescript, but predictably appealing all the same.

66 minutes of this kind of overwrought caterwauling is a little exhausting. That said, there are great songs here.

The production is generally safe but solid, and his ease with pop songwriting results in occasional cliches, but for the most part these are achingly sincere songs dealing with the aftermath of loss.

No wheels are being reinvented here, but while much of Walls marks a return to the Kings sound of eight years ago, there is some experimentation.

It’s hard to overcome the feeling that this kind of finger-wagging is fine if you’re Crass, living off homegrown vegetables in your anarcho-syndicalist commune, but perhaps a bit much if your music has been used to advertise everything from Vodafone to Debenhams. Still, there’s something fascinating about the way Two Door Cinema Club have become a band in a position to offer lofty pronouncements while remaining weirdly anonymous.

They’re so malleable that guests Peter Gabriel and Cassius have no problem stealing the show (on throwback synth track AI and electrofunk confection Oh My My, respectively). Other songs make it too easy to imagine what a more characterful singer could have done with them.

Joanne stumbles a bit, and will be received with bafflement by everyone other than hardcore Little Monsters, but you can’t help admiring her boldness.

It’s not a sonically adventurous album, but Chaplin’s voice on tender songs such as the title track is as affecting as ever.

Despite a few moments of oddball brilliance (namely on Broke Me in Two) and Wasser’s ever-mesmerising tones, this is a disjointed, narrativeless collection that doesn’t quite do the pair justice.

File under: promising, but far from the finished article.

Delightfully weird and yet unmistakably icky.

The ecological concept behind the album doesn’t really assert itself among the dreamy backdrops. But it also means we get some superbly written pop/indie hybrids, of which the pick are Way to Go and First Crush, both of which evoke coastal drives, each sumptuous chorus sliding into place like the shifting of gears in a luxury car.

This album celebrates sex with an infectious joie de vivre, while tracks like Cool Girl--a sarcastic ode to no-strings romance--prove she’s not just posturing.

Their songs are best when they stop being so satirically cutesy and zip somewhere else.

Bon Jovi’s first album since guitarist Richie Sambora’s departure doesn’t tear up the old formula.

There are songs from China, Chile and Algeria, along with Kate Bush’s Army Dreamers, at one time banned by the BBC. It’s unfortunate that A Matter of Habit, a powerful antiwar song by the Israeli singer Izhar Ashdot, is marred by swirling orchestral backing.

This should all be heavier going than it is: that it isn’t is at least partly down to the arrangements, which are largely based around acoustic guitar and subtly effective throughout. Moreover, they fit Collins’ voice, which has weathered considerably in the years she kept silent. But the new patina suits her, and the material.

With his first solo album in four years, he concentrates on narrative folk ballads that are transformed by bold string and brass arrangements, with Moray adding everything from guitars to vibraphone. It works remarkable well, for the most part.

While Amazing Grace has the low-key wistfulness of late-era Teenage Fanclub. Yet with this narrowing of focus comes a sense of safeness, and you can’t help but miss the sense of risk-taking that characterised McClure’s ramshackle early work.

All of these references are used so tastefully as to nullify any potential excitement, making for a record that will wash over you pleasantly, without leaving much of a mark.

Parts of this album creep even closer to the middle of the road: whisper-to-a-scream ballads such as Happen are interesting only for their vastness.

Woman is surprisingly banger-lite, a totally serviceable one-night stand rather than a torrid love affair. Maybe give it another 10 years.

Here, twins Sari and Romy Lightman (formerly of electronic outfit Austra) translate that concept into a languid and mystical form of baroque folk pop that alternates between seducing and confounding the listener.

James Brown is referenced unto pastiche on the crisp Perm, but Finesse and That’s What I Like respectively revisit new jack swing and the young R Kelly with such love that it’s not so much throwback as righteous resurrection.

The Kinks-esque melodies are surprisingly tuneful and, during its hushed moments, Doherty proves himself a deft master of late-night intimacy.

There are things worth hearing on Starboy. It seems to capture an artist in a slightly awkward state of flux, unsure whether to cravenly embrace the kind of pop stardom that gets you on the shortlist for the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice awards or throw caution to the wind and do something more interesting artistically. Starboy hedges its bets and tries to do both. You can see why, but it makes for a curiously uneven album.

This might be far from a perfect album, but it’s certainly nothing to be ashamed of.

It’s an entertaining, impressively varied set, and includes a fine reworking of the Blur song Out of Time. But the Syrian Orchestra surely deserved a full album of their own material, accompanied by a second set of collaborations.

The delicate lyrical barbs make Honest Life one to hear. It could have done with an upbeat song or two to puncture the introspection, but that’s just being picky.

The slow-motion misery of I Want Love is a little too drenched in its own fragile despair, but the lazy, wilted quality of Bad Mistake is better; a tired, grunge-lite lollop, more Stephen Malkmus than all-out macabre.

It is his most unassuming record to date, but also his richest sonically. There is still significant room for growth, but he has finally found his voice.

This techno-utopian lift music, while captivating, is not exactly worthy of eternity.

Future Politics succeeds in conjuring the current feeling of exhaustion and the modern malaise--but is more like the confused anticipation of the present every day rather than the post-apocalyptic future.

These [guest appearances] are mostly successful, with Gucci’s one-note delivery providing ballast for the crooning of Tiller, the emo-rap of Drake and the Auto-Tuned oddness of Scott. But Gucci is at his best when solo.

At first the wackiness is too much to digest, a sort of “you don’t have to be mad to review this, but it helps!” Yet against the odds, Hang does reward patience.

It’ll sound great blaring from the car radio at rush hour, but you’ll find more darkness and complexity in Twilight fan-fic.

Her mystery and malady are communicated best on dreampop tracks Hell and Back and Colour of Water; moments of spaced-out, doomed romance on an album that’s otherwise a little too long and indulgent.

Not all the songs fire quite as convincingly, but the band sound as if they’re coming of age and still having fun growing up disgracefully.

The likes of All Comes Back 2 U and Dissolve are undoubtedly accomplished, although by paying homage to Pharrell and Solange respectively, Ronika’s own personality isn’t stamped across Lose My Cool quite as much as it was on her first record.

It’s a zany but melodically substantial record, in which the best songs (Thank You Mr K, Freedom) sit somewhere between the oeuvres of the Lemonheads and the Ramones.

Genre fans will love it--it’s the perfect soundtrack to pulling on your Chelsea boots and black crew-neck sweater. Those who see don’t especially wish it was 1965 again may be less convinced.

While everything sounds lovely and moody--understated desert blues for a night in without the smartphone--beware the risk that it might send you to literal sleep, too.

Undoubtedly one for the purists, but it’s hard not to admire their focus.

It’s a bright but unremarkable return, perhaps best represented by the opening track, Matter of Time, which is filled with a desire to seek salvation from their music.

There’s too much bland, Identikit retro soul, the tasteful production becomes stifling, and the lyrics tip from heartfelt and personal into cliched and overwrought. Thankfully, there are still times when he cuts loose.

Flying Microtonal Banana is occasionally pleasant but mostly pedestrian. If anything, it’s a step back from the experimentation of last year’s fierce Nonagon Infinity.

Aside from some tracks that veer into nothingness, much of it wafts around pleasantly enough, given the right beanbag.

Ultimately, this lack of direction means the album doesn’t take off. Even amid the mish-mash, however, there are enough moments of quality to remind the listener why this MC deserves to finish his career on his own terms.

Trading postmodern sheen for a more traditional sound could help attract the support from country radio stations that Lane needs, in a crowded field, to achieve a mainstream breakthrough.

This fidgety, off-kilter return is exhausting.

World Eater is a brutal record, but there’s humanity in it, because Power is drawn to melodies: even at its most pummelling it offers sweet spots and moments of instant gratification.

Heartworms is an album of tinkering and pootling, the sound of a man reminiscing on life, referencing his favourite records--less rock star, more bloke living out his hobby from the comfort of a suburban garage.

If something is missing, it’s any kind of dark heart. After these 12 heaped spoonfuls of sugar, you may be left yearning for the medicine.

Macve sings with real power as she glides from note to note in a dreamy glissando--although the Tammy Wynette-style catch in her voice is a quirk that is perhaps overemployed.

Highwire post-punk number Bête Morcelée suggests they could go darker if they wanted to, but otherwise Solide Mirage feels more like whimsical escapism than a reflection of harsh reality.

It’s a lot better than it might have been, but not quite as great as one might have hoped.

There is less of a sense of community on their album, a set often dominated by the instrumental work of Irish electronic producer Liam Farrell.

Room 29 sags in the forlorn middle section, but Bombshell’s nervous energy and the frenzied A Trick of the Light brilliantly expose the torment of falling for an illusion.

Its highlights will do for now--there’s great stuff here--but it’s hard not to compare it to the days when you never quite knew what a Goldfrapp album would contain, or to hope they opt for another dramatic stylistic shift in future: it’s better to embody the idea of transformation than to sing about it.

The first four tracks all follow a familiar template, with drummer Brann Dailor driving everything along at a breathless clip and big, alt-rock refrains that, as memorable as they are, exhibit little of Mastodon’s much-celebrated progressive instinct. But then things pick up.

While their fifth album is not a giant leap forwards, all their essential elements are intact and thriving, and it reaffirms their mastery of modern synthpop.