Power, for all its lovable energy and admirable experimentation, occasionally suffers from an excess of both.

None of it is compelling or well-written – the constant lyrical repetition really grates – especially when he attempts grand statements.

While Shake occasionally excels at crafting musical gems out of dark paranoia, her themes are stretched somewhat thin over the course of the whole record and on some tracks she ends up sounding listless.

If Music to Be Murdered By covers a lot of old ground, it does so in considerable style. It’s a stronger album musically than its predecessor.

The album is solid and dependable, rather than a source of head-spinning shocks and thrills: it knows its audience, and it knows better than to confound them if you want to keep bucking trends and filling arenas.

Of course, this is Poppy, and so repetitive, Twitter bot-like lyrics remain the norm (“Chewy chewy / Yummy yummy yummy”, goes one refrain). But there are moments of musical complexity and bracing sincerity that her previous albums have lacked.

Passing St Vincent’s songs through the hands of such a diverse cast of producers makes for a disjointed listening experience and broken narrative; but along the way, there are moments of raw, magnetic beauty.

A pretty well-executed genre album. Just don’t compare it to the rest of his mighty oeuvre. Should Kanye’s interest in gospel music prove temporary, this is likely to be remembered as an oddity rather than a baptism.

The album can be dazzling in its ruthless sense of purpose: the closing First Man is an effective tearjerker in which a new bride addresses her father, which may well end up where it clearly wants to be, as a staple of wedding dances. Sometimes, however, the songwriting is just so-so. ... A flawed album.

Kanda’s aptitude for melody is mixed and sometimes abandons him altogether, making the likes of Enigma and Garnet rudderless, but when he locks into one, his work becomes really compelling.

After You is a tasteful record – at times it’s exactly the soft, melancholy, adult house pop they play in the chic bar at 7pm in every Netflix drama you’ve ever watched – but it’s also got tunes, and Peñate has also finally lost all his vocal mannerisms, so you’re not distracted from those tunes.

The Christmas Present may be the perfect outlet for Williams’s wryly mawkish sensibilities, but it is still a gift few people will want to find under the tree.

It’s just about enough to keep you browsing, but never enough to inspire.

The straightforwardly Coldplay-esque moments sound more straightforward and Coldplay-esque than ever. ... But the dabblings in gospel (Broken) and bluesy doo-wop (Cry Cry Cry) seem like the result of a long and fruitful search to pinpoint the genres in which Coldplay are least suited to dabbling.

It’s a mixed bag, as posthumous collections often are, but there is enough to suggest that much wider stardom was well within his grasp.

Updating Dion’s sound without frightening the horses – is a tough one. At its worst, Courage ends up peddling the kind of dreary, blanched take on contemporary pop that packs Radio 2’s playlist. ... The best tracks on Courage stick close to the music that made Dion famous.

It’s a hard place to go with him; confrontationally stark, it may be the rare album that works better on paper.

Girl feels more exploratory than certain, never quite as assertive of its identity as one might hope. Still, their willingness to shift identity without compromising their core suggests Girl Ray could have a lustrous future.

These [Natural Hair, Between Me and My Maker & Ceiling Games] are the snatched glimpses of humanity that pierce through a noisy record with love and light.

Sometimes the results are stunning, as on the beautiful microcosmos of tiny, constantly shifting sounds that fade in and out of Mary Magdalene. ... Sometimes, however, the songs are weirdly stifling.

With only three songs stretching beyond the three-minute mark, the album is mostly made up of short sketches. Some are perfectly fine little ditties, but without more full-bodied tracks to act as support, Jesus Is King is a suite that constantly feels like it will blow away in the breeze. Confronted with the task of creating songs about religion, West delivers a set that lyrically is as thin as Bible paper.

The youthful tendency to overthink things spills into the music, which is sometimes a little fussy.

The end result is another Neil Young album to add to the pile of the not-bad and the OK he’s amassed over the last decade, while a steady stream of archive releases highlight how great Neil Young can be at his best: as good as any artist in rock history, and certainly better than this.

What the combination of grinding riffs, commercial choruses and arena-sized ambition recalls is a cross between the Arctic Monkeys circa AM and the 1975. There’s obviously absolutely nothing wrong with sounding like that, but the sense that it isn’t quite what it thinks it is hangs heavy over Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost Part 2.

Even given its many highlights, sitting through its 14 songs in a single sitting can be a slog. The intensity of Metal Galaxy makes it a hard sell, but, at their best, Babymetal make clashing elements surprisingly cogent, not to mention fun.

Given the accomplished nature of the instrumentation, it is a shame that, unlike the classic records it ostensibly draws influence from, the production of 85 to Africa is clean to the point of sterility.

Chromatics’ influence means there’s a sense in which its haunted suburban chilliness sounds old hat. But the production is smarter than that sound’s schlockier Stranger Things reincarnation.

Certainly, Hey, I’m Just Like You has a cracking backstory, but the album’s workaday synthpop means it struggles to make much of an impact based purely on its sonic appeal.