Not all the tracks hit the spot, and some of her edge has been dulled by studio sheen, but the album is bookended by two songs from her top drawer.

Three albums in, and their voices still chime like a Swedish Everly Brothers.

It can be a tough listen, as on The Girl You Wouldn't Leave, when he veers from after-hours mumble to out-of-tune shriek. But mostly it works.

It's a world that starts to feel repetitive after a while; and so when they do try something different, it pays off.

Tracks such as Hawkmoth and OH pull the listener in with their dreamy harmonies, typifying a style that has infused contemporary pop and R&B, and influenced producers including Hit-Boy and Clams Casino.

[The Songs] need topline melodies, and Abraham cannot supply them. It makes Glass Boys a tiring experience, as you search for tunes that logic tells you must be there, but which the recording fails to deliver, putting too great a burden on lead guitar lines and backing vocals to add melodic shade.

[50 Cent is un]likely to recapture the notoriety and relevance he had at his peak. He can, however, continue to offer vicarious thrills via the sinister-slick production of glock fantasy Hold On and the creeping dread of Everytime I Come Around.

Lazaretto sounds dense, to the point of occasionally seeming cluttered and a little messy--the things that are good about Lazaretto are pretty much the same things that are good about every album White has made.

You just want them to cut loose, and they never do.

It's sweet, but after a few listens, a little too limp.

There's a lot of heartbreak in this album, a lot of nostalgia for the simplicity of pre-pubescence--and a lot of taking refuge in ineffable pop songs, just like these.

The lyrics are uniformly awful.

This is an upbeat album, as if LaVere is looking back on her youthful adventures with a twinkle in her eye.

Its gloom is potent and pervasive, and, while you're mired in it, A Letter Home doesn't seem like a baffling act of wilful perversity. It makes perfect sense, as it presumably does to the man who recorded it.

Maybe the pace flags a little after a ferocious start--The Company Man is as pure a shot of adrenaline as a guitar band will release this year--but that's just a quibble about a terrific album.

While he has talent and likability, it's a shame this album is not a little freakier, a little riskier--a little lonelier.

Van Etten's melodies often feel as if they're not quite taking flight, and rarely cause you to catch your breath the way her lyrics do.

On And Then You Shoot Your Cousin, the Roots serve up a concept album of tortured stories from a collection of downtrodden and conflicted characters.

Admittedly, there's a good deal of clutter: not just 90s R&B throwbacks such as You're Mine (Eternal) and a gospelised cover of George Michael's One More Try, but an appearance by her three-year-old twins. Yet she's also at her most soulful and melodic, and the best of the bunch, such as the dreamy 70s disco of Meteorite, make this album a welcome return.

There's more than enough subtlety here to mean it isn't just a collection of club cuts.

The best efforts are Dynamite, featuring Snoop Dogg, with its low-slung Cali feel, and Three Strikes, which bangs--and features the vocals of Martine McCutcheon's husband, Jack McManus ("one, two, three, get the fuck up"). The worst is everything else.

The band constantly change direction, from easygoing dance passages and rippling, African-influenced guitar work through to sudden waves of sound, with the cool but dominant vocals of Jucara Marcal matched against furious passages of jazz saxophone and percussion.

True, Newcombe's fondness for repetition allows him to take half an idea and stretch it out until it disappears into a chorus-less fug. But it's all pleasingly reassuring, like stepping into a well-curated vintage furniture shop.

Forget genre, though, and this unique album has much going for it.

With so much theory and style to cut through before you get to the actual music, it's to the album's credit that it often stands up as much more than just a high-brow, Edward Said-inspired thought experiment.

The most striking things here are the tracks that shift furthest away from the standard Coldplay blueprint the lovely, beatless, vocoder-heavy drift of Midnight--based on an old track by electronic auteur Jon Hopkins--and the single Magic, which sounds not unlike the kind of beautifully understated pop song Everything But the Girl might have come up with in their mid-90s dance music phase. The rest is understated and equivocal, pleasant but underwhelming.

While the lyrics are too cloying and cliched to mean much, in conjunction with such a button-pushing soundtrack, they still carry the capacity to move.

Down IV – Part II is unlikely to shock devotees, but recent lineup changes seem to have rejuvenated the Louisiana quintet's approach, resulting in their strongest batch of material since 1995's widely adored debut album, NOLA.