Like last year's debut, this employs repetition and deliberate naivety, but it's starting to sound disingenuous, perhaps because of a strong sense of joylessness and duty.

One of the year's more delightful debuts.

Their original tracks are mostly given a more electronic, dancefloor hue, within which styles rollercoast from from hip-hop to garage to African music, and moods from airy to sinister.

The album sounds weirdly uniform, the over-similarity perhaps the result of avoiding choruses in favour of repetitive mantras.

The Amazons have a playful rockiness that could see them rise above the surfeit of indie revivalists, but right now they’re still a little too close to landfill.

It's another guilty pleasure from an album that sacrifices identity in a scramble for catchy tunes.

This whole album feels less of an art stunt and more of a well-executed idea.

The band's sound has changed, too--it's less triumphal and more cinematic, although the Krautrock groove of Catacomb sounds genuinely angry.

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.

It's worth reiterating that there's good music here: it's just that if you want to hear it you have endure being hectored by a man who gives every impression of being a thumping twit.

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.

Songs of self-abuse and suicide - and those are the sunnier moments - are wrapped in wailing riffs, big choruses and fiddly guitar solos.

Overall, BDoD’s fifth album tends to rehash the typical traits of rebellious guitar music, and while Barrett may not join the ranks of the titans he mimics, there’s no harm in letting another punk delinquent rattle on amid the din of the dull.

You leave Seeing Sounds convinced that Williams and Hugo are no closer to their dream of inventing a successful R&B/rock hybrid.

Let's not get overexcited - it's no masterpiece - but this is the first Oasis album in a decade to suggest that they have a future rather than just a huge, asphyxiating past.

Musically, there are obvious reference points in the likes of 1990s shoegaze, Brian Eno ambience and Can-like grooves, but his atmospheres are darker and unfathomable.

Head Carrier continues down the cul-de-sac first entered on 2014’s lukewarm Indie Cindy, largely comprising chugging, artless alt rock.

It’s Gaga who will benefit most from this album, which has the pair finding joyous common ground as they swing through 11 standards.

Working Girl’s weakness is not in Hesketh’s insecurity, or the songs themselves, but in the fact that it breaches what was advertised.

Often during Perfect Symmetry, listeners of a certain age might find themselves recalling Simple Minds or Tears for Fears. Whether that thought fills you with delight or revulsion rather determines the album's appeal.

Weezer's third eponymously titled album sees the progenitors of emo still frantically chasing their tail.

The album is occasionally brought to earth by mediocre hip-hop, suggesting the project would have been better with a smaller, more focused cast.

It seems the rejuvenated five have also been listening to Coldplay's "A Rush of Blood to The Head" for inspiration, delivering a set of earnest songs full of chiming guitars and a dozen violins, which should soar through Wembley Stadium when they embark on their stadium tour next summer.

On his second album, he has taken a chance by steering away from the declawed R&B that got him filed alongside fellow pretty boy James Morrison, and gives reggae and Celtic folk a whirl. It's not bad.

In a Space Outta Sound eschews froth - and a whole lot more - in favour of a minimalist approach that is a return to the form of his 1990s output.

At times a potentially great song seems to be trying to make itself felt, but none ever quite manages to bust through the beige arrangements.

Often, he sounds bored, as if he's going through the motions. The flat and repetitive music follows suit - even Dr Dre's production lacks its usual inventive spark.

A solid country-pop record. It’s a celebration of endings: a fortifying, bridging album that guides its author towards, hopefully, happier times.

The album doesn't lend Flowers the gravitas he apparently yearns for, but it does prove that few are better at irrepressible pop hooks and fist-pumping choruses.

They sound more attractive, though, when they excercise a little restraint, as on 'Substitution:' less dramatic, but less contrived, too.

Less immediate than its predecessor, Wooden Arms takes several plays before the haunting melodies and more obtuse textures draw you in.

Though it doesn't sound a lot like Pink Floyd, it shares the quality of that group's early 70s records: it is leisurely, taking its time to reflect rather than rushing to a conclusion. The melodies, though, mean it never shrinks into the background.

Oberst's whimsy now just sounds trite.

It works best when the music hall bawdiness is left aside in favour of bleak euphoria.

Instances of clarity and grace alternate with wodges of unfathomable nonsense that a good editor would have blue-pencilled from the first draft.

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.

But after achieving a perfect strike rate on their singles, the Ting Tings' admirable quest for glossy, depthless pop perfection keeps coming up short.

It’s pretty damning when one of the most arresting tracks on your EP is a 17-second snare drum solo.

Reality Check is best approached with caution, but it's worth a listen.

Despite its grim title with its visions of messy self-absorption, The Emancipation of Mimi is - mostly - cool, focused and urban.

Generic, yes, but that is no cause for complaint when the genre is so good.

The dizzy, euphoric racket is occasionally brought earthward by lyrics that hint at darker troubles.

A record like this stands or falls by the guitar riffs, and there's no gainsaying the ludicrous, joyful power of the crashing Gibson SGs at work here.

The good news is that it seems to have refired his creative urges: the songs have an ethereal sense of unease.

Its lack of artistic ambition or character of its own is easy to mock, but Horan may well have the last laugh.

On the whole, her adoption of these different registers is more carefree than in the past. Rather than seeking a new identity to disappear into, this Cyrus is playful, tongue-in-cheek, and, most importantly, making some of the best pop songs she has made in years.

She writes in bland generalities... and uses her opulent voice as a battering ram.

Mayer's talents are obvious, but there's so much more cheese than charm here that he would seem like a hard sell outside the Billboard heartland.

Blacc's gravelly, expressive voice sounds terrific throughout, his trills and melodies indebted to Stevie Wonder and Bill Withers, but isn't enough to make the album sound particularly exciting.

For all her undoubted talent - and only the unreasonably churlish would deny she can sing up a storm - she now seems trapped awkwardly between two diametrically opposing cultures.

For all its brevity, ye doesn’t feel slight. Substantially more focused than its predecessor, it packs a lot into 23 minutes. It is bold, risky, infuriating, compelling and a little exhausting: a vivid reflection of its author.

The nine tracks you must navigate before you get to the mini-opera seem like a trudge.

Propaganda sounds like Muse are trying to be Prince, which isn’t entirely convincing, while Get Up and Fight bolts on a power ballad chorus to an elegantly restrained verse. But it’s still the less poppy moments that are most exciting.

The surprise is that it's pretty palatable.

Despite its flaws, Songs of Experience is an audibly better album than either of its predecessors. For one thing, not all its errors are overwhelming--if the Auto-Tune feels a bit jarring, the song it decorates is still pretty great. And for another, when U2 calm down and allow themselves to be themselves, the results are frequently fantastic.

It’s Top of the Pops in 1992. It’s not at all bad.

This nostalgic trip back to their roots makes modestly agreeable listening, though the translation from raucous pub to sober recording studio has squeezed out much of the combo's spontaneous lunacy.

While aesthetic shifts have been crucial to her career, Golden feels like the first time the window dressing is a distraction from a flawed yet deeply admirable album.

The narrative she introduced with her first single Katy on a Mission--the story of a prospective dancefloor tryst--still dominates, and it’s a subject that barely contains the emotional mileage to sustain a single song, let alone a whole body of work. Her vocal melodies, meanwhile, can feel almost abrasive in their mediocrity. Instead, it’s left to the production to provide the wit, amusement and emotion.

Whatever it lacks in straightforward pop tunes, this album makes up for in rich, multilayered weirdness.

The No 2 hit 'Supernova' and new single 'White Lies' bode well, showing what he can do with a tune and a computer, but West is forever adding clunky raps where they're not wanted and diverting the spotlight from Hudson.

All in All is simply lovely. The rest of the album isn't always this good, so perhaps only inconsistency is holding back his rise to pop's higher league.

The musical direction owes much to co-producer Skrillex, whose unexpectedly subtle electronic palette complements Bieber’s affectedly breathy voice. The voice soon palls, but the songs are often interesting.

Like fellow pop-rappers Rae Sremmurd, Yachty will often use a single melody for the verse and chorus, thus creating a new, disturbing kind of catchiness, a hook that digs into your cortex with such purchase that at least one part of your subconscious is singing it at all times. His freewheeling scansion, meanwhile, stops it being monolithic or boring.

Songs such as Anything You Say and Metal Zone come laden with unsubtle but effective hooks, loud-quiet-loud dynamics, crunchy riffs and Beatles-esque harmonies. Only on the dreamy Clueless does Nicholls attach his strong sense of melody to a different set of sounds.

It lacks both the lurching DIY energy and emotional intimacy of his more rough and ready recordings.

Too much of the album passes by in a pleasantly inconsequential blur.

Things may go awry on He Said He Loved Me, where comedy Essex girls cheep-cheep the grating refrain, but as an updated take on the Specials' equal disgust and infatuation with urban life, it's impressive.

Essentially it's a honing of their 2009 debut, Sigh No More, but with more of the ferocity you encounter in their live show.

At six tracks and barely 20 minutes long, it feels like an interstitial release rather than a major statement. ... Still, if you can get around the fact that the lyrics appear to have been written by R&B’s answer to that bloke who said he was going to continuously play piano in Bristol town centre until his girlfriend took him back, there’s a great deal to like about My Dear Melancholy,. It abandons the pick’n’mix and indeed hit-and-miss approach of previous album Starboy in favour of something more cohesive: uniformly downbeat and twilit, it flows really well.

"Party in the USA" is a cute pop song, with a clever clash between feathery jazz guitar chords and a booming synth bassline serving as hook. But it's downhill from there, thanks to a run of inferior ballads arrested only at the very close by one rather superior ballad, "The Climb."

Generally, the bluesy, Southernised rockers (Medicine, Only Love) make more of an impression than the power balladry (Colors), while an anomalous wallow in country-rock sentimentality (Things I Never Needed) feels like it was tacked on because they realised they needed a slow one.

At 16 tracks, it feels bloated and unfocused, tonally offering up an uneasy mix of cheery pop-punk (Kings of the Weekend) and moody, goth-tinged alt-rock (Los Angeles).

There's more captivating electro-funk where that came from: his debut album is stuffed with it, some immediate enough to match Black and Gold's success.

If only the music on her major label debut album was as interesting and innovative as its author is, or even as diverting as Unholy.

Even when they the songs are nearly anonymous, Nile Rodgers’ guitar is buoyant and propulsive, and his playing is an unalloyed joy throughout. And there are points where the songwriting clicks, hitting a sweet spot between then and now.

On this album, her voice is still her Achilles heel; she's a 26-year-old who sounds 16, and a colourless 16 at that.

Thomas's lingering look at the past won't get the cool kids onside, but ravers of a certain age will find much to love.

By and large, the new age retro-futurism that characterised Jarre’s earlier work is replaced by a focus on accessible modern pop.

The result is that For the Company doesn’t end up sounding like an album so much as 11 songs that--instead of being individually tailored to complement and balance each other--have been burnished to within an inch of their lives to maximise each one’s chances of cinematic or television placement.

Flowers might pay tribute with a sound that’s appealing, but they exist in a world of hindsight that isn’t.

Musicians often try to recapture the slippery magic of their initial successes--but few attempt it as explicitly as Nash does here. By doing so, she’s proven the vitality and raggedy charm of her early work is long gone.

A great record, guilelessly cheery and knowingly witty in equal measure.

The spiky quartet furnish their usual shouty vocals with grinding riffola and twiddly guitar solos, just as the rest of the post-Linkin Park world are realising nu metal wasn't such a good idea.

It's a lopsided affair: while Smith bleats on about being cold and feeling old (on the dreadful When the Thames Froze), the songs on which Burrows takes the lead possess a more pleasant and gentle Elliott Smith lilt.

Guitarist partner Gale Paridjanian and backing band have upped their game accordingly, and the sound isn't far short of what you might call "epic."

Occasionally, the combination of parping horns with perky indie melodies means the sound slips its moorings and drifts into another genre entirely: the kind of jolly, vaguely saucy-sounding easy listening found on the soundtracks of 70s sex comedies.... More often, however, the formula works perfectly.

What 20/20 does best is portentousness and the empty brag - essentially male traits that make listening rather like being hectored by the pub bore.

A wonderfully lavish, romantic record.

This second album is laden with big, chunky riffs and swaggering anthems tailormade for waving scarves and throwing beer.

It's all too dull to make anyone care but Crow.

Much of Only By the Night is unmistakably the work of a band making music with arenas in mind. Sometimes it's intriguing.

Whatever the album is trying to do--provoke, confront, horrify--it only partially achieves it.

Business goes on essentially as usual across this collection of muscular funk-rock songs, though it falls short in the ultra-catchy-hooks department.

A saucy strut of an album that may not measure up to the classics but wipes the floor with imitators like Madonna.

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

It’s a strange thing: in a genre where the vocals tend to be the focus, here’s an album where you’d be better off ignoring the star performance and concentrating on the scenery.