Get Born's follow-up suggests their musical palette is substantially broader than that of their progenitors or than their Cro-Magnon image suggests... [but] the lyrics are agonisingly stupid throughout.

His voice is heavenly and the production cool and slinky, but all that really registers is the explicitness of the lyrics.

If this had been released a year after their last album, Trompe Le Monde, it would have fit perfectly adequately into Pixies' discography.

At a time when artists such as William Tyler are driving Americana into fascinating and strange territory, this is too timid by half.

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

It's a sweet hotpot of northern European record-making.

Hackneyed songs grind drearily.

A pleasantly surprising, if patchy, return.

The title envisages a blend of Ibiza and California: dancefloor funky pop merges into balmy, sunshine-soaked grooves, although at times the band seem to be feeling the effects of that long gap.

Some of these treatments verge on the visionary.

It adds up to a slick and competent, if uninspiring, production.

The pro-weed track Sensimilla will prompt mass eye-rolling because of her decision to sing part of it in patois, and Harry’s Symphony likewise.... The latter song--an 80s reggae throwback that broodingly warns against being taken in by “bad boys”--is more than listenable, and other moments on this reggae/African-influenced album are fine, too.

You get the feeling Barnes is trying to bash you into the same twisted mindspace he himself inhabits, mixing up spiralling flute lines, cosmic rock and deranged show tunes.

The musical brilliance that surrounds him only serves to highlight Combs's shortcomings as a rapper.

Producer Dave Stewart has helped create an album that sounds exactly like the Nicks of myth: spooky, otherworldly, emotional and sassy, yet stalked by some undefinable melancholy.

The likes of Road to Nowhere are Starsailor lite and suggest no great upturn in their fortunes.

His genius lies in pitching his records just right: he injects these songs with enough grit to interest hip-hop fans, without scaring the pop audiences his catchy hooks are designed to ensnare. It's ruthlessly effective, though difficult to love.

The guitar-drums duo format makes for a sizable nod to the White Stripes too, and delicately crafted songs such as Follow Me Down are interspersed with chugging psychedelic blues and a infectious, mescalin-around-the-campfire feel.

Hey People! isn't something you can listen to often, but it's a bracing start to the year.

Draw the Line makes rather beguiling listening as the nights begin to draw in.

Oleaginous and rasping, Morrissey is often lost among the strident music as he hectors people afraid to be themselves.

Even as she pulled it off against the odds, one sensed the line between success and failure was being cut ever finer; and, in hooking up with her original partner in crime, the Hacker, Kittin has fallen on the wrong side of it.

At times the dreaded accusation of self-indulgence feels appropriate, and some of the songs here feel like sketches that still need fleshing out.

At times, Chapman's whispery vocals could benefit from a magic potion of their own.

An album of covers which, however enjoyable, doesn’t always take songs by the likes of John and JJ Cale, Ronnie Laine, Bon Iver and Bonnie Raitt to places they haven’t been before.

Even when Owens isn’t operating at his peak, his work remains oddly intriguing--there’s a passion and honesty here, an uncompromising desire to follow his own vision.

The resulting album is a ragbag of environmentalist/credit-crunch rants and rusty old chuggers.

It fizzles out with embarrassing speed.

Not unappealing, but not very novel.

Foot of the Mountain's core consists of the same grown-up wistfulness that's powered Barlow and company's comeback.

Throughout, however, the record teeters on the brink of Postcard Records pastiche, with Graham Wann's wavering vocals and the record's constant references to omnibuses and sixth-form poets threatening to buckle its charms.

It's a clinical, dark, adult pop record.

It's an awkward concept that might work better on stage, but Hurt is in fine form and the songs are a reminder of Sawhney's skill as a composer, and of the musical variety of multicultural Britain.

An unfocused set, maybe, but well worth checking out.

When off-kilter beats collide with impeccable harmonies and pleasingly daft lyrics, it sounds like pop as it should be, and their gamble in borrowing De La Soul's Ring Ring Ring refrain for How Ya Doin comes good. The ballads, however, plod along with heavy-handed emotion.

Daniel Tashian appears to be one of those songwriters from whom melodies simply pour, and there's barely a misplaced chord in this perfect miniature.

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.

No Romeo is smart, inventive, thought-provoking pop music, and it deserves to be a hit.

The resulting blend is not exactly a vital sound.

The group are perhaps a little more trad than even the likes of Alabama Shakes and Blackberry Smoke, but fans of both will find much to enjoy here.

The result is a varied set of American and English songs that range from an amplified treatment of Sacred Harp hymns to a gutsy banjo- and violin-backed arrangement of the tragic ballad Whitby Lad, and fine unaccompanied harmony singing on Love Farewell.

These are songs destined to soundtrack supermarket adverts extolling the convivial virtues of barbecuing. They stand up to scrutiny about as well as a cheap sausage, but slip down just as easily.

There’s more introspection as the album broadens out, and an appealing honesty about his greed in his chart-topping years, but he often stops short of serious self-analysis.

They [After All and Testament In Motion] are proof there’s potential here, but Testament is mostly weak Lemonade.

The album falters when the voices aren’t as strong and vivid as hers [Yebba]. The Cockney burr of Hak Baker and the untamed scansion of Kojey Radical are made all the more refreshing when you have to munch through the generic pop vocals of Kevin Garrett, Raye, Raphaella and others.

It’s slim on features (only Young Thug, Clever and Brent Faiyaz) but big on misanthropic head-nodders that put Juice’s Fall Out Boy-style whine or raspy flow to the fore: he is more versatile than his peers and also more gifted. ... But ultimately, the suicide references of songs such as Empty and casual misogyny in the tauntingly violent Syphilis leave an uncomfortable taste.

Wilson sounds adrift. He won’t find an identity in the painfully strained Golden Oldies, a shouty song in sharp contrast to its broody sentiment. Nor in Don’t Just Stand There, Do Something, an unnervingly edgy vaudevillian number. ... But they still have enough hooks and appealingly weird quirks to keep getting away with it.

As it is, you’re left with a solid, well-made pop album that occasionally hints its maker might be more interesting and individual: time will show if that’s the case, but the immediate future seems secure.

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

Quicken the Heart sticks rigidly to their formula of nervy rhythms and angular guitars.

Granted, there's nothing new going on, but their passion fills in the innovation gaps.

3rdEyeGirl are an impressively tight funk-rock band, and their presence inspires Prince to some imposing soloing on the instrumental title track and at the conclusion of Anotherlove. The issue with PlectrumElectrum is the variable quality of the songwriting on offer.

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.

Fufanu capably replay the post-punk sound but, without the transgression and creativity of the original movement, it feels as if there’s little point in doing so.

For all its musical value, listening to Unapologetic is a pretty depressing experience.

This record will not make you fall for T 'N T, but it might make you give them one more chance.

Half the 12 tracks are risible throwaway genre and covers. The other half are, at best, extremely mellifluous Big Star tribute band songs.

Sleep Through the Static has one gear, and that's the one marked "Actually, can we do it tomorrow?"

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

Like Alex Turner with a head injury, Jon Fratelli writes observational lyrics that observe nothing, and character songs with no character.

Frustratingly, Doo-Wops & Hooligans ends by suggesting it could have been far more interesting than it is.

There are less cohesive moments--the Skrillex-driven closer Drum Machine doesn’t come off at all--but the best bits are as much of a joy to listen to as they sound as if they were to make.

Bearing in mind that music about touring is of more interest to the artist than to listeners, it's still easy to appreciate swathes of Destroyed.

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.

'Can't B Good' is completely lovely; the rest are unmemorable.

Overall, there are more hits than misses.

On early singles... Hope of the States displayed a promisingly dark streak, like Mogwai with songs; now they are merely Embrace with effects pedals.

Too mystical by half, perhaps, but streets ahead of former Stone Rose John Squire's plain-Jane rock.

Her jump dancewards is curious commercially, but thoroughly worthwhile artistically.

It's a bold, exciting album.

Call this album their application for recognition as one of the decade's major UK bands.

Performed alone at the piano, Scattergood's debut would be nearly unbearable, but the widescreen production of soundtrack specialist Simon Fisher Turner goes a long way towards taking the edge off her sixth-form Plathisms and dignifying her emotional melodrama.

What they're actually releasing is passionate, urgent, full of music that swoops with the geometric elegance of flocking birds, but shows scant evidence of original thinking.

It's possible the sound of Ghostface Killah being upstaged by an unknown rapper suggests he isn't really trying. Perhaps that's the problem with Legendary Weapons, which hints at the greatness of the Wu-Tang Clan but never really achieves it: another brand extension that makes you long for the real thing.

As a comeback, this is nice work.

A typically canny and diverse selection: bona fide dancehall cuts interspersed with hooky pop.

They are, on this startling debut, X-rated, terrifying and funny, not least on brutal opener 'Fucked Up,' which has the girls slashing tyres and asking to be hit in the face--all in the name of a skewed love affair.

I applaud the duo's unpredictability but wish they would calm down a bit.

The group's decision to concentrate on what keyboardist Nick Rhodes calls "the groove factor" has resulted in one of their more adventurous releases, in the sense that there's plenty of groove, but not much of the tunefulness that was behind their biggest hits.

Their third album does little to differentiate itself from the kind of bombastic mainstream fodder that has felt stale for some time.

On their own terms, at least, they deliver.

What's indisputable is that every last song is incredibly catchy.... The other side of the coin, though, is their penchant for quivering balladry and bland arrangements that make Maroon 5 sound like Fuck Buttons.

I don’t know if those [other Kid rock] records feature as many torturous lyrical cliches as this one (whisky, Jesus, Johnny Cash and beers with the old man all feature, and that’s just the track titles), or are sung with such constipated insincerity.

[A] pleasant but pointless exercise.

Overlook the hazy underlying politicism... to enjoy a smooth, summery cocktail.

There’s none of Blunt’s deadpan chat and only a couple of (possibly Copeland-delivered) female vocals, a shame as some of the tracks are pleasingly punchdrunk trip-hop instrumentals that cry out for a top line, however meandering.

Sadly, nearly every song is made worse by Khaled’s inane shout outs of “another one” or “we the best music”, making you yearn for a Khaled-free version.

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.

An album that’s not as great as the show’s success suggests.

Sonically, it is exquisite: shimmering, subtle electropop that pairs finely judged bleeps and beats with gorgeous banks of harmonies. The problem, though, is Hayes himself: the quavery bluster of his lead vocals strives for emotional gravitas, but too often leaves the impression of a minor tantrum.

The songs start to blur into each other, Baron-Gracie’s vocal affectations become grating, and the sense that Pale Waves might be writing to a formula becomes difficult to shake. You’re left with an album with ambitions bigger than its abilities.

His voice is undeniably powerful; moreover it adds some grit and heft that’s lacking among sappier balladeers. So, occasionally, do the lyrics.

Some songs sound like Fleetwood Mac, others could have fallen off the back of a Basement Jaxx album, while hints of David Guetta and Mark Ronson appear throughout.

At 52 minutes, "...Ya Know?" is at least a quarter of an hour too long, and the individual songs – rarely more than germs of ideas – are dragged out beyond their natural span.

While their first album had a stirring anthem or two, their songwriting here is both flimsy and overblown, like an empty carrier bag temporarily inflated by a gust of wind.

This sweet-and-sour debut that is more original than your average pop thing.

As an artist himself, he's proficient but generic.

Sometimes it sounds atmospheric – on From Florida With Love, producer MexikoDro constructs a spectral, impressively abstract backing track out of tape hiss and distortion – but a lot of the time it just sounds like a noncommittal shrug: tracks come and go without leaving much of a sonic impression.