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.

Toure sings well, but intricate solos are his forte.

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.

Chemtrails Over the Country Club does what it does exceptionally well. The songwriting misfires that plagued her early albums have been eradicated through that refinement; everything here is incredibly melodically strong, strong enough, in fact, that it feels beguiling rather than formulaic, which is an impressive feat to pull off.

The good bits are great, the bad bits best avoided, but in a pop world where originality isn’t much encouraged, there’s something really laudable about the intention behind it, and its author’s willingness to think outside the box.

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

Interesting, but not involving.

While 'The Written Word' and the title track are bonanzas for fans of arm-waving disco-house, the "control" element of the title is present all the way through, and the songs never quite transcend the feeling they're a bit too school for cool.

It's never as rollicking as 2010's Praise and Blame, though a version of Tom Waits' Bad As Me will sound agreeably demented to anyone who's never heard the original.

Escort’s sense of abandon never quite reaches the heights of their disco forebears, but closing track Dancer, recorded before an audience in Brooklyn, reveals them to be a formidable live prospect.

Their big moment in the sun has long gone, but there’s enough here for an Indian summer.

While the likes of Stormzy and Novelist have concentrated on harder, myopic tracks that reference their world and little else, here Kano offers more accessibility. Some of that jars, including a slow, trudging ode to his sibling (Little Sis), but others--such as standout A Roadman’s Hymn--show an MC who has become an artist.

Opening track Girls and Boys and the furious Turnaround are enough to make anyone over the age of 24 shake their head at the unnecessary racket. There are more muted moments, too, most of them musing upon the other recent event in Lunn's life.

They ape the cons as well as the pros of 70s rock: longer-than-necessary songs, a weakness for cliche and, inevitably, unabashed retroism.

A straight-ahead rock album that already sounds like a festival set list in waiting.

While the record climaxes with a duo of stomping disco tracks furnished with pleasingly dour melodies. They hammer home Always Ascending’s technical brilliance, but a visceral emotional connection remains elusive.

Moments of excitement notwithstanding, the result is a frustratingly tentative step from a band who promised bolder strides this time around.

If the album has a rough-around-the-edges, askew quality, that just makes it more fascinating: this isn't music that settles in the background.

Some of the routes it leads you down come to dead ends, but when it works, Warpaint slowly pulls you into its own, quietly captivating world.

The album is consistently tuneful, yet also pile-driving and monolithic.

Musically, the DBTs manage a decent range--from big, squalling rockers to teary, lap-steel balladry--albeit without throwing any great surprises. Same old story, to some extent, but one worth hearing again.

You end up wishing Ndegeocello would grab someone and go get a room.

The most interesting aspect of this uneven album is Henley’s lyrics: he’s by turns peppery (“Space-age machinery / Stone-age emotions,” sniffs the honky-tonk swingalong No, Thank You) and unsentimental (“Time can be unkind / But I know every wrinkle and earned every line”)--and enjoyably so.

A certain cosiness produces fillers So Happy and New York Ivy, but abandoning the comfort zone delivers some of the best things here.

Too often here Cara is let down by bland arrangements and underbaked melodies, from the Swift-by-numbers of opener Seventeen to the banal balladry of Stars.

Though it's utterly sumptuous, and occasionally sizzling, the album has been divested of the spook-pop quality that made the debut stand out, replacing it with excessive tastefulness.

In its second half, Piano begins to suffer from its stripped-back simplicity, when its sparse arrangements and slow pace start to feel plodding rather than profound.

It's very classy contemporary jazz, but it doesn't leave quite as lingering an effect as the lineup suggests it might.

It’s often passionate, illuminating and fascinating, it frequently bears the hallmarks of self-indulgence, and some of it, you get the feeling, might only make sense to its author.

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.

There are some very strong tracks here and Minaj’s flow remains utterly unique, even if she only puts it to use disparaging her subjects. She still has a good case to be the queen, but uneasy lies the head that wears a crown, perhaps.

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.

Campbell's voice is frustratingly wan.

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

With Steadman taking production duties, the album's ambition is palpable; and yet that ambition feels undermined by his diffidence as a singer, the lack of blood and pulse in his lyrics, the marshmallow softness of his voice.

It’s often compelling, but you occasionally find yourself gripped by an overwhelming urge to turn it off.

It's easy to boggle at but less easy to love, since there's nowhere to hang your critical hat for longer than about three bars at a time.

Surprises don't abound.

It doesn't sound like a masterpiece; then again, it does nothing to damage its maker's reputation, which is more than you can say for Doherty's post-Libertines efforts.

The format can run the risk of feeling one-dimensional, and the repetitive Mind Blues is more jarring than thrilling, but The Offbeat and Everything All the Time are giant, funky, instantly catchy collisions of voice and rhythm that will no doubt gain even more physical heft when they play them live.

An enjoyable if occasionally familiar-sounding second album from this New York trio continues their open-armed embrace of the woozy melodies and prettified feedback of early-90s shoegaze indie while upping their game somewhat in terms of polish and accessibility.

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.

At their best - on songs such as the wailing and quirky Seeing Hands and Mr Orange, or the pounding finale One Thousand Tears of a Tarantula - they play an intriguing mixture of psychedelic rock and garage surf styles, mixed in with Nimol's cool, clear vocals in Khmer.

Cut and Paste’s melodies are glorious--single Daffodil Days is surging and swoonsome--but with lyrics so surface, you sometimes wish he’d get out a bit more.

A sense of stylistic familiarity does rather rule out any real "wow" factor, but its simple charms sink in over repeated listens, and firm fans of this whole backwoods-troubadour thing should find plenty to admire here.

It’s polite punk: impossible to feel either alarmed or electrified by, but an appealingly ghostly listen nonetheless.

She's somewhere beneath some half-hearted songs, a confused concept and someone else's image.

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.

At their best, their songs transcend lyrical cliches such as "There's a line between love and hate", and Locked in the Basement and The Runner are undeniably haunting, even though there's nothing to particularly distinguish the band from their better-known peers.

FlyLo's albums tend to be slight, and this is no exception: these tracks feel less like fully fleshed-out compositions than lightly drawn sketches started, but not always finished, from a spontaneous jam session.

The formula of cramming 30 different songs into one is fun for a while, and it's invigorating, but ultimately it's hard to shake a sense of over-indulgence.

Linden's songs are structurally simple yet too busy, layered with rolling, bending, juddering, chiming, spiralling, crackling electronic noise.

After the Disco has some memorable hooks, but it doesn't quite lift this work beyond a studied genre piece.

It feels like a series of tracks rather than a fully realised long-player.

Despite the added value of the remixes and the quality of the original tracks, The Apple and the Tooth remains a complementary piece - albeit one that's a compliment to Bibio's craft, too.

Klaxons' ambition to stand apart from the grey indie hordes, to race by in a blur of outlandish rhetoric and pupil-dilating intensity, is admirable, but there are too many road bumps on this particular trip.

songs, like I'm Hungry, are laudably silly, others simply bland, but with a little help from Ozzy Osbourne and Slash, who adds glitzy embellishments to the heavy, anthemic Vengeance Is Mine, Cooper's back on par.

Even at its most jagged, however, Gimme Some comes across as power-pop by numbers, the effortlessness with which the Swedish trio spin cheerful melodies and ineffable hooks making almost every song sound uncomfortably derivative.

Listened to loud, these songs drift warmly away on the air, but up close, Stables’ voice burrows into the ears, sounding direct and sweet, like a dear old friend you’re reconnecting with, or a more grounded Cat Power.

There are a couple of indifferent songs, and the musical arrangements behind those amazing voices are sometimes a little underwhelming – but amazing they remain.

A debut that, frustratingly, juggles promise and excess.

Olympia is only the Roxy Music singer's second set of new material since 1994. However, he's busily assembled an all-star supporting cast – guitarists Nile Rodgers, Jonny Greenwood and Dave Gilmour, Mani and Flea on bass, and most of Roxy, including Brian Eno.

If only Michaelson's lyrics could match theirs for social insight, devastating romanticism or sharp wit. Nonetheless, this second album gleams with promise.

A succession of producers--including Ariel Rechtshaid, Patrick Carney of the Black Keys and Jesso’s chief collaborator, former Girls bassist Chet “JR” White--have smoothed the fragility and murk of Jesso’s demos into a 70s-inspired production that accentuates the similarities between his songs and those of various vintage songwriters.

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart opt to adapt, drafting in producer Flood and mixer Alan Moulder to polish and shine their second album.

The tidy landing constrains otherwise appreciably ambiguous songwriting that feels true to the wayward flux of Musgraves’ feelings – of the confusing aftermath of divorce, peppered with relief, mystery, disappointment. It feels like the first time this iconoclast has stuck to the script.

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

What it lacks in linguistic poetry is amply compensated for in the vibrancy of Seasick's guitar-playing.

The unvarying mood can get a little tiring.

This has the feel of a document rather than a record.

It's so seamlessly soothing that it's a struggle to distinguish one segment from the next.

Whatever the reason, this collection seems retrograde and oddly neutered, the chilly vulnerability of its inspirations recoded as muscular bombast.

In the absence of a song as undeniable [as 'Umbrella'], they try a number of approaches, with varying success.

Just as you're about to dismiss the album entirely, something extraordinary happens. The final three tracks – From There to Back Again, Pacific Coast Highway and Summer's Gone – form a kind of suite that is easily the best thing Brian Wilson has put his name to in the last 30 years.

Glasser has a masterpiece in her, but this isn't quite it.

There are lulls elsewhere, but the highlights are a treat.

The addition of syrupy strings and pedestrian drumming further dilutes the impact of his raw talent. However, when he performs unadorned, melodies dripping from his fingertips, and letting fly from the heart, his voice is difficult to forget.

Glitch's motorik electronics and Seedpods' airy grooves are compelling, but at times it feels as if Eno is stubbornly working against himself.

Unfortunately, four of the 10 tracks are deeply pedestrian, heartland rock.... Worse, presumably - like Charlotte Church - tired of having the voice of an angel, several songs find Jim James singing with the voice of a brickie.

Most albums become familiar with repeated listens; this just grows more strange.

Their album is mostly the sum of its parts: hushed, literate songwriting where his boyish croak meets her anguished sweetness. Occasionally, subtle touches shift the atmosphere.

Across two hours, there’s plenty of dross: techno-leaning tracks lack danger, while others could soundtrack the bland aspiration of a duty-free shop. But just as he sampled Steve Winwood for his number one hit Call on Me, Prydz knows the value of a yacht-rock vocal.

Mould's ability with melody is much in evidence throughout District Line - there's a particularly glorious example on the closing 'Walls in Time'--though it's occasionally hard to escape the uncomfortable sensation of an artist trapped somewhere between his own urges and his audience's expectations.

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.

It does exemplifies the enjoyable glossiness that experienced backroom types can bring to the over-subscribed electropop genre.

There are some fine songs here, from the bluesy, harmonica-backed You’re Right, I’m Wrong to the stirring folk-gospel Tell Me Moses and the gently pained country weepie You’re Still Gone.

His sparse, sweet acoustic songs charm more than they shock, and make you think rather than irritate.

The fact that they are the strongest efforts here suggests that, despite his admirable ambition, perhaps he should focus on what he does best.

It’s neither better nor worse than Heartworms--which itself was very much a mixed bag--but the pleasures come in different places.

As with a lot of Morrissey's latter-day solo material, its target market appears to be people who heard the Smiths and thought: if only this stuff was less beautifully nuanced and original, a bit more ungainly and predictable, then we'd really be getting somewhere.

It's all wrapped in a leisurely vocal style that recalls Jack Johnson--in a good way, if you can believe that.

That tension between sweetness and distortion lurches across the album, coming together best in Chaeri, a gothic house devotional to a destitute friend. Tenenbaum seems to writhe through her agonies as she wonders whether she could have done more.

Mostly No's sound is a pretty familiar one – the Jesus and Mary Chain loom large in particular – which does burst into bloom here and there... but there's also a sense of pedals unstamped-on and wigs unflipped that makes you wonder if it could all have gone further.

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.

There’s a lot that’s laudable about Caprisongs. Not least its desire to keep moving and changing – enough that complaining about something as straightforward as a paucity of memorable tunes almost feels miserly. But equally, it’s something that ultimately impedes your enjoyment of the album. As a soundtrack for the start of a night, it doesn’t quite pan out as you might hope.

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.

Songs from dustier corners of their back catalogue and guest appearances from Jack White , Buddy Guy and Christina Aguilera pique the interest but don't dispel a sense of overkill.

Working Out seems to ache for more expressive vocals, and a little less of the primness exhibited by Girardot and Sheppard.