When not humming, Ásgeir has a beautiful voice, high and clear, which he uses to sing some very pretty songs, albeit of a kind that seem predestined to waft gently in the background of TV ads or romcoms.

McMorrow's new direction is so sweetly sentimental it makes Alt-J sound like NWA.

They're quieter and less raging than they were, but retain the nagging pull of their creator's creative disturbance.

There is merely a niggling sense that certain songs could be better.

The issue here isn’t intent; it’s execution. But when Viagra Boys are completely focused, they’re still fantastic.

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.

Along with beats that feel refined yet retro enough to have come via mid-00s German labels, they create a comfort that sinks into nostalgia perhaps too easily for an artist so committed to continual evolution.

The playing and production... is pretty, but neither edgy enough to grip nor a glossy enough vehicle for the songs' elegant subversions to hit home.

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.

Literate, droll, moving and often very beautiful, The Life Pursuit certainly isn't a bad album, but it's a disappointment after Dear Catastrophe Waitress.

They certainly have their sound down (reverb-laced guitars, big choruses, surf-tinged moments), but there's a lack of variety here.

It’s I Decide’s grainy post-punk claustrophobia that leaves you wishing they’d ditched some of the beehive-coiffing bops in favour of something darker.

Though slight, it's worth 32 minutes of your time.

It's an entertainingly varied set – thanks to the Congolese musicians rather than Baloji himself.

This album could do with even more solo work from its star.

It's a finely crafted tribute to the classic country duos such as Johnny Cash and June Carter or George Jones and Tammy Wynette.

Samba has a style and a message of his own, and his latest album of desert blues is a reflection on the continuing upheavals in his country.

Songs such as (Invisible) Friends veer towards the anthemic but don't quite ignite.

In fact, so good-natured are the funtimes here that some listeners might find themselves craving a little more crunch.

While most songs here would be great for a drunken dance, they aren’t memorable enough for you to still be singing them the morning after.

Classy and entertaining.

As ever, so much depends on your tolerance for Treays’ desire to make “big statements”--the noise assault of Drone Strike feels a little too on-point--but this at least feels like Jamie T is being himself again.

It’s an entertaining, impressively varied set, and includes a fine reworking of the Blur song Out of Time. But the Syrian Orchestra surely deserved a full album of their own material, accompanied by a second set of collaborations.

Trading postmodern sheen for a more traditional sound could help attract the support from country radio stations that Lane needs, in a crowded field, to achieve a mainstream breakthrough.

Sabaton’s choruses are certainly catchy, although the barrage of gutturally sung lyrics (“Fire and brimstone, heading your way!”), proggy keyboards and twiddly solos can sound overwrought.

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.

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

It’s an album about hedonistic abandon that occasionally makes hedonistic abandon sound like something challenging a therapist has tasked you to do before next week’s session. Then again, the album’s brevity means those moments pass quickly, to be supplanted by moments when Monáe sounds as light and warm as the music behind her.

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.

Thankfully, another character sidles between the layers of these songs, and even shuffles into the limelight elsewhere - someone more shady and strange, who loves circus rhythms and giddy trumpet riffs, the glimmer of broken glass and crackle of static. If only this odd chap dominated proceedings.

When emotions warm, Charles loses command of her musical touchstones, the potential for nostalgia and poignancy smothered by sentimental pastiche.

Though her songwriting partners--Nashville A-listers Luke Laird and Shane McAnally--are on board again, the acuity is lessened.

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

Mew don’t quite convert slight self-indulgence into tunes, with several here (Water Slides, Making Friends and Interview the Girls) never really going anywhere.

Ordinary Man was made in a few days with a core band of Duff McKagan, Chad Smith and Andrew Watt, who also produces. It sounds like it, in good and bad ways: there’s real urgency to Straight to Hell, but there are perhaps too few genuinely memorable songs.

[Business Dinners is] a moment of offbeat delight on an album otherwise characterised by earworm-centric efficiency--and the kind of gratifyingly idiosyncratic move a supposed pop renegade would benefit from making more often.

Even more so than the White Stripes, the Hives have an aesthetic so rigidly codified that it becomes a straitjacket.

For such an intellectually fearless band, the production is sometimes frustratingly reserved: you can never seem to turn the volume loud enough to give the more biting songs the impact they deserve.

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.

Beatopia is an enjoyable sojourn down a well-travelled sonic avenue, but not the most memorable of trips.

It ultimately feels more like the document of a fantastic experience than a fantastic experience in its own right.

It's beautiful, spectral, dreamy, but never makes your pulse quicken.

Suffers in places from an attack of earnestness.

As stand-alone tracks they work, but side-by-side, you can’t help but wish they’d try something outside this comfort zone.

This is no people-pleasing pop record: appealingly, its 70s-centric stew seems designed to satisfy only its maker--and, presumably, his pal Elton, too.

While Amazing Grace has the low-key wistfulness of late-era Teenage Fanclub. Yet with this narrowing of focus comes a sense of safeness, and you can’t help but miss the sense of risk-taking that characterised McClure’s ramshackle early work.

He ends up sounding like a confused Billy Joel.

Sohn's crisp, emotional electronica is certainly moving at times, but over a whole album, his fist-clenching intensity weighs a little too heavily.

Bibio's debut for Warp (he's a Mush alum) sounds like the last 10 years of Warp albumized: he noses ahead of Grizzly Bear's latest in terms of likability ('All the Flowers') as often as he lags slightly behind Prefuse 73 in terms of pure choppage chops ('Fire Ant').

The first four tracks all follow a familiar template, with drummer Brann Dailor driving everything along at a breathless clip and big, alt-rock refrains that, as memorable as they are, exhibit little of Mastodon’s much-celebrated progressive instinct. But then things pick up.

Aside from the skewered, St Vincent-style intro track Killer, or Big Rock, which feigns a kind of burly, truck-driving swagger, most of the songs on this record are in the style of moping traditional country and Americana ballads.

They're a great loud band, but apart from some bagpipes before Let's Shake Hands, there's little new or particularly interesting here.

An undercurrent of drama runs through The Broken Wave, but it's never allowed to surge: Peel is too coolly restrained for that. Sometimes she even seems self-effacing.

In their favour, Parts & Labor embrace melody far more willingly than many of their counterparts on the US underground scene, building their layers of noise in a manner intended to excite and entertain, rather than confront.

It does what it does immaculately and satisfyingly.... But Piano Counterpoint seems less successful; that’s nothing to do with Vicky Chow’s playing, but because this arrangement for solo piano (again with multiple pre-recorded partners) of Reich’s 1973 piece Six Pianos seems to lose so much of the muscular energy of the original.

Modern Guilt feels like a vanity project: there is no attempt to reach out, none of the classic pop singles Beck has been revered for, just 10 inward-looking, unlovable tracks.

This album feels a little stranded, not quite pulling off the icy, slightly scary pop one suspects is the intention--good enough, but no Ladytron or the Knife.

It’s never less than intriguing, and certainly unique, but Take Her Up to Monto is diverting rather than stunning.

An album that is not particularly consistent in sound or even sentiment--the worthiness of Easy Target is matched with half-of-the-title track Sad Clowns, a patronising and crankily retro missive on chivalry.

What makes this more than merely a trip down memory lane is the always-inventive production and Aalegra’s elegant, preternaturally smooth voice, which she uses to chronicle the neglected fringes of minor romantic disappointment. Although catchy choruses haven’t historically been a prerequisite of her chosen style, the widespread absence of memorable melodic hooks does feel notable.

Too much of the album... drifts along in a sombre haze, languishing in a single tempo, looking up at the sky and seeing only clouds.

It's a good album, but somewhere in Archy is a remarkable one.

There may not quite be the soaring quality of songs here that Hollywood Town Hall or Rainy Day Music offered, but its pleasures are manifold.

The musical mood of much of the album is a dense, unsettled fug: slightly paranoid, rather unfocused.

Comparisons to Enya, Coldplay and Goulding may bring out a rash of snobbery in some, but the absence of cynicism and self-consciousness make this an endearing debut.

This belated debut album defies you not to join the canonical dots that start, perhaps, with George Harrison's lesser-known Revolver songs, proceed to Pink Floyd's pastoral Scarecrow (on Rising Son), take the scenic route round Can, Kraftwerk (Metal Biscuit) and Augustus Pablo's wistful melodica, swerve off to Gerry Rafferty's Baker Street (Paperhead), then hit the home straight through Talking Heads and Brian Eno to arrive next door to strumming melancholics Elliott Smith and Eric Matthews.

Tthis self-titled album is monolithic, bombastic, urgent. It doesn't pay to listen closely to the lyrics, because what emerges is repetition.

There are some fine songs here, from the gloriously strange O, Where Is Saint George? to the epic I Is Someone Else, but the album’s excitedly noisy production would benefit from greater degree of variety.

Their second album is an assured, intriguing collection of songs that constantly changes direction, from delicate shimmering guitar work and brooding ballads to sturdy riffs and post-bossa rhythms.

There’s enough worthwhile stuff to ensure that fans will be happy – you can overlook its shortcomings while the title track rages – and that touring won’t seem entirely like an exercise in running through the back catalogue. Equally, no one hoping to convince a non-believer of Metallica’s greatness will reach for it over the classics.

Yet for all its merits--her voice is utterly pure, and the altpop textures luscious--The Voyager lacks unity.

The arrangements aren’t faithful in any way to those that made these songs famous--That Old Black Magic becomes a rockabilly shuffle--but there’s a certain loveliness to them.

While Broke With Expensive Taste’s overarching direction is a thrill, its execution doesn’t always match up.

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

It's a cheerful, stirring and perhaps deliberately unfocused set, but they sound even better live.

He’s got tunes when he wants them--Candy Sam, in particular, is terrific--but it’s an uncomfortable, dissonant record, a bad trip rather than a mellow high.

Overall, though, it's too smooth and metropolitan to inspire the same ­reaction that Bon Iver's For Emma, ­Forever Ago did last summer.

You will find little robust melody or Piano Man finesse in these strange symphonies. But rummaging through Gately’s mazy, beautiful disorder is a beguiling adventure in its own right.

Among the hackneyed British soul tropes, the 24-year-old clearly has a distinct vision of off-kilter pop.

The songs aren’t all as strong, but they have the hallmark of a highly promising, individual group.

You're left with an album that succeeds despite itself, but succeeds nonetheless.

Peel back the early 00s rock (the Vines, Death from Above, riffs that lurch like Jack White drunk at a saloon bar) and there are quavering vocals that add texture to their stodgy sound, too.

Trying Hartz perfectly encapsulates and celebrates Smith's ecstatic musical vision.

Whether the sisters' gossamer voices are woven together or flutter alone, what you hear is a bloodless, polite prettiness.

Impossible Dream undoubtedly boasts the kind of bright melodies, satisfying hooks and nice turns of phrase that can worm their way into your psyche. Whether Bonar’s songs are distinctive enough to leave a mark there, though, is not quite so certain.

A Legendary Christmas’s sophistication is both its big selling point and its major drawback. The arrangements are beautifully done and sepia-toned. ... You start longing for a moment where it loosens its tie, when Legend lays into the sherry and really lets rip.

The violin-assisted Woman, When I Raise Hell sounds like a brilliant, disturbed relation of Bruce Springsteen's haunted Nebraska, although elsewhere, 13-minute trawls through Pearson's innermost feelings and failings, with lines such as "I'm in love with an amazing woman, she just is not my wife", make for uncomfortable listening.

Lacks the standout tracks of its predecessors.

Everything is enormously compressed, then amplified: it's claustrophobic and oppressive, but without having any particular power.

A roaring opener, a trio of great potential singles and a remarkable slow number successfully divert attention from the fact that half of Room on Fire is uninspired filler.

This might be music that is superficially clean and minimal but, at its best, you’ll hear the toil and effort underneath the seemingly frictionless surfaces. ... Some of these pieces, particularly the rather lazy-sounding final CD, Music for Future Installations, sound as if they were made on an iPhone and took less time to write than they do to listen to.

On Invite the Light, funk remains not only Dam-Funk’s backbone, but his beating heart, his brain, his codpiece.

The likes of All Comes Back 2 U and Dissolve are undoubtedly accomplished, although by paying homage to Pharrell and Solange respectively, Ronika’s own personality isn’t stamped across Lose My Cool quite as much as it was on her first record.

While their fifth album is not a giant leap forwards, all their essential elements are intact and thriving, and it reaffirms their mastery of modern synthpop.

The effect is gorgeous, atmospheric – at times spine-tinglingly so – and undeniably cool. Yet she doesn’t distinguish herself from the glut of similarly minded artists from Greentea Peng to KeiyaA.

It’s an album that’s too overblown and daft for the songs to have the desired emotional impact: it’s never really intimate enough for the feelings Welch expresses to connect. Instead, it wobbles precariously along the line that separates the enjoyably OTT from the faintly exhausting.

At its worst, on Everybody Out There, this desire [for contemporaneity] manifests itself in thumpy post-Mumford faux-folk and Coldplay-style massed "woah-oh" vocals.... At the other extreme, there are moments when McCartney has clearly allowed his younger producers to push him into areas that are intriguing rather than infuriating.

A spiky hybrid of stuff grabbed from various decades.