Low-slung, dub-ish beats are appealing, though lead some tracks to Snooze Town.

It is stately, rather imperious music, conveying emotion through the deployment of technical effects rather than through the revelation of a voice.

Desire Lines lacks the hooks of their best work, with no obvious hits.

There's an excess of bog-standard radio-friendly pop-rock, and a couple of wet weepies à la "Don't Speak".

The album’s end stretch meanders, but the fidgety techno bounce of “Got Well Soon” makes its point, which is that Breton have it in them to draw converts on their own outsider terms.

Sadly, the Showgirls star is no Alicia Keys (who contributes three songs), and while she unquestionably has a voice, the material's nothing you'll want to remember.

The more you listen, the less the album reveals; her vocals fall between sultry and sterile, and you wish, to take two of her professed influences, that she was a little less Sade, and a little more Chaka Khan.

So far, so Mogwai. However, a few surprises have been chucked in, too.

Each song sounds much like the last but with hooks like this, who needs prizes for subtlety?

Cherry's version of Suicide's "Dream Baby Dream" is an unmissable marvel... Elsewhere, it's not the freedom of the backing that's the problem so much as the randomness of the material, with several songs feeling as if they were chosen to look hip rather than sound interesting.

Oceania is best listened to in bits.

An aural Waltzer, exhilarating and nauseous. On the plus side, there's oompah brass, jaunty jigs and a song channelling Fraggle Rock for vocal inspiration; and on the minus, oompah brass [and] jaunty jigs.

Difficult to fault, [yet] it's equally difficult to get excited about.

An almost comically deep, rich baritone croon, it carries echoes of Scott Walker, Nick Cave, Elvis Presley and, more prosaically, the guy from Crash Test Dummies.

It's nothing that Best Coast and the Magic Numbers don't do better.

Its chances are boosted by Ian Broudie's bright, bold production, but, apart from one obligatory Beatlesy ballad, it's full of route-one glam-rock stompers with not a single interesting or original twist and lazy stuff-that-rhymes lyrics.

Humbugness aside, though, it's a serviceable collection of jazzy covers and duets.

Nothing much happens in it, but there is plenty to be seen

This long-delayed third album sets out to make the Hackney diva "current" again.

Pleasant, sad, classy and thoughtful. No more than that.

Fans of Springsteen's downer side might flow with the music's riverine vibe.

A genuinely odd collaboration.

This is Green Day doing what Green Day have always done.

At its best on the quasi-techno anthem "Low Times", it's claustrophobically compelling, if too formulaic to be truly super-natural.

Well, these things are relative, and this record is still jam-packed with purest filth and unrepentant excess.

When he isn't sounding like a Police album track ("Locked Out of Heaven") or a Musical Youth album track ("Show Me"), he's mostly sounding like a Wham! album track (the disco-pop "Treasure" being a case in point).

Revelation Road proves, though, that form may come and go, but class is permanent.

Those who endured Williams’s recent X Factor performance need not fear: this brassy sequel to 2001’s big-band LP Swing When You’re Winning, is actually rather listenable.