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

"Anastasis" is the Greek word for "resurrection", but stasis is closer to the truth.

After a four-year hiatus, Shakira’s 10th album is full of raggae-tinged, bouncy melodies and absurd, occasionally quite poetic lyrics.

Moon is bookended by the structurally perfect melodies of "I Heard the Owl Call My Name" and "Heart of the Woods"--but what’s in-between is often too airy-fairy to really grab.

Solid, polished, dancefloor-friendly, and other damningly faint adjectives.

A loose-limbed, spacious, American indie-folk-rock. Political, challenging, dissatisfied and, naturally, righteous.

It isn't long before their second album goes sour, settling into a pattern of either doctrinaire psych-rock or alt-country which recalls the Dandy Warhols in their more meandering moods.

He's not breaking any moulds--it's solid, guitar led, pop-rock--but then Marr is the man for that job.

So Long’s strenuously busy patchwork leaves you wondering how something so superficially impressive ends up making so little impact. The answer lies in the way the Bicycle Clubbers rarely deliver these gap-year reports with decisive force enough to thrill, or dwell on an idea for long enough to fulfill its promise.

Everything's turned up to 11 but content is absolute zero. If the Cribs were any more landfill, they'd have seagulls following them around.

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.

It's about time he delivered something of substance. YCTAODNT fits the bill, kinda. It's long on heartbreak and short on yee-haw affectations.

Unless you have a natural predisposition towards the enjoyment of self-consciously nerdy vocals and jangling harmonic songs taking a 'sideways looks' at life, Sky Full Of Holes will leave you completely unmoved.

This feels like a wearisome exercise in reasserting his market appeal.

Most of disc one consists of ponderous, blustering nonsense, with a black chandelier used as a metaphor for depression. Disc two shows more promise.

[Four] sees them rediscovering guitars with a vengeance – and many tracks here come with the sort of epic quality that has helped Muse filled arenas.

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

New project HDBA (a translation of the German name for the board game Frustration) sees him actually having fun, after a fashion.

It is cursory, lumpen and dull.

High on saccharine and low on fidelity, LATBOTS has one foot in the recent 8-bit scene, the other in Merritt's own back catalogue.

“Bitter Virtue” pursues a familiar James theme--condemnation of repressive moralities--but elsewhere, things are more ineffectual.

Like the latter’s Random Access Memories, it’s an enjoyable dance-pop album lacking a central focus. But one whose diffident charm makes a pleasant change from the overwrought wailing that routinely afflicts R&B.

This is a sweet, light confection, but insubstantial as whipped cream and too sugary for some tastes.

Charmless kiss-offs (“Don’t”) and sappy sentiments (“People Fall in Love in Mysterious Ways”) dominate otherwise, landing with the thud of the authentically uninspiring.

Presumably not this unremittingly OK collection of hazy pop-rock singalongs paying anodyne homage to the Ramones, Jesus and Mary Chain and, er, Interpol.

Rizzle Kicks are best when brisk and larky--more heartfelt musings on love and being true to yourself are banal.

Flitting between 1980s soul-pop and jerky indie, it has its big, brash, pop-rock moments.

Good songs, largely, if songs broadly governed by the imperative to “heal”: a worthy intention, for sure, but fluffed up massively in a compressed space like this, also a rather stifling one.