In place of the suavité we associate with Songbook Rod, we get a whooping, sequenced modernisation of 1970s Guitar-Rock Rod.

It sometimes meanders like a wasted hipster at an Animal Collective after-show. Yet it preserves enough presence of mind to yield gems such as the sing-song "Alien Days" or the deliquescent "Mystery Disease."

Here, the North-east new-wave revivalists refresh their default angular moves with nervy propulsion (“Give, Get, Take”), elegant synth-pop (“Brain Cells”) and electro-glide reflections (“Is it True?”).

Balminess, after all, is the chief asset of this second album's slow-rolling, harmonic country-gospel jams.

Smart, thoughtful lyrics about everything from iPods to the Arab Spring.

Reconvening after a four-year hiatus, the duo have carried on where they left off--meaning the Frankmusik-produced TW is gentle, blissful and devoid of the exuberant electro romps of yesteryear.

The caprine warble of solo Steve Nicks has broken its silence after 10 years to explore the idea that nothing lasts forever, especially in affairs of the heart.

There's such a belt-and-braces approach that the array of sounds (strings, choirs, tubular bells, beats and synths, dubby blurbs and squeaks) can come across as overbearing.

Not easy. Not pleasant. But touching in parts, if only because of Martyn's honest gaze.

All elegantly arranged and written in self-consciously prosy style. He'd say wry. I'd say borderline sententious.

The main duty of pop is to be catchy, and it's a duty which DNA mostly shirks miserably.

It’s what The Feeling might sound like if they were American; endlessly “nice”, but with nothing to stir the soul.

Like most of Unapologetic, it's ["Nobody's Business" is] instantly forgettable.

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

Throwaways (“Jewels n’ Drugs”) and power-ballad (“DOPE”) digressions weigh heavy on the pacing, but the arch “Mary Jane Holland” and “Swine” occupy livelier turf.

Nothing you wouldn't expect.

It adds up to a shallowly appealing, summery package; glossily produced and personality free.

Self-help and sauce remain the remit, which might have been less tiring if “Roar”, “Walking on Air” and “This Moment” offered forms fresher than, respectively, the robo-stutter of Rihanna’s “Umbrella”, weary Italo-house pianos and strenuous stadium bluster to enliven their empowerment-speak.

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

Overlong at 19 tracks, it has its moments.

What Corazon certainly contains is a brightly recorded, punchy collection of “Latin” beats and melodies, plus some rock, featuring a handful of distinguished guests and the familiar overflying drone of Carlos’s own guitar obbligati.

Gimmicks aside, any version of TFIM with a core of "Little Shocks", "Start with Nothing", "When all is Quiet", "Man on Mars" and "Heard it Break" won't go far wrong. [Review of UK release The Future Is Medieval]

It's high-class karaoke, covering the Chi-Lites, Dorothy Moore, The Dells, Womack & Womack.

This quickly becomes the stuff of a thousand, middling US soft-rockers and when they're not whining like Maroon 5, they're whining like Blink-182.

Ditto & co ... appear to have disastrously lost their fire. Only "Love in a Foreign Place" shows the sort of strutting disco beast they are capable of. It's too little. But not, one still hopes, too late.

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

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

Strangeland is drenched in reverb-heavy piano, Chicken Soup for the Soul maxims and moderately maudlin musings about not being young any more.