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.

Not to say Cohen is not an artist to be treasured, just that Old Ideas may not be entirely essential.

Ferguson's smoky tones recall the young Aretha Franklin at her more restrained, [but] it's all ever so slightly boring.

There’s a personal context (Mac’s dad was a famous singer of spirituals), the band is great, the vibe folksy.

Any good songs sound like demos awaiting their final form.

The very home-made, amateur-sounding production, coupled with what was obviously a fully formed musical vision, carries great charm and will appeal to fans of Scottish indie jazz weirdo Bill Wells as much as funkers, although only the first two of eight tracks excel.

The music? It is of course exciting, youthful, dazzling in its energy and simplicity.... However, you may feel, given the track listing, that you have been this way before...

The results can be more interesting than listenable – and the musical contents do seem wilfully random.

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

It's all a bit "junior school music project" at times, and there's nothing John Cale wasn't doing half a century ago, but it's nevertheless an impressive work.

DeMent cuts through the sheen with a simplicity that reaches back through decades.

For anyone who lived through grunge, this is mere nostalgia. Anyone who didn't is advised to go straight to the source.

With A Wonder Working Stone, Alasdair Roberts continues to blur the borders between ancient and modern, between heady myth and harsh reality, and between folk and whatever sounds right in context.

Those moments [where it's stirring, sentimental, and altogether too safe] aside, there's plenty more that is beautiful, forgettable and primed to aid a little light Sunday-afternoon catharsis.

The Atlanta singer delivers soulful, socially conscious meditations.

Their most consistent and accomplished album to date.

She has ... created a sound which is almost absurdly ill-matched to her songs.

A dance album that spins the decks back to the turn of the millennium.

The result is refreshing but also a bit boring, although things get interesting towards the end.

The sound is gothically cavernous and frames her seized phrasing with tasteful restraint.

The songs? Melodically flat, feel-driven jive from the hip.

While newer tracks “My Song 5” and “Let Me Go” snag by throwing surprisingly moody shapes, Martika-esque closer “Running if You Call My Name” sounds like something smoothed for A-list romcom duties.

Bradley, a 62-year-old ex-plumber and James Brown impersonator, has a raspy, infinitely pained voice but there doesn't appear to be any real interaction between him and the band.

Precocious, certainly, exhilarating, at times, Lorde’s debut album is almost but not quite as good as it thinks it is.

Not for the faint-hearted, nor those offended by religion. Often brilliant.

Sadly, they simultaneously fail to disguise a whole bucketload of ponderous, self-indulgent navel-gazing from the same source.

Casual bystanders might wish for more memorable songs or some advancement of the form.

It's mostly a thing of pleasing lonesome grooves--but there are moments where it sounds like the Mahavishnu Orchestra tuning up.

Wrecking Ball is as surgical as a ball of pig-iron on a swinging chain.

Sun is an album of polished electronic pop that mostly struggles to distinguish itself from the current slew of female singers.

At its best, in the opening “All Will Surely Burn” and in a thrilling closing version of “Rivers of Babylon”, this is mesmerising trance music of great power.

The Blue Note debut can be as frustratingly tentative as his first outing for RCA 15 years ago.... Things do heat up, with drummer Eric Harland stoking the fires, but there's no big flame.

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

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

If mainstream and soulful's your country bag, you can do a lot worse than this.

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.

One minute it's like listening to early Genesis, the next Smile-era Beach Boys, the next XTC and the next, um, 1980s Genesis.

They've done a respectful job of augmenting the atmosphere of melancholy, contemplation and unease.

She's an oblique writer and arranger, though, often interesting, never predictable.

Chris Thile is the most remarkable mandolinist in the world; fluent, articulate and sometimes just a little too clever to be truly engaging.

Throughout, we get a wounded and fragile man setting his hope-filled heart to music.

It's seldom terrible. And seldom does much to persuade you that it wouldn't be a better idea to cut out the middle man and listen to Gillespie's old LPs instead.

There is in these performances a slightly mannered theatricalism which you will need to reconcile with any desire you may harbour for either simple affect or no affect at all.

A chastened affair: instrumentally pared-back, vocally wan and full of unremarkable Brill-Building-meets-Belle-and-Sebastian ditties.

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

An example of its genre it most certainly is.

The Vega songwriting style is hardwearing.

Essential for fans, of course. It is left to the rest of us to look on from a safe distance with our hard hats on and to marvel at the most self-regarding singing voice in post-war popular music.

Never, whose song titles are nearly all one word, isn't as daunting as the avant-garde approach might suggest.

Set your sights high, by all means, but when each track sounds like an attempt to emulate a specific great (Bruce, Bob, Leonard, the Band etc) the confused listener can't help but be left thinking "Will the real Low Anthem please stand up?"

A genuinely odd collaboration.

Katie Stelmanis's emotionally tortured vibrato meshes with her band's lush textures to often-potent effect.

The sixth album by these Kentucky alt-country types sees them risk destroying forever the aura of existential gravitas they've accrued with the previous five.

In place of politics, or any kind of point, all this album offers is a parade of premium brands, from Grey Goose to Louboutin. The overriding sensation is akin to reading one of those luxury-shopping magazines you get on planes while a mediocre hip-hop station plays over the headphones.

Based on his native London, its themes are hardly original but he handles them with likeability.

Venturing further into radio-friendly pop-rock than ever before, her fourth album showcases a strong voice which (unlike brother Rufus) actually hits the notes.

There's no "Chasing Pavements"-style killer, but she has murdered the Cure's "Lovesong" using Heart FM-friendly jazz-lite as her weapon.

Yorke's lyrics, consisting mainly of repeated aphorisms and clichés ("A penny for your thoughts", "I've made my bed, I'll lie in it"), don't suggest any great depth.... But the sounds, bringing in elements of tropicalia, Afro-funk and laptronica, with glitches, rainforest sounds and superb analogue-synth squelches (if anyone steals the show here, it's Godrich), mean you hardly notice.

A partial return to top form for the widdly-diddly axe-meister.

As a soundtrack, sure; as a record, one for the completist.

This is a very capable attempt to update that swoonable sound, and the arrangements do offer a few contemporary touches.

It is not a substantial offering, nor does it plough a new furrow--but it is a buzz.

It's often barely there, notably the final minutes of "Lux 4". This is musical homeopathy.

Although it is both loud and quiet, it neither rocks nor swings.

Save Rock and Roll features unexpected excursions into rave-pop, and numerous celebrity cameos, but enough airbrushed pop-punk to prove they haven't forgotten which side their bread's buttered.

Recorded in Hollywood, which figures - there is a near-visual sense of overstatement to the bleakness.

Enough promise here to keep listening.

Their festival-friendly rap-rave-metal goes "the-generation-that-are-going-to-change-the-world" political.

Ward's at his best when he ditches the troubadour formula, as on the glam-pop romp he takes through Daniel Johnston's "Sweetheart".

Most of the beloved Feat features are featured.

It's two-thirds pretty good, all the same.

It's a shame the God-bothering pomp of John Legend collaboration "The Believer" spoils it all at the end.

Suggests and afternoon in Ikea. Snorbital.

Slipstream is welcome, despite large portions of it sounding generic to the point of self-parody: funky, strolling, sunny California blues-rock with lashings of soul.

Well, they were demos once; and here they are, in all their functional glory.

It is derivative and woebegone and its musical twists are seldom hard to predict, but it is also finely crafted and devoid of the phoniness which can make such works unbearable.

Nice is the word.

When he shuts up, and lets the shambling jangle and daydreamy exotica take over, it's great. When he sings, it's murder.

Bracing stuff.

Just when the world is no longer particularly bothered about a new Arctic Monkeys record, they've finally released one worth being bothered about – at least in parts.

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.

Spalding tries to breathe new life into the dead form of smooth jazz-fusion. And nearly succeeds.

Lakeman writes, sings, plays, produces and mixes, which may or may not explain the rather dry, stoney sound of the album and the rhythmic forthrightness of the playing.

The ballads will be the tracks from Little Red to own the charts for the foreseeable future, but it’s on the 5am dancefloor that Katy B’s second album will score its biggest impact.

Ultraviolence is more of the same, but less.

[In French] it's beguiling and sexy. When she crosses the Channel and sings in English, she's a ten-a-penny kook-merchant.

Over rudimentary backing beats, in that "ya feel me?" accent, his humour often hits the spot. However, the going-through-Customs skit, followed by a track about having his urine tested at the airport, is as tedious as it is righteous.

What We Saw..., then, is the usual Spektorish mixed bag of literate genius and "look at me" showboating.

It’s still the instrumentals, with their bass growls and motorik rhythms, moody ambience, psychedelic wig-outs and violent moodswings, that have the most flavour.

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

A barrel of laughs it ain't. Over sparse, semi-orchestral backing, Gahan tackles the big ones.

Too safe, too familiar...and was that really a power-ballad key change? Good guitarist when the songs allow it, though.

It does just enough to bring "happy" to you, and you've gotta love the black humour of any band who'd call a song "God Help This Divorce".

Beyoncé's strident triumphalism is displaced by muted heartbreak and the cookie-cutter R&B of her mega-sellers ditched for a subtle, stripped-down sound that suggests someone's been listening to Janelle Monae.

The arrangements for a small rock band are rudimentary, leaving everything to depend on the song and the singer.

For all the virtuosity in his fingers, Jerry is no singer, and this collection of tasteful exhibits needs faces [guest singers]. The faces save the record.

If you replace the techno with ambient tones and piano noodles, he can sound a little reedy and exposed.

Much of the time, it's reheated Madchester. The rest, it's over-literal psychedelia.