It's pleasant enough, but on the whole feels like Hynes' sketches towards an album, rather than the finished item.

Restlessness and drive applauded, but oh for the sound of those demons.

Home Again is sweet, inoffensive, well-intentioned and gently, grainily melancholic, and it operates most fluently at the slow temperature which offends some while delighting others.

Apart from a lovely snare-drum loop on "Recat" (annoyingly, all the tracks are called Re-something or other), this is barely even a head-nodding experience.

Songs typically travel from the spindly to the epic, and extol the virtues of living life to the full.

They've brought touches of ska and Latin into the mix, but KD&L still don't do anything Imelda May can do better.

Oceania is best listened to in bits.

It's broodingly impactful stuff, only hampered by the kind of self-parodically indie-kid vocals that remain in a permanent state of posturing ennui.

Penny has garage-rock form, but Too True is a light-footed, echo-heavy pop makeover with a 1980s gloss, frothy but forthright.

Turn a deaf ear to the Cowell-connected producer Labrinth's uninspired Brit-hop beats and instead concentrate on the surely intentional comedy of Tinie's "I've got so many clothes I keep some of them in my aunt's house" and "I've been to Southampton but I've never been to Scunthorpe" (both from number-one single "Pass Out").

Their heat-haze hybrid of soul grooves and falsetto-funk chic feels too under-cooked to sustain a whole album.

Despite a version of Earth Wind & Fire's "After The Love Is Gone" that is so good you can play it for days, this dream-team collaboration between jazz singer Elling and big-time weirdo producer Don Was delivers less than it promises.

It's all pretty good, but you want to see them live more than replay the album, though "504" needs downloading.

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

It's the very definition of "not bad", but surely there's some urgent paint you need to watch drying instead?

It sounds like a Sabbath album, from the tortuous lyrics to the eight-minute track lengths. But something about it feels wrong.

It is not a bad record--Danger Mouse doesn’t make those--but it does feel safe and predictable rather than fresh and exciting.

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

It's actually a more interesting artifact than the Mitchell one. Having said that, it is also hobbled by a paucity of good songs and a slightly splashy production. Solomon rides the turbulence like a whale.

Like the late Johnny Cash, Jones has reinterpreted the venerable songs in a bare, bluesy style. Unlike Cash, he never quite makes them his own.

Historic reunion of the piano and vibes duo-masters starts unpromisingly on a hit-you-over-the-head-with-a-mallet version of "Eleanor Rigby", but recovers with gorgeous treatments of Weill's "My Ship" and Jobim's "Once I Loved".

At times, listening to The Civil Wars is like wading through a swamp of still-raw emotion. It is an album that is more haunted than haunting.

Coming from a band who blatantly don't want to be a band any more, Angles is inevitably disjointed. But it's not disastrous.

It remains the case that this kind of thing only has something to say about distance travelled, no more.

Its main virtue: brevity. Most songs are sub-2 minutes, and the entire album is over in 20.

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.

The latest retro sensation, Waterhouse is a 25-year-old from San Francisco ... who's trying to sound like Ike Turner circa 1958. And he's pretty good at it.

The treatments range from Schifrin/Morricone atmospherics to full on Prokofiev/Tchaikovsky bombast, with results which are variable, but the scary choral, Omen-style version of "Where's Your Head At" is a hoot.

It might be more accurate to say that nearly all of the songs on Whispering Trees aim for "Satellite of Love" but come closer to achieving Sky dish of desire.

The beats aren't always the best, but Wretch, who lives on the notorious Tiverton Estate and whose "mum's still living in the ends", has a self-awareness lacking in many of his peers.

Both gently gripping and strangely sinister.

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).

As is conventional with contract filler, this is not going to be a go-to album in the canon.

Each to their own. For me, there's nothing here not to like, but even less to love.

The small print is that Travis are still doing what Travis have always done.

He comes on like a Conor Oberst meets Brian Wilson in a ramshackle approach that sounds to these ears like a refreshing burst of honest emotion in an often pallid musical landscape.

It's an album you can hear without ever really noticing. Radox for the ears.

None of it is clumsy but, equally, none of it truly escapes the originator's gravitational field.

Spread over a 67-minute album, their second with new voice William DuVall, that grinding insistence first impresses, then just grinds.

Whatever they say, this isn’t the “comeback story of a lifetime”: it’s the low-risk re-entry bid of a band who know where their bread is buttered.

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

Though less folky than their 2010 debut, Blood Speaks sticks to the harmonies and arpeggios formula that made their Jack White-produced "Gastown" single so memorable.

Her fifth studio album is dominated by navel-gazing auto-therapy sessions.

The wan vocals and listless melodies conspire to render such eclecticism [on this album] as flavourless as a Cup-a-Soup variety pack.

The Origin of Love is an autotuned, multitracked meringue whose ingredients include 10cc and Buggles, and whose only weakness is the absence of a killer single.

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.

She makes a half-decent dance diva on "I Need Your Love", but I'd ask whether that doesn't defeat the object of being Ellie Goulding, though I still don't know what that object is.

You’re not listening to songs so much as attempting to pull up the past as if it were an old pair of trousers, and then rope it into place with lengths of digital cable. It is both ridiculous and oddly moving.

CYHSY now sound more or less exactly like The Killers.

It's exquisite, of course, but dull.

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.

It's a Gary Barlow idea of what indie music sounds like.

Uno! starts promisingly, but it's soon obvious that the Clash of "Tommy Gun" is still their template.

Apart from a bit of pedal steel and some gospel backing vocals, it sounds a lot like a Snow Patrol record, rendering the whole exercise somewhat redundant.

The results have a tendency to make you look at the ceiling.

Dazzling songs, dismally sung.

There are too many plodding ballads, sentimental on the piano and heavy on the cymbals.

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.

There's an undercurrent of sentimentalism running through Come of Age....But originality is hard to come by.

The duo often leave any sense of taste with their gumboots outside on the doorstep.

Not one for Bon Iver fans, but the kid's got something.

"Lioness" reinforces what we already knew: Winehouse was, in every sense, wasted.

Surprises are few and what Delta Machine lacks is one big, arena-ready, fist-in-the-air synthpop stormer.

Sadly for the listener, this is mostly a collection of one-paced songs more heartbroken than heartbreaking.

It is a lush thing that, were we writing for a certain type of women’s mag, might have us reaching for words such as "candles" and "bubble bath."

It takes no chances. This is a record that browbeats and bullies you into submission with its sheer massiveness, courtesy of producer Brian Eno.

It's charming enough, but it's as well mannered as a picnic with Cath Kidston accoutrements.

She's good when not covering Mary Margaret O'Hara. But you'll need to hear through the still-life mannerisms to get to the good stuff.

If you loved Williams the way he was, rejoice. If you didn't, it may be time to switch off the radio and television for a few months, and bury your head in a bucket of calamine lotion.

Her voice hangs inertly among racks of lustrous guitars like a worn shirt.

In most cases, the cupboard seems its best home.