They have now cracked out the synths, ramped up the drum machines, and found their calling in giddy, lovelorn electro-pop.

It can be plodding and takes a while to get going, but also occasionally reaches soaring, festival-fields-at-dusk heights.

The result is an album of solid country virtue.

The repertoire leaves room for instrumental chops from saxophonist Ernie Watts, while Haden's big bass fiddle thumps out the time with authority.

Bewitching.

They sound confident enough to provide space for Finn’s lyrics of high nights and soul-harrowed hangovers

Mostly, though, this lingered-over comeback offers sumptuous returns for those prepared to linger over it.

Pianist Matthew Bourne goes all English-pastoral in this largely lovely solo suite.

A cool, edgy soundtrack for the summer, should it ever arrive.

[An] exceptionally artful debut.

For all Bird's reverence for American rural music of the past, Hands is startlingly contemporary.

BTS is a covers album recorded at and paying tribute to Memphis's Sun Studios, deploying tumbleweed guitar twang, and occasionally, the falsetto.

When it's good, it's a thrilling and ambtitious state-of-the-nation address.

The most rewarding part of this double-disc is the first quarter. Not that the hissy old demos and rarities on the rest of the collection are without their charms. But it's the opening section which really whisks you back to another age.

Haunting and harrowing, the uncomprehending first reactions are combined with a score both alarming and consoling. Also here, Mallet Quartet (2009) and Dance Patterns (2002), but it is WTC 9/11 which packs the most powerful punch.

Feels Like Home is musically conservative, socially ingratiating, politically vulnerable. It is unmistakably a piece of product. But it is also brilliant.

Wonderful.

A surprising (if a little sad) return to form.

It is, almost inevitably, charming.

It's touching, witty, and like everything else the Bostonian ever does, brilliant.

Happily, beardy-weirdy Texas psych-folkies Midlake manage to weather Tim Smith’s split with no pinch in purpose or progress.

Subjects resulting from such reveries include imperialism, the environment and the more familiar home turf of love and longing. Nobody does it better.

As befits a novelist, the songs are narratives concerned with the big issues. Life, death, that sort of thing. Good record.

Fusion fans might be confused but as a sentimental affirmation of melody it's Metheny to the core.

With treasurable details – the dubbed-up refrain of "Black Icy Stare", the Merseybeat-ish groove of "Karmatron" – feeding into an overall ambience of lotus-eating sensuality.

As long as you don't ask too much of it, it's good knockabout rowdy fun.

Right at the end of what is officially the most depressing month of the year comes a shaft of unadulterated sunshine.

It recalls MGMT before the wheels came off. Which is no bad thing.

The set list's rather obvious and the interstitial chat goes on a bit, but the heart of the man is there to be heard.

There's a childlike sense of adventure and fun about his sampladelic approach.

Michigan auteur Hawthorne has synthesised his influences into perfect power pop, with the help of producers including Pharrell Williams.

Another sweet viper's bite of post-Freudian dyspepsia from the singersongwriter who loves to mistrust.

They don't significantly compromise the essential charm and glitchy poetry of the songcraft.

Nobody does this kind of thing quite like the Swedes, and NATD are a welcome addition to that nation's synthpop hall of fame.

Finn's second album continues the project he undertook with his first – namely to shake off the shackles of being "Neil Finn's son" by swamping his dreamy, Beatles-esque pop songs with moments of electronic and percussive madness.

Drawing on anything from Medieval plainsong to free jazz, she creates an extraordinary sensation of light, air, and space.

Baird's own rather fabulous acoustic is garnished with touches of dobro, pedal-steel or electric, over which her wisp of a voice, and words, hang in a vapour.

"I Wanna Talk 2 U", [is] just one highlight of an album which manages to be sonically inventive, dense and complex and melodically accessible.

See You There revisits his classics as well as finding room for one new track and a beauty of an alternate version of "What I Wouldn't Give."

A seething, soundtracky, high-gloss, high-energy orchestral Latin "fusion", full of licks and stabs and twiddly bits.

It's an assured collection of pure pop with an independent sensibility, equal parts Kylie and The XX.

As so often before, the duo’s choice of vocal collaborators is timely and transformative, bringing fresh, unexpected angles to their pieces.

It's still a cut above most epic global-influenced rock.

She's on the cover, smirking in front of an old map: a naughty sea god(dess) in a Cruikshank cartoon. Which somehow suits the discursive post-folk rompery of the music: highly arranged, wordy as an Elvis Costello song with larks taking the place of bitterness.

With its flutes, xylophones, mandolins, a truly incongruous mention of Superman III and, not least, Martin's own lilting delivery, it also has a fair quantity of charm.

It's great.

Every once in a while, the results can be more enjoyable than the main event (see Stephen Stills' Manassas). And this may be true of CRB.

If Mala wasn't conceived as Devendra Banhart's Europhile album, it's doing a damn fine impression of one.

Turn Blue’s stealth seduction suggests this much: their wrong-footing instincts should keep them on the right track.

You can almost hear the chickens out in the yard and see the dust mites dancing in the sunlit air.

One day, maybe the Lips will play nice again. Until then, they and their Fwends have given us plenty to get our heads around.

Few bands do that thing - spitting the venom of the dumped, but somehow staying romantic at the same time - better.

His second solo album, while often truly horrible, is also fascinating and funny.

Halstead's songs and Euros Childs-like voice breathe the sort of honesty and goodness that's harder and harder to find in the iTunes age.

Reuniting him with Slowhand/Backless producer Glyn Johns for the first time in four decades, I Still Do is Eric Clapton’s most assured album in ages, its understated poise and refinement reflecting the influence of his late compadre JJ Cale.

If the band can let go of their younger selves completely, that masterpiece will be theirs.

Honest, soulful, happy-sad, warm and welcoming.

Wilfully abstruse, then, but still one hell of a talent.

The voice (Joni Mitchell meets Anna Calvi), is as tough and tender as before but the music now acts as a bouncy counterpoint to songs with lyrics such as "death is a hard act to follow", blurring the line between unsettling and uplifting nicely.

The perfect soundtrack for early summer, and all the possibilities it holds.

The results are fluent, tasteful, ghostly and more than a little wistful. Ideally served with morning coffee.

There's a modicum of standard Teenage-Fanclub-meets-Mekons indie jangle. Far more interesting, however, are the dreamy, dazed disco tunes.

A hitherto only-hinted-at humour (try "UK Blues") punctuates this hypnotic and haunting glimpse into an imperial isolation.

The sound is a return to the Whigs' finest and the mood is whiskey, cigarettes and damnation.

Tracks such as "Epilogue to a Marriage" here, serve as a reminder that there's always room for the real thing, and you'll know it when it hits you.

If his follow-up doesn't evince quite the same exuberance, it still twinkles with a well-travelled exoticism.

It's derivative and is a near hybrid of Mew, the Postal Service, M83 and Empire of the Sun, but it's perfectly likeable without ever inspiring outright love.

R.E.M's 15th album could trade places with almost any of the previous 14.

Squelchy synths, down-and-dirty basslines, and vocodered vocals stay just the right side of Jamiroquai.

By Ben Gibbard's own admission "a much less guitar-centric" record than usual, it is therefore, if only by default, the closest thing yet to a follow-up to Give Up by Gibbard's other concern, the Postal Service, although it's more about pretty pianos than effervescent synths.

[Tales from Terra Firm] ought to be the one that separates the Oxford quartet from the indie-folk bandwagon and kicks them a few steps up the ladder to being Mumfords-sized.

It's almost boring: yet another excellent British Sea Power album.

Sounds like Kraftwerk's Autobahn driven by a tractor. Forget Krautrock, and say hello to Yokelrock.

It is a glossy thing that entwines her Californian folky yin around his Southern gothic yang.

A skittering collage of vocal drum'n'bass, garage, and funky house that parties, in the best way, like it's July 1999.

After an average third LP and a four-year hiatus, the art-rockers are once again all kinds of excellent.

The Glaswegian band's chosen style this time around, namely dark vintage synth pop (early Human League) and scratchy, spindly post-punk (Wire, the Cure), matches the mood and subject matter perfectly.

Gruff’s gorgeous voice helps humanise Feltrinelli. Never more so than on “Hoops With Fidel”, which, rather than demonising him and Castro, conveys the ideal of international revolution as a beautiful thing. As beautiful, in fact, as this album.

This is a belting return to form by the best vocal artist in jazz.

However much you think it a tired formula, this lot shake it awake with their relentless charm.

Should you be struck by a nostalgic mood yourself, Oui Oui Si Si Ja Ja Da Da is a Madness album like they used to make 'em.

Fragrant Word has killer synthpop tunes buried within it, but too often you wonder how much better a record this would have been if they quit dicking around and just gave you the song.

The soundtrack to Jennifer Aniston. Nice. Attractive. Hygienic.

There's a master at work here and if he finds his filter he'll no doubt lose some of that fairy dust.

It's essentially 1980s indie jangle with hints of Afro-pop and Northern Soul, carrying echoes of Orange Juice.

Obscure or not, they're songs worth learning, especially when sung as gorgeously as this.

The none-more-Nietzschean, grandiose-apocalyptic mood continues through the utterly splendid Olympic theme "Survival", with its über-ELO arrangement, and "Animals", with its sound effects of an angry, riotous mob.

Impressive rather than engaging.

Everett’s earlier, fearless accounts of family tragedy have refined his ability to explore extreme states of emotional disrepair.

The songwriting has come into focus and the hooks get under your skin.

It is, as you'd expect, spacious, gentle, reachy, euphonious and, for Air, fairly organic sounding.

Equal parts Byrds, Beatles and Burritos, this kicks away the cobwebs nicely.

It's tender, touching and not nearly as miserable as its subject matter suggests.

This is light and breezy pop that marries summery synths with dreamy female vocals.

As an 19-track collection of rarities from the period 2003-present, TTEC is necessarily a mixed bag of styles and qualities.

When these three Liverpool lasses let their freak-folk flag fly their abandon is contagious. Their voices are great, which helps, but it's the unexpected instrumentation that really seals the deal.

Composer Joe Acheson seems more interested in texture than development and you can long for a discordant voice, but as head-nodding experiences go, this is pretty good.

Woon's work is unashamedly bucolic (he writes songs about going for a walk) and beat-literate (he's worked with Burial), and his tremulous, medieval folk singer voice makes it perfectly bearable.