[Jones'] natural ebullience still drives the splendid Give the People What They Want, a hook-laden affair keeping up the high standard set by I Learned the Hard Way and 2011’s punchy Soul Time!, as good an R&B album as any in recent years.

Todd Snider has the kind of audience rapport that comes only through years of one-night stands and the confidence that builds in one's character – even if that character is of an inveterate ne'er-do-well peacenik, wryly proud of his inability to grow old gracefully.

The euphoria of parenthood is effusively conveyed in several tracks, though the overall mood created by the heavily reverbed vocals, drones and pulses remains pregnant with potential distress.

A brilliantly-realised evocation of addiction building to crisis-point before the inevitable comedown heralds a change in priorities, it gives some idea of what Clark herself may be building towards.

The lyrics dwell on age, family and endurance, but the backporch party vibe imparts a warm glow to proceedings.

With the skirling, Arabic-tinged drone-rock textures of his band The Space Shifters augmented by cello and Seth Lakeman’s violin, the album’s miasmic charm imbues even the rockabilly standard “Bluebirds Over The Mountain” with new, mysterious depths.

Americana II feels like another chapter exploring a still-living, breathing relationship with an intensely complex land, that makes for a rich and invigorating listening experience, heightened even more by the news that a new Kinks album is on the way, too.

Few artists can make such heartbreak sound so pretty, while still reflecting on all its weirdness and complexity.

An album, that restores to R&B some of the adult concerns that powered the genre through its '70s golden era.

Fanfare offers a classy rumination on modern values--albeit something of a conundrum, in being perhaps the most sophisticated celebration of simplicity ever recorded.

It’s true that listening to The National often makes me feel I’m hearing ghosts of their previous songs. Old chords and thoughts stalk the halls of different songs. But it’s hard to resist their shimmering, shapeshifting companionship. And on Laugh Track the ghosts are floppier and friendlier than they’ve been in a while.

So long as you're not paying close attention, it's a beguiling enough experience.

The result may be the band’s best album yet, one on which they come closer than ever.

Unsurprisingly, his vocals are the most appealing aspect of the album, with the emotional strength of his lead lines supported by subtle harmonies.

Bovelle’s dub skills ensure there’s depth and disturbance in the band’s angry bricolages of whines, whirrs and harsh, stabbing guitars dancing around Mark Stewart’s edgy, political caterwauling on tracks like “Instant Halo” and “Pure Ones”, while Shocklee cooks up a bulldozer funk maelstrom of splintering sounds for “Burn Your Flag” and “City Of Eyes”.

The mood of alienated isolation evoked by songs like this and “Funny How Time Slips Away” is balanced by the genial warmth James brings to songs by crooner Al Bowlly, “Love Is The Sweetest Thing” and “Midnight, The Stars And You”.

The standard dips slightly in the later stages, but the grooves throughout are sleek and snappy, and CeeLo himself has rarely sounded better.

Ironically, given its disillusioned tone, After the Disco offers welcome confirmation of the vast and varied terrain available to pop and rock when it dares stray away from the mainstream or merely contemporary.

Drawing on the embattled, hopeful possibilities of early Seventies soul, rock and folk, its chamber-classical and folk instrumentation allows for pleasure as well as despair. This is a Radiohead album to make you feel, better.

When the songs do drop in tempo, they’re stripped down so the sound is soulful and raw, rather than sickly sweet.

It feels like the throwing down of a gauntlet, Cabello determined to wear her heart on her sleeve in the studio as well as in paparazzi photos.

It’s delightfully weird.

Grasscut push the electropop envelope in intriguing new directions with Unearth, its songs inspired by alliances of people, poetry and places.

Gently marching strings furnish an aptly martial underscoring for the conflict imagery of “Treaty”, the latest of Cohen’s romantic mea culpas, which reveals how, for a Great Seducer, love is an essentially narcissistic, even solipsistic, pastime, its protagonist apologising “for that ghost I made you be”. It’s just one of several sharp, stinging twists casting new and unusual shadows on old themes in You Want It Darker, culminating in the mordant, bitter advice of “Steer Your Way.”

Switching smoothly between contemporary classical orchestrations, big-band jazz and operatic chorale, the results are frequently breathtaking in their audacity.

Given the stuttering, protracted process it’s been through to get here, it’s a surprisingly coherent record. ... For the most part, though, Phoenix is worth the wait.

It's gimmicky, sure, but also pretty irresistible.

As a record that’s as lyrically compelling as it is sonically daring, I’m All Ears is an admirable follow-up to an impressive debut.

Variously embracing fado, jazzy whiskey-bar blues and tensile, grandiose strings, ... Eastern Esplanade is easily The Libertines’ most expansive and ambitious record.

My Soft Machine is a punchier, poppier outing for Parks but the record shares a lot in common with its predecessor. .... It’s when Park veers off her own path that things get interesting. “Devotion” is a risk that pays off.

The tone here is more robust than [Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down's] thoughtful reflections on history and poverty, taking its cue rather from the ribald pillorying of conservatives in tracks like "No Banker Left Behind" and "I Want My Crown".

A late-career lapse into gimmicky covers of “Silent Night” and “Can Can” aside, this compilation is a marvellous confirmation of pop’s fringe possibilities.

Trip-hop pioneers Morcheeba continue to broaden their approach on Head Up High, incorporating dancehall, dubstep and rock elements into grooves informed by European soundtrack/library music. Remarkably, they still keep it infectious.

It's easily the best work Diddy's been involved with in his entire career.

Swift doesn’t need her lover to save her, as she notes on album standout “Call It What You Want”, which is, arguably, the best song Swift has ever made. Its lyrics are more open and willingly vulnerable than anything she’s done before.

For a while on this overlong album, he brings something new to the usual hip-hop parade of brandy and bitches, lasciviousness and loyalty.

The band seem guided more by instinct than any sense of formula, but there are some superb embellishments – a fearsome guitar solo on “Take the Long Way”, eerie synth ripples on “Retrograde” – that build to the surprising final track, “River Cross”.

When I Get Home is an album, yes. But ultimately, it’s a sleepy, uplifting antidote to the often painful reality that black people, particularly black Americans in Solange’s experience, have been increasingly facing in recent years. We’re in the midst of ever-escalating chaos. But here Solange has come, offering us a chance not just to rest, but to relish in that languidness.

The raging country-punk counterblast “Country” unleashes her disgust at the country establishment’s backward attitude towards women. Elsewhere, her sympathies remain firmly with the downtrodden and desperate, as in her straight-talking depiction of teen pressures faced in “High School”, a bruised parade of class clowns and cheerleaders, pep pills and pregnancy.

An album of polished pop. Perhaps this will put her at the top where she belongs.

While Negro Swan elaborates on Hynes’s best work, he remains grounded in cosy bedroom-pop by shambling drum machines, vocal compressors and gratuitous psych pedals.

Former Hüsker Dü drummer/songwriter Grant Hart exhibits huge ambition on The Argument.

The Weeknd weasels his way queasily into unprotected affections under cover of arrangements whose dark, miasmic synth tones and itchy, sludgy rhythms blend the apparently conflicting worlds of R&B and industrial new-wave.

It’s been just over a year since Bieber released his worst album. He’s returned with his best.

It's beautifully presented in an absorbing blend of acoustic guitar, piano, cello, and the occasional tint of vibes or ambient colouration.

An absorbing, intermittently amusing album.

Occasionally, the meandering nature of Mvula’s song structures can leave you grasping for more melody, but the moods she creates are always clearly defined.

Apocalypse is Bill Callahan's best release in some while, sustaining a unity and intimacy of mood throughout.

Singer Julie Baenziger, aka Julie Ann Bee, whose debut album reveals a similar mix of emotional openness and affinity for the natural world as Laura Veirs, with something of Veirs's inquistive approach to musical textures, too.

Across the album’s 13 tracks, she flits easily between pop’s peripherals and its core, dispensing emotional catharsis all the way.

It offers an engagement with the notion of music as a lived obsession that far outstrips their mostly meagre intentions.

Few musicians ever achieve such complete dominance and superiority on their instrument as Jerry Douglas: not a single voice is raised in challenge to Douglas's mastery of the dobro. This latest, guest-laden album shows why.

It’s a record that sucks in all of the band’s best-known sounds and blows them out in a wild confetti blast of twisty-indie-anxious-punk-jazzy-joy.

Mogwai's score for the French TV series Les Revenants places certain restrictions on the band's style which, it must be said, work to their advantage.

Never Let Me Go expands on the disassociation Molko encapsulated for so many misunderstood Nineties teens, applying it now to the entire human species.

Satisfying and wholly enjoyable album.

Thankfully, Burn Something Beautiful confirms his own fund of creativity is far from drained, the collaboration with Buck and McCaughey resulting in all three’s best work in years.

Americana is the kind of concept album that Bernie Taupin might have written for Elton John; but being Ray Davies, it’s not so much comprised of fond, mythopoeic imaginings as the more specific (non-political) relationship that still subsists between Britain and America.

While refusing to close the doors on the synth-pop sound so synonymous with Scissor Sisters, Jake Shears also stands out as a progression; call it the same dance up a different street.

An artful yet unschooled prospect to reckon with.

These are some of the most engaging songs he's written, with beguiling melodies wrapped around typically gnomic lyrics, and little undue instrumental indulgence.

Where his recent albums have leant more towards long-form improvisation, 50 focuses on songs, with the warm drizzle of Chapman’s gnarled Yorkshire burr lending a bluff, worldly-wise character to American tableaux.

The folksy settings are tinted with brooding strings and tearful pedal steel, adding colour to well-turned lines.

Macero’s edits on the original double-album collaged four nights’ shows into a single, 20-minute track apiece; but this 4CD set presents each night’s ebullient flow in full.

A viscerally entertaining album that never lingers for more than four minutes per song. Rock’n’roll isn’t dead: it’s just been sleeping.

I suspect both the artist and her critics push too hard for her to find one true self. Whereas this record sees her rattling between a range of identities, it’s still a lovely bunch of Keys.

CSS's La Liberacion offers a much more serviceable blend of their original X-Ray Spex-style doughty amateurism with their slicker, sleeker electropop self.

It's on "Early Roman Kings" that the various strains come together most effectively, with Hidalgo's organ added to another Muddy Waters blues-stomp groove, and Dylan blurring history again in his depiction of the titular Romans "in their sharkskin suits, bowties and buttons, with their high-top shoes" – neatly underlining the gangsterism of imperial invaders of all eras.

Fans of Led Zep III should take a thoughtful interest.

Despite their diversity, a mood is sustained through Midlake’s arrangements, which draw on fond ‘70s influences, from the glam-rock boogie of “Restart” to the sweeping yacht-rock sheen of “Unlikely Force”. In most cases, the songs locate almost perfect surroundings.

He drifts like a spectre through a labyrinth, exploring his favourite themes of sleep, reality and the subconscious. The tones here are stark and bleak, compared to the claustrophobia of 2014’s Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes. ... By the end of ANIMA, you’re left wondering about those dreams that are just out of reach, but also what we risk losing when we look back.

The only mis-step on the album is "Boeing 737", a pounding, splashy stomp whose brash incoherence perhaps disguises a commentary on the twin towers attacks. It seems brutish and crude set alongside the rest of the album, which otherwise has the kind of stylistic and atmospheric unity that reminds one of what albums can offer that no other format can match.

In just eight songs, BTS have accomplished the same genre-bending they usually do in double that runtime. And for the most part, the album avoids the pitfall of sounding like a checklist. With BE, BTS keep their foot on the pedal.

It’s not so much that she’s changed direction completely, as that she’s drained her art of the obfuscating sonic blabber to leave her pop aesthetic.

There’s so much sheer, on-one attitude in Gallagher’s parka pastichery that’s hard to resist. His band are on fire with it. Riffs skirling from the guitars. Drums constantly a-quiver. Even tossed-off tracks like “World in Need” (“send godspeed”) catch flame with harmonica hooks and shaken maracas.

Merging deft production with stark, diary-entry songwriting on opener 'Too Much Love' (for dancing in low light with strangers) the south London electronic trio find a balance between melancholic subtext and the thrill of a beat you can sway to.

On the excellent Wheelhouse, Brad Paisley tiptoes a fine line between satisfying his core country audience and encouraging them to more adventurous attitudes.

Lurking behind the cosmicity, there’s usually a solid pop hook.

Where previous albums had been bland landfill electro-pop rendered even more indistinguishable through her heavily autotuned vocals, Rainbow offers a range of approaches, from pop and R&B to country and funk, applied to material that brings greater depth to her characteristic sassy attitude.

There's a danger of art-rock overload in this alliance of two cerebral music talents, but Love This Giant succeeds remarkably well.

The first 12 songs glow with standard praise for a natural, respectful love (rumoured to be about his on/off model girlfriend Gigi Hadid) but things take a darker turn after Malik’s mythical musings (over muted pings of electric guitar) on “Icarus Interlude”, which concludes with him singing that he “lied to the liars”. Both sonically and lyrically, things get more interesting from this point.

Phantom Limb have refined their sound further to more clearly occupy the kind of country-soul territory once inhabited by the likes of Dobie Gray and The Staple Singers.

Jupiter’s songs remain daringly iconoclastic, from the anti-monarchist critique of “Benanga” to the anti-materialist slant of “Pondjo Pondjo”; but there’s still plenty of room for pure pleasure, as per the dashing, ebullient celebration of dancing, “Ekombe”.

Hammill continues to explore the hubris of human existence. He’s often best, though, when he ventures off-track into more warmly specific tales.

Despite the record’s immersive qualities, the overwhelming effect is as satisfying as a plaster being ripped right off.

What impresses most about Blue & Lonesome is Mick Jagger, who really animates these songs.

His barnacled baritone steers a steady course through Moog-soaked covers of favourite songs, with sombre lines about dark oceans, soulless days, and skirting a skeleton coast.

It’s a masterful set, stuffed with brooding, industrial-synth beats.

Drunk Tank Pink offers a new sense of space, of notes ricocheting off walls. Green and Coyle-Smith clearly enjoyed experimenting with unconventional guitar tunings, playing energised ping pong with the tangy twists of key.

Their latest EP, Lout, is only three songs long, but even in under 15 minutes, the short-player packs a wallop.

Pre Pleasure is one of those rare records that reveals the whole artist, cheap kicks and all.

There’s a curious congruence to the duo’s harmonies that brings their songs to unique life, nowhere more so than when their voices take perfectly divergent paths over the melodic lilt of “The Lamb You Lost”.

It’s an elegant, thoughtful album, rendered in deft, subtle brushstrokes.

This debut offering as Snoop Lion has much to recommend it, not least the infectious grooves devised by Diplo's Major Lazer production team.

On what may be her best album, Polly Harvey offers a portrait of her homeland as a country built on bloodshed and battle, not so much a police state as a nation in thrall to military endeavour, however impotent and wasteful that has become.

Blessed improves upon 2008's lacklustre Little Honey simply because it boasts a better set of songs, most of which are treated to Williams's signature style of soul-tinged country-blues, using organ and pedal-steel guitar to light her sandpaper vocal rasp.

Martin Simpson applies his dazzling fingerstyle technique to a broad range of material.

There’s a drive and urgency about Whiteout Conditions that whisks one along regardless, their usual indie-pop mode here strengthened by layers of fast, bubbly synths and pulsing Eurocentric beats.