Disregard the didacticism, and there’s much to enjoy in tracks like “Til I’m Done”, a pumping disco-funk assertion of independence with abundant orchestral bells and whistles; the louchely loping “Guilty”, with Paloma giving it the full Amy Winehouse; and the pop-soul charmer “Crybaby”, whose kalimba-style keyboard groove recalls Whitney’s “It’s Not Right But It’s Okay”. But the bombastic tone overall is exhausting.

For while there’s no denying that Low In High School is more musically exploratory than usual, drawing from glam rock, electropop, tango and Tropicalismo, the singer himself has rarely exhibited such a grating combination of spite and self-pity. ... The album’s lengthy centrepiece “I Bury The Living”, an odious slab of trundling guitar bombast, lambasts as “just honour-mad cannon-fodder” the work of soldiers whom he presumes are too stupid to understand the wars they’re involved in.

[Jupiter Calling] still relies too heavily on routine romantic fluff like “Hit My Ground Running” and the glutinous “Butter Flutter.” T-Bone Burnett has been drafted in as producer, and brings his usual taste and expertise

The opening “Rebel” sets the tone with a country-style tale of how a good-hearted man’s attempt to live up to his father’s ideals backfires to leave him a criminal, losing his beloved’s respect and affection in the process. From there, the journey swings between ebullient celebrations of life and sombre tales of misfortune, with the shadow of Springsteen looming large over songwriter Eric Earley’s material.

Moments after hearing “Best 4 You”, with its slimline groove and sleek falsetto chorus, I can’t remember a trace of its melody or theme: it was just there, and then not there. It’s an experience repeated throughout Red Pill Blues.

While the U2-style arena-rock impressions that dogged Keep The Village Alive persist in places here, elsewhere Scream Above The Sounds finds Kelly Jones in more reflective mood, resulting in a more appealing balance of head and heart overall.

His facility with the form is evident on songs like “Easy To Love”, which aptly has the smooth, easy manner of a standard, and more dramatically with “On The Waterfront”, which renders solitude in epic fashion. ... Elsewhere, he reverts to form with the rolling blues arrangement of “Love This Way”, with his signature piano to the fore, and terse blues guitar punctuating his account of being “lost inside the darkness and the howling wind”.

Though obviously sincere and heartfelt, Gregory Porter’s tribute to his greatest influence falls a touch short in some cases. His voice, while smooth and warm, lacks the silky, creamy timbre of Cole’s on “Mona Lisa”, and on some songs he sounds more like Kurt Elling or Sammy Davis Jr.

Musically it’s pleasant enough, with string and wind flourishes either emboldening or offering solace from the folk-rock arrangements; but it’s all a bit samey, and after a while, rather dull.

The limp, autotuned love song “Happy” and drearily positivist “Good Morning” are lazy nods to the mainstream, but elsewhere Wretch is better served by the dark sparkle of arrangements featuring grimy sub-bass synths and itchy electro beats tinted with eerie vocal samples, thumb-piano and synthetic pan-pipes.

Lyrically, Horan pushes no envelopes, sticking to earnest love plaints and poignant reminiscences for the most part, and even offering to listen to his girl’s problems in “Fire Away”.

Secure behind the protective pop wall erected by producers such as Max Martin and the ubiquitous Greg Kurstin, there’s little room for originality here. Which may be for the best, given the mid-album limpness imposed by the gratingly wistful, cello-draped childhood yearning of “Barbies”, which oozes insincerity. Pink’s on safer ground riding the pumping pop-funk of “Secrets” and the title-track.

Grizzled Americana veteran Ray Wylie Hubbard cooks up a steamy stew of voodoo magick and rock’n’roll mythos on Tell The Devil I’m Gettin’ There As Fast As I Can, a title whose droll self-deprecation is reflected in the weary sprechstimme style with which Hubbard delivers his narratives, homages and sermons.

All told, it’s pretty crowded territory, with too many jams.

Following the largely insipid twinklings of his Beady Eye, As You Were suggests that, given the right conditions and appropriate collaborators, Liam Gallagher could become a more potent force than expected--especially if he could broaden his musical outlook beyond such predictable parameters.

Van’s fellow Brit-blues icons Georgie Fame, Chris Farlowe and Paul Jones take turns to duet, in a relaxed manner which exemplifies the overall mood: comfortable rather than inspirational.

In truth, the move towards country music made on Younger Now is fraught with potholes that she and producer Oren Yoel rarely manage to avoid. The main problem is the half-heartedness of the move.

Sløtface are a pleasing antidote to the cluster of guitar bands being peddled in the UK, drawing more on the grunge of Wolf Alice or the Riot Grrrl attitude of Sleater Kinney. In some cases they try too hard to sound cool.

Wonderful Wonderful is an album that doesn’t let the listener look forward to the next track, because the album is restlessly glancing backwards over its shoulder, haunted by past successes of The Killers, and the great artists who came before them.

Most of the album’s tracks also date from an earlier era, four of them retreads of songs originally recorded for his 1967 flop album New Masters. Sadly, they haven’t matured well.

When they stray from their core heavy rock duties, there’s an Oasis-like magpie quality to the songs, be it the way that the acoustic harmony-pop of “Happy Ever After (Zero Hour)” recalls ‘60s pop trifle “Sitting On A Fence”, or the way Dave Grolsch’s Lennon-esque inflection on “Sunday Rain” is winkingly set within guitar and dynamics echoing Abbey Road’s “I Want You”.

Having spent so long exploring the intensely personal, she struggles here to find the right tone for more public matters.

Sleep Well Beast, like all The National’s albums, occupies troubled territory. These are songs about the fleeting impermanence of joy, compared to the lingering bruise of despair, and how hard it is to live in this unfairly weighted emotional space. It’s a struggle embodied in Matt Berninger’s enervated, murmurous baritone.

While Martin Simpson’s peerless fingerpicking is in full effect throughout Trails & Tribulations, what’s equally impressive is the way his arrangements reflect the material with empathic sensitivity.

Though rooted in familiar influences--“Crossing The Road Material” is like a more anchored Neu!, while “Old Poisons” is old-school psychedelia, with squealing organ and guitar swathed in drums--Mogwai apply subtle details that are unmistakably their own.

Too many tracks, however, suffer from a shortfall of melodic potency, and a lack of lateral development, especially in longer pieces such as the 12-minute sci-fi musings of “Black Screen” and the declamatory nine minutes of “How Do You Sleep?”.

Eugene Hutz’s gypsy-punk combo--a sort of Balkan-American Pogues--functions best here on galloping grooves of fiddle and accordion like the opening “Did It All” and “Break Into Your Higher Self”. But the latter, in which discontent prompts the search for a more transcendent purpose, hints at the cod-philosophising which damages Seekers And Finders.

Art In The Age Of Automation finds the group expanding their sound to accommodate strings and horns alongside their core armoury of drums, bass, keys, sax and hang, the latter’s steel-pan timbres pleasingly sprinkled over the slow drift of “Objects To Place In A Tomb” and prominently featured in “Beyond Dialogue”, two of the better tracks.