Few songwriters can juggle seriousness and whimsy as adeptly as Paul Simon on Stranger To Stranger, his best album in several years.

It’s a lovely, laidback collection, with percussionist Willie Bobo adding a languid Latin feel, and multi-instrumentalist David Lindley excelling on guitar and violin, while Reid’s sepiatone delivery is expertly framed by master producers Eddy Offord and Tom Dowd.

The predatory, hypnotic swamp grooves that have been Tony Joe White’s stock-in-trade throughout his career lend a magical backwoods bayou ambience to the nine tracks of Rain Crow, on which his peculiar songcraft and grizzled Woodbine baritone conjure up gripping regional narratives.

As might be expected, the favourites chosen by Mark Kozelek for his covers album are predominantly those reflecting cloudy, sometimes ambivalent emotional responses.

Too many of these tracks are slight ideas and punning phrasework over-egged into grotesque wedding-cakes by Dudley’s billowing strings, leaving Fry stranded in the position summarised in “Brighter Than The Sun”: “I’m a man out of time/Looking for a mountain to climb”.

The main problem is that overall, the aptly-titled By Default just lacks excitement and panache.

All told, probably The Monkees’ best album, after their hits compilation.

Perversely set to chortling, bustling electropop synth figures, these songs present existence as “bounded by brackets of life and death, alone from first to last”, delivered in Middleton’s glum brogue, with only the most wafer-thin hints of humour tempering the onslaught of self-recrimination and hypochondria in a track like “Steps.”

It’s a fascinating oddity streaked with sex, violence and sorrow, a sort of seedcorn of the Robert Rodriguez aesthetic, presented complete with the lithographs that accompanied the original, albeit in cramped CD size.

Played entirely by Shauf save for the lush string arrangements, it’s a baroque-pop exercise with echoes of Seventies smarties like Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman and Steely Dan, though rather more empathetic than them. And less cynical.

Bryce Dessner brings his minimalist experience to bear on “Garcia Counterpoint”, a Reichian exercise of layered guitar lines, but only Wilco’s Nels Cline comes close to the spirit of exploratory abandon in Wilco’s live version of “St. Stephen”. And amongst a tranche of dutiful replicas, Anohni’s “Black Peter” stands out for its transformative orchestration and delivery.

Richard Ashcroft’s first album in six years is a dismal affair.

Even when he strains to keep in key or pitch, he manages to make a virtue of his shortcomings, bringing a sense of long-distance exhaustion to “All The Way”, and applying a sort of Gallic shrug to “All Or Nothing At All”, in stark contrast to the jauntier tone of Frank Sinatra’s and Billie Holiday’s interpretations.

It’s not a perfect album--like so many, at 17 tracks it’s way too long, and there’s too little variation in tempo and mood--but it’s yet another confirmation of what can be achieved when subtlety and sensitivity are the driving forces.

It’s Vance’s sepia growl of a voice that grips most on The Wild Swan, bringing raw conviction especially to the opener “Noam Chomsky Is A Soft Revolution.”

Sadly, following the great strides made on the grief-stricken The Sea, with The Heart Speaks In Whispers, Corinne Bailey Rae reverts to the blandly serviceable beige soul of her 2006 debut.

This third album is a delight, riddled with hooks and energy that hark all the way back to the early 70s heyday of Big Star and The Raspberries.

With Konnichiwa, Skepta hoists grime to another level. It’s not just a case of his lyrical prowess, which goes some way deeper than most of his peers; it’s the way that he has fiercely retained control over his own destiny, overseeing everything from mastering to merchandise through the Boy Better Know collective.

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.

Save for three traditional songs, Strange Country comprises brilliantly-wrought original material haunted by themes of uncertainty, lassitude, jealousy and spite.

The process of recovery shifts through numbness, melancholy and tentative hope in an admirably straightforward, touching manner that suggests Cohen’s previous tenure in edgy art-rockers S.C.U.M. was another world entirely.

A bitterly beautiful album.

It’s not completely without merit--some of the backing tracks have a mesmerisingly entropic grip, as well they might, with 14 writer/producers involved in a single track--but the overall effect is utterly wearying, and unpersuasive: after all, only fools waste pity on the wealthy.

Lemonade is fiery, insurgent, fiercely proud, sprawling and sharply focused in its dissatisfaction.

The Ship is a strange amalgam of Eno’s familiar ambient approach with poetry--the latter delivered in a sonorous basso profundothat resonates with a sort of looming, warning warmth.

With its serene harmonies and Byrdsy jangle of arpeggiated guitars, “Quiet Corners & Empty Spaces” heralds the most potent Jayhawks album in ages, with some of Gary Louris’s best songs captured at their sweetest by producers Tucker Martine and Peter Buck.

Although comprised of re-worked leftovers from last year’s excellent Wire album, Nocturnal Koreans finds the band still managing to find new routes to take away from that tightly-focused project.