He doesn't care whether you want it or not, he's going to do it anyway. And How to Compose... confirms that he undoubtedly still loves music. The problem is, it's usually somebody else's music,

Chapel Club are another retro-indie band apparently eager to re-run the 1980s, albeit in slightly more musically adventurous manner than the likes of White Lies and Interpol.

It's ultimately hard not to like an album that features not one but two epiphanies, one experienced lying on the "Roof of Your Car" staring at the stars, while in album closer "Lock the Locks" a dream prompts Skinner's sudden change of career--an event engagingly depicted as an office farewell party.

The arrangements are pleasurable enough, less rootsy than before, with some skilled use of orchestration; but it's a shame to find such a gifted songwriter sounding so gullible.

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.

Potential affection for this self-titled debut is likely to depend on how one takes this and similarly twee sentiments.

Go-Go Boots is the promised "R&B Murder Ballad Album" recorded concurrently with last year's The Big To-Do, and it's every bit as good as that description suggests.

A sense of awestruck wonder permeates tracks such as "Swallowed by the Night", though when Barthmus tries to deal in more human terms, with the inverse "Ebony & Ivory" schtick of "Shared Piano", the results are less successful.

Slightly laconic, slightly ironic, ["No Problem"] makes for a brilliant contrast with the production duo's galloping stutter-riff groove, heralding a run of crunching fuzz-guitar riffs that brings to mind the UK big-beat heyday of The Prodigy.

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

The group have been around for well over a year without arousing much of a stir, and the monumentally tedious poesie-rock of Violet Cries offers few hints that this should change.

[There are] some decent moments on this debut album.

Things begin well enough with the single "Rolling in the Deep", with its thumping piano quadruplets and gospelly backing vocals, and continues reasonably with the galumphing Tom Waits-style arrangement of "Rumour Has It"; until, two-thirds of the way through the song, it grinds to a halt for a slower, torchy middle eight.

The T-Bone Burnett-produced Low Country Blues is Gruntin' Gregg Allman's first album in 14 years, and it's the best work he's done since the Allman Brothers' Seventies heyday.

Kiss Each Other Clean is much more focused and homogenous, but there's still a lingering sense of abundant inspiration, eager to carry the songs off to different lairs.

This Jack White-produced comeback album suggests there can be few septuagenarians keener on raising hell.

Like some hibernating agit-prop agency awakening to meet the needs of these hard times, Gang of Four are in typically brusque form on their first new material for 16 years.

Tracks like the delinquent reminiscence "How Life Changed" and the mea culpa duet with Chris Brown, "Get Back Up", teeter queasily on the cusp of boast and apology. But you have to admire the gall of a repeat offender brazen enough to feature a quote from Helen Keller in his lyric booklet.

As you'd expect, it relies heavily on programmed beats of spare simplicity, and layered dubstep synth riffs over which Albarn sketches his impressions of life on the road.

It's still northern Europe that dominates their music.

It's 16 years since Mariah Carey's first Christmas album, and there's nothing here to suggest she's developed significantly since then.

Technically unimpeachable, the layered harmonies of songs such as "Angels From The Realms Of Glory" and "The Holly And The Ivy" are rendered with razor-sharp precision, though there's a stridency to her delivery on some pieces.

This is just another competent rock record in hock to the band Wire used to be.