It's not a bad album as much, but to anyone familiar with Lynch's other work, it's entirely predictable in sound and style.

They’ve formed their own blueprint in which the messages they purvey and the grandiose shows they stage are our main point of interest, but the music, production-wise, falls a little by the wayside when it comes to breaking new ground.

Hewson’s songwriting is definitely up to snuff, although occasionally lapses into cliches.

This throws most of one's attention on the vocals, always the most engagingly evanescent aspect of their sound.

With their lyrical focus on teen sex, money and the misplaced glamour of crime, at times it's like “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”, for boys.

Styles has opened himself up, as best he can, to his audience, and by gathering a solid team around him to help achieve that he’s created an immersive, well-produced collection of songs that isn’t trying to prove anything in particular to anyone.

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

Throughout, he's supported by Stooges guitar riffing of brutal directness and simplicity, occasionally fattened by the horns that lend an apt touch of soul sleaze to the latter track.

Oddly, there’s nothing here from Echo & The Bunnymen, despite the inclusion of borderline cases like The Damned, The Mission and Adam And The Ants, and a host of lesser bands creating the musical equivalent of smeared mascara. But there’s a broad range of tangential directions sheltering under the otherwise welcoming umbrella of Silhouettes & Statues.

It’s not bad, as such, but like Primal Scream it promises more than it delivers.

The melancholy mood pervades throughout, into the itchy, insect flurries of Penderecki's Polymorphia, for 48 strings, and Greenwood's 48 Responses To Polymorphia.

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.

As usual with Sawhney, it's typically eclectic, and surprisingly effective.

Sadly, the decision to tell Feltrinelli's story in the same period technopop music as Stainless Style sabotages its impact.

He's no fool: the result is an even more potent clutch of instrumentals, punctuated with the occasional vocal from Sharon Jones and some surprising male singers, including The National's Matt Berninger and Lou Reed.

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.

The blues and soul power are real, even as racial lines are leered and sneered at, the sort of ballsiness that could make rock breathe freely again.

If the solutions offered are sometimes better than expected, they’re also, frequently, tentative and tired.

In some cases, as in "Cloud on My Tongue", the orchestrations serve as little more than swaddling blankets. But the more thoughtful rearrangements can be transformative.

Whenever thoughts here turn to love, the results are not pretty.... But when antipathy rules, things go with a fizzy enthusiasm that’s quite infectious.

Being F&M, they can’t help adding funky, syncopated twitches to break up the four-square march occasionally.

There’s a confidence and flexibility to his disparate themes.

There’s still a nagging sense that the band are resting on their laurels. The record is still good – DFA are too talented for it to be otherwise – but it’s a little deflating for a band whose history is built on boundary-pushing.

The Big Day is like a lot of weddings: too long and occasionally a little dull – with one or two unforgettable moments.

FIBS highlights Meredith as a much-needed creative force. Her shape-shifting genre-defiance constantly surprises and intrigues, but it’s good to get back down to Earth afterwards.

The usual bouts of brusque dissing rub shoulders with love songs, fond tributes to his mom, and a fulsome, swaying devotional hymn “Blinded By Your Grace Pt. 2”. But it’s the engaging sense of vulnerability and self-deprecation that brings depth and charm to Gang Signs & Prayer.

Connick displays his versatility with the bossa nova sway of “I Love Her”, the New Orleans R&B of “S'pposed To Be” and “You've Got It”, and the sentimental country stylings of “Greatest Love Story”.

In the Blue Light is not the sound of a man reinventing himself, nor is it a final meditation on decades gone. But in shining a light on a handful of overlooked gems, Simon has succeeded brilliantly.

The songs are littered with piquant period references--Eric Bristow, Bruce Lee, Roman Polanski, spaghetti hoops--often in absurd situations, such as the mash-up of teutonic terrorism and mad-scientist sci-fi that is “Ulrike Meinhof’s Brain Is Missing”. But Haines’s genuine affection shines through fond tributes like the chugging glam boogie “Marc Bolan Blues” and acid-folk exploration “The Incredible String Band.”

It’s an enjoyable, occasionally virtuosic romp, fronted by Thundercat’s smooth soul harmonies, which lend proceedings the lustrous sheen of Earth, Wind & Fire.

Love is a pleasant although occasionally overly earnest capsule collection of pop sounds where Diamantis proves herself to be the master of the “brief pause... and gentle drop” technique. ... Her voice skitters across songs with a frostiness reminiscent of Madonna’s Ray of Light era, and sometimes it feels like a lecture being delivered into the mirror: everyone’s just like you, no one’s happy, enjoy your life.

“Heading South On The Great North Road”, sounds like an outtake from Sting’s musical The Last Ship. But otherwise it’s fairly standard AOR fare, only baring its teeth on the snarling “Petrol Head”

It's all neatly-dressed, buttoned-down and restrained but sometimes suffocatingly introspective, with lyrics mining a private image bank; even so, some moments cut to the emotional quick.

Though hobbled by the occasional cliche, it’s an album with its heart in the right place.

There’s a little of Prince in the sensuousness of certain songs, but Bay doesn’t possess that same crackling sexual energy as the Purple One; he’s more brooding, introspective.

Though not entirely “unplugged”--there’s a wealth of keyboard drones and subtle electronic detail lurking behind the foreground mandolins and acoustic guitars--applying this stripped-down format to some of their most memorable moments does help dilute the excessive stadium bombast which became a cornerstone of Simple Minds’ style.

The homogeneity of the album's arrangements effectively denudes the individual songs of their emotional power.

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”.

Further confirmation of the enduring strength of old-school electronic music.

John Martyn's valedictory recordings have a suitably weary presence that makes even such legendary laidback soporificos as J J Cale and Leonard Cohen seem positively sprightly by comparison.

There is no earworm melody as insistent as “White Flag” here, but melancholic opener “Hurricanes” and single “Give It Up” boast that same persistent emotion. And, of course, there’s that voice: steadfastly pure and mellifluous, just as it sounded 20 years ago.

There's often a mismatch of temperament between the most brutally juddering of Lidell's quacking synth grooves and the floaty, unanchored manner of his vocal lines.

She harmonises piquantly with herself over the languid guitar groove, and B.o.B's rap is pleasingly modest enough, too. The same can't really be said of such tracks as "Casualty Of Love" and "Rainbow", however, both singularly unimpressive songs tricked out with the showy vocal bling favoured by R&B divas as a substitute for genuine soul.

Cliched rock band they might be, but the problem lies more with the fact that they used to be bloody good at it. Night People is a painfully disjointed album that shows a band at an impasse, unsure about which direction they want to go in.

As ever, it's an eclectic mix of styles.

It seems a huge effort being expended to achieve so little.

It's presented as 39 miniature sonic studies in the vein of European "library music" fragments, interspersed with dialogue clips from the movie and sound effects to evoke the protagonist's deteriorating mindset.

The Menahan Street Band have proven a fertile sampling source for such as Jay-Z, Kid Cudi and 50 Cent, and it's not hard to tell why listening to the grooves on this latest album.

On their tribute to The Everly Brothers, Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Faun Fables' Dawn McCarthy avoid the obvious hits in favour of more unfamiliar items from the brothers' repertoire.

A trio of absorbing driftworks.

The music Kanye West reserves for his own albums is so much more ambitious than that apportioned to the collaborations on this compilation from his new label, Good Music. Which isn't to say it's not effective.

There is some sense that Blood Red Shoes are trying too hard to cultivate their own myth, with all these tales of rock and roll hedonism. For the most part, though, the music on Get Tragic is good enough to speak for itself.

Elsewhere, these grand new performances with the Danish National Chamber Orchestra serve to pinion some songs too fixedly.

It remains to be seen whether the band can transcend their influences and develop a sound that’s solely theirs.

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”.

Babel bowls along with the ebullient energy one expects of Mumford & Sons, like a cider-soused hoedown at an after-hours lock-in. But while this works to the advantage of their more rousing sentiments, it tends to iron out the subtler creases in some of the songs.

While their retreads of "Robot" and "Thursday" come perilously close to "Bohemian Rhapsody", the makeovers of Kelis's "Acapella" and Sparks' "The No. 1 Song in Heaven" are brilliant.

Dirty Jeans And Mudslide Hymns is full of typical John Hiatt tropes: old-timers and hard times, devotion and desperation, in roughly equal measure.

The more often she changes, and the broader she spreads her net musically, the less distinctive her art becomes.

Tea for the Tillerman has been updated with the aim of drawing attention and fans from a new generation. Whether these fuller versions will attract new listeners is debatable. However, there are certainly surprises here.

The fairly routine nature of the backing tracks means that The Fifth lacks some of the distinctive berserker spirit that characterised its predecessors.

Produced by Sturgill Simpson and David Ferguson, the arrangements offer a feisty take on bluegrass mountain music which sets off Childers’ perkily engaging delivery splendidly.

“Windows”, with its eerie synths and squawking delivery, recalls the dark psychedelia of Cypress Hills’ 2018 record, Elephants on Acid. But that then jumps to skittery R&B with “I’ll Take You On”. Nothing joins together. Brockhampton don’t sound self-aware as much as self-conscious.

Bruno Mars is a talented chap, he's forced to demean his abilities by echoing other artists' former glories on Unorthodox Jukebox, whose title all but gives the game away.

Gently wrought from strands of acoustic guitar, mandolin, violin and harp, encountering the genteel Demolished Thoughts after Thurston Moore's more abrasive work with Sonic Youth is akin to hearing Paris 1919 after John Cale's rampaging Velvet Underground period.

It’s pleasantly – if forgettably – soporific. The sort of family motorway album that tired parents can hum along to without waking the kids in the back.

Though the Nashville experiment is finally too half-hearted for the desired transformation, “Shelby ’68” mines Melbourne memories for a more personalised rural makeover.

“Cold Little Heart” builds from piano and the merest shiver of strings to a Morricone-esque pitch of intensity, before Kiwanuka himself arrives five minutes in. It’s a big, powerful statement of intent that the rest of the album doesn’t quite live up to.

It's a perfunctory affair, further fragmented on my download version by the muting of Wayne's stream of expletives, which renders large parts of it unintelligible.

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.

Wu Block suffers from the absence of a few vital presences, in particular Wu Tang producer the RZA.

Soothing stuff; but there’s too little variety to counteract the general tendency towards stasis.

"Moonlit Car Chase" and "Base 64 Love" come perilously close to generic technopop.

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.

In between, there’s nimble bluegrass picking on the chipper two-step “The Wind” Less welcome are Caribbean incursions like the tourist-reggae drivel that is “Island Song”.

The combination of indistinct vocals and the band’s preference for meandering charm over more decisive structures tends to sap the music of potency.

The Lost Sirens actually bests its parent album, which was not New Order's finest hour.

Smith’s vocals are, of course, beautiful. Creamy and curvaceous; liquid with emotion. But I often feel their voice is searching for tangier tunes to wrap that molten wax around. Without any sharpness to offset it, listening to the repeated wobbly rise of Smith’s lovely, dollopy notes can feel like the aural equivalent of watching a lava lamp.

It’s a fascinating journey, presaged by Cluster’s 1974 shift from avant-garde to pop with “Caramel”, taking in the pulsing minimalism of Monoton’s “Tanzen & Singen”, the simplistic electropop of Die Gesunden’s “Die Gesunden Kommen” and the more sophisticated soundscapes of Yello, Vangelis and Klaus Schulze.

Courage is a force to be reckoned with. It seems unlikely that more than a few of its tracks will jostle their way onto Dion’s setlist, given the decades of power ballads they have to compete with. But those that do will make their mark.

A decent collection which explores different aspects of the duo’s chosen musical territory.

While Take The Crown undoubtedly contains many individual tracks sure to tickle the mainstream pop palate, that doesn't in itself make for a great album.

Heidi Talbot employs an engaging blend of ancient and modern on Angels Without Wings.

A little more campfire crackle to his delivery would have helped lift these good short stories from the prettily glowing embers of forgettable and occasionally recycled melodies.

The ponderous rocker "How Long Can These Streets Be Empty?" shows up the limitations of a voice better suited to pop and soul.

[The album] mostly eschews his usual glum ruminations in favour of pleasingly methodical instrumental trifles.

I wonder if Larsson boxed herself in with her theme (“I’m obsessed with love”, she told NME in a recent interview), then struggled to find new ways to explore it. Overall, though, Poster Girl has more than enough bops to keep fans happy.

Penguin Cafe’s music continuing to explore the more earthly pleasures to be found at the confluence of world, folk, minimalism and chamber music.

Too often their light touch turns lightweight, even wan.

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.

The engaging mood is further enhanced by Condon's baffling but beautiful lyrics.

It's the same throughout, London relying on charm over content. But, in fairness, he makes it more fun than most.

Overall, it treads an uncertain line between bombast and sensitivity.

It’s a pleasant enough effort, but lacks the distinctive touch that might set it apart in a very crowded field.

It’s crafted to slot neatly into the 6 Music playlist. Smart and friendly. Tasteful and tuneful. Just a little unsurprising.

No Doubt makes only the most tentative divergences from previously tried and tested strategies, which gives Push and Shove a character that could be described as either dated or timeless.

It's a well-crafted, stylish piece of work. But it's hard to love songs that try to hide.

There's a profound valedictory tone about it, as songwriters such as Jakob Dylan and Paul Westerberg craft material custom-built for Campbell's situation.