They just sound like desperate grasps for something--anything--before the latter stages of the album slump into terminal dullness.

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 their most accomplished clawing-back so far of the basic dark rock’n’roll street-smarts that were lost as they cast fruitlessly around for new directions with projects like the acoustic album Howl and the awful noise-scape effort The Effects Of 333 (their very own Metal Machine Music).

Save for a shaky cover of “Send in the Clowns”, Ferry remains as calm and collected as ever at the eye of these emotional storms.

Comeback albums, it seems, are not just for other bands to do.

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”.

Equally interesting are undeveloped outtakes such as the exquisite heartbreak miniature “Marigold”, and two songs deliberately written to meet Elektra’s demand for a hit single, “Once Upon A Time” and “Lady, Give Me Your Key”, on which Buckley’s genial charm and outlandish vocal gymnastics--not to mention the latter track’s clumsy drug-pun metaphor--trump any unfeasible commercial considerations.

Smoke Fairies’ fourth album finds the English duo taking a tangent from their folk/blues approach with the help of a young producer, Kristofer Harris, who gives them a textured sound.

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.

Just when you think it's done, it finds another gear through the ingenious addition of a subtle offbeat that kicks the groove up a notch--the kind of sly, brilliant touch that suggests Rudimental are worthy heirs to the likes of Soul II Soul and Basement Jaxx.

It’s all a bit stiff: the methodical chording of “All This Way” lacks swing or swagger, as if too tightly corsetted, and “Take Care” displays similar restrictions applied to their keyboard-led material: the plonking piano and falsetto refrain suggest someone’s trying for Brian Wilson magic, but falling well short.

It's all delivered with customary warmth and swing from Miller's home studio.

Throughout Synthetica, an undertow of dystopian unease drags the music away from standard pop territory into darker areas.

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

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.

This debut album is awash in buzzsaw guitar riffs and splashy cymbals, while the wild-child vocals of Arrow De Wilde channel the jaded disdain of Courtney Love (minus the rage), occasionally peaking in a Lene Lovish-like squawk. It’s a formula which works best on “Love’s Gone Again”, which has something of the elemental primitivism of Pink Flag-era Wire as it treats perverse carnal urges to a dose of distortion.

In a year already host to some brilliant albums, it seems tired and dated.

It’s an odd selection, including Bowie’s “Lady Grinning Soul” as a pallid piano ballad, and Keren Ann’s “Strange Weather” as a desolate but oddly comforting duet with David Byrne.

It all comes together more fruitfully on the ensuing "Hey, Shooter." [...] From there, it gets more fecund than ever.

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

There's a bruised strength to Spx's voice, and her melodies have the stark, fatalistic tone of chain-gang moans.

Felice fails to animate them in the manner of comparable storytellers like Johnny Dowd and Richmond Fontaine's Willy Vlautin, and thus leaves one's interest unignited.

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.”

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.

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”.

Quite, quite lovely.

It's always an after-hours, nocturnal experience.

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.

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.

It's a gently moving meditation on the effects of solitude and nature on the soul, set to Lytle's characteristic blend of chugging guitar grooves aerated by bubbling synths and soothed by high harmonies.

Whatever his anxieties, it’s never less than gently engaging.

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

Beautiful Thing is a confident statement about musical and human authenticity, with production by UNKLE’s Tim Goldsworthy which builds dub-like echo-chambers, inside which a kitchen sink’s worth of sounds claustrophobically rattle.

They’re still sculpted from the same small portfolio of sounds--basically, buzzing distorted guitar riffs and harmony chants borne along on pummelling drum barrages--which tends to impose too narrow an emotional range on the album. It’s like being hectored loudly by a bore.

The arrangements on Barry Adamson's latest album seem more restrained than usual, his jazz-noir ambitions trimmed to a blues-funk palette of bass and drum grooves carrying Hammond organ or piano parts, with just the occasional solo horn part.

Lollipop is the best Meat Puppets album since the halcyon days of Up on the Sun and Mirage, full of scudding lysergic country-rock grooves bound in twisting skeins of dervish lead guitar.

Can’t Touch Us Now doesn’t have quite the exploratory breadth of Oui Oui Si Si Ja Ja Da Da, but there’s enough variety to animate their tableaux of social portraits.

It's quite easy to envisage entire arenas punching the air to songs like these and the pounding “You're Gonna Get It”, one of two tracks featuring Paul Weller.

The record’s problem is that it never settles on one cohesive sound.

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.

Li’s latest foray in pop is a brilliant display of growth, both personally and professionally. She once again proves that there’s no such thing as boring in her music.

Though less ambitious than 2009's The Liberty of Norton Folgate, Madness's Oui Oui Si Si Ja Ja Da Da confirms the benefits of spreading songwriting chores among the entire band.

Saxophonist Lovano's third album with his two-drummer quintet is a very mixed affair.

Although it marks no significant shift in style--she’s still mining the same pop-R&B seam--it’s undoubtedly a better effort than its predecessor.

It’s always been hard to translate the irresistible propulsion of Femi Kuti’s live shows into a comparably effective studio realisation, but with One People One World he makes a decent stab.

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

[“Valentine” is] the most endearing entry in an album that has its moments but doesn’t quite leave a mark.

The album could have been shorter and catchier but fans will feel their cockles warmed and their pulses raised.

Waterhouse's own voice is slightly under-recorded, but the musical settings--the understated Telecaster twang, the honking horns, the rumbling tom-toms--always churn with the right degree of roadhouse charm.

A frustrating experience overall.

Too much is still being worked through, though, for this to be the exhilarating, post-depression party its best music suggests.

While the music has the spindly, junkie-skeletal manner of earlier releases. But the way that songs relentlessly mythologise their past is frankly wearisome at this late stage.

One can’t help thinking the ghosts and echoes of previous scandalous indulgences are rather betrayed by the project’s neat, sentimental manner.

As usual, guests crowd the album... less welcome, though, is the way that vast tranches of the album serve as a showcase for Willie's son, Lukas.

Common’s lyrical imagery is as evocative as ever on both. ... This is Common’s most hopeful album in years.

It all fits seamlessly together, a rich tapestry of weed-toked slow jams, woozy psychedelic infusions and pimped-out west coast joyrides. ... This record never takes a wrong turn.

The deep, surging bass pulse that opens “Summer” suggests a more focused approach, but before long Jim Kerr’s descending again into his dreams, anticipating “all those energies” amidst yet another miasmic, swirling sea of sound, and the song just evaporates into a mist of queasy bombast.

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

He fills the Gary Moore-shaped hole in the world admirably.

Only occasionally does the survey of this interpersonal battlefield afford an optimistic light.

Here, his pool of talent is confirmed in the spare xylophone beat to “Youth” and the ingenious, slinky grooves to “Lightwork” and “They Don’t Know”, a frisky pass-the-mic showcase between Tinie, Kid Ink, Stefflon Don and AoD. But given the sharp drop-off in notable guest talent this time round, compared with Demonstration, he certainly needs to make changes.

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

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”.

It’s hard to think of many other contemporary albums that are quite so beautifully arranged as this. ... This is a very special album indeed.

It’s a typical contacts-book R&B exercise, with an impressive cast of guests (including Frank, Pharrell, Snoop, Nicki, Katy, Ariana and others) on a fairly underwhelming series of grooves.

Bennett and Gaga dance through [Cole Porter's] witty wordplay and bring nuanced humanity to the deft melodies he dashed off in his suite at the Waldorf.

The album has an unpolished feel – a diamond in the rough – with its analogue sounds and snatches of conversation from the recording studio.

It’s a far cry from the usual meat’n’spuds rock that has characterised most Morrissey albums; and a welcome change, suggesting perhaps that this most British of pop bards is renegotiating his own boundaries.

The loss of its uplifting chorus harmonies deprives "Map Ref" of its sunny appeal, but "Two People In a Room" bowls along briskly with dissonant monochord tension.

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.

It's Wretch's determination to find success by finding his own voice that's most impressive here.

Due to the choice of material, the arrangements lean heavily towards the dramatic and angst-ridden--well, it is Peter Gabriel--with the sole recourse to mellow calm reserved for the undulating strings of "The Nest That Sailed the Sky".

It's Bruni's intimacy that's the album's most alluring aspect.

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.

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.

Jeff Lynne's musical memoir of youthful influences, old songs are recast in new lights.

The Cautionary Tales... is wracked with recrimination, remorse and self-doubt. It can be bleak--the electric piano of “Lockdown Hurricane” seems a sound soaked in self-pity--but the intimate beauty of the strings and woodwinds sweetens the pill.

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

It’s a return to form, but reveals an expected sense of maturity. Pryor and sometimes guitarist Jim Suptic split vocal duties on the EP.

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.

At its best, it has a radiant, marvellous sound.

All very authentic and in the room.

It may lack cohesion at certain points, but one thing is never in doubt: Minaj is still one of the best in her field.

Wonderful Crazy Night is not an album of hit singles, but John knows his game is to sit on the sub’s bench these days. But still to be delivering such carefully and enthusiastically forged handiwork says much about his respect for his legacy and his audience.

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.

Despite the propulsive energy sustained throughout, some tracks lack focus.

Pleasingly, it's all comically cosmic, as befits the host movie.

There is no song on Fever Dream that is likely to eclipse, or even cast a shadow on the success of “Little Talks”, but this is a soothing, affable record nonetheless.

The chunky robot-rock riff [in the opening track] suggests they’re headed to Queens of the Stone Age territory, a route confirmed by the strutting “Brothers and Sisters”; but each track seems to signal some fresh direction.

Steinman’s sonic fingerprints are all over the album--the furiously arpeggiating piano riffs (one “borrowed” from Randy Newman), the brusque guitars, the Wagnerian pomp--though it is Loaf’s stagey delivery, with that juddering vibrato, which dominates songs.

There’s scant distinction overall, with Bruno’s eager-beaver personality wearing perilously thin on “That’s What I Like”, a tiresome tick-list of unimaginative hedonism, and “Chunky”, a big-lass anthem lacking even the roguish, cheeky [sic] charm of Sir Mixalot’s “Baby Got Back”.

It has everything the Adele album lacks: real emotional insight, couched in genuinely soulful arrangements bristling with imagination.

When the funk gets this good, with a relaxed, propulsive charm that belies the P-Funk density of the arrangements, why bother modernising?

The duo have devised a series of fascinating improvisations.

The Jayhawks release their most insipid, uninspired album in years.

At various points across the album, Doja Cat channels her predecessors. There’s a gorgeous D’Angelo croon to “Often” and on the punchy “Demons”, she emulates Kendrick Lamar’s silky, dangerous tones. Notably, though, there are zero features on this record. Scarlet holds up all on its own.

"Moving" apes the shameless anthemic yearning of Coldplay, and "A Different Room" has the windy bluster of U2. But it's the tiredness of the songwriting that cripples Where You Stand.

while Seal's voice is a natural fit, it's hard to discern what these versions add, given their general faithfulness to the originals.