This revamp does at least serve as a reminder of the album’s untouchable greatness.

Save for the chunky “Don’t You Wait”, there’s little punch or pop charm to the album, which boasts a surfeit of luscious textures and feisty attitudes, but a shortfall of killer melodies.

There’s prodigious ambition here, and moments of great pleasure.

Less structured and song-oriented than Channel Orange, it’s a long, meandering ramble through Ocean’s passing interests and attitudes, hopes and memories, alighted upon like scenes briefly glimpsed from a train window and then dropped into tracks that aren’t so much sung as delivered in an undulating sprechstimme that seems to be avoiding the difficult choice of a compelling melody.

With the hindsight afforded by this monumental 17-disc career retrospective, he seems somewhat less than The One, an idiosyncratic talent undermined by MOR inclinations.

The chief virtue is the immediacy that courses through tracks like “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton” and “Fall of the Star High School Running Back”.

Bjork’s Vulnicura represents a return of sorts to standard song form after the experimental Biophilia, its nine long tracks evoking the emotional confusion following a break-up.... But throughout, Bjork’s own vocals are the stumbling-block.

“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.

“Wanderlust” establishes the overall thematic impulse to live culturally beyond one’s means, but in practice this can lead to the preference for smarts over suitability that spoils a track like “A Dog’s Life”. But there are moments of greatness here and there.

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?”.

Paul Simon's ruminations here on love, age and encroaching mortality have a valedictory flavour about them.

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.

This fourth album is produced by south London’s Paul White, and a shared taste for Talking Heads and especially Joy Division (the LP is named after their song, more than JG Ballard’s novel) takes it way off the mainstream hip-hop map.

Ultimately, Dry Cleaning start to sound like a one-song idea dragged out over two albums. A slog.

For her third album as St. Vincent, Annie Clark has jettisoned the baroque string and woodwind arrangements that marked 2009's Actor, in favour of more direct, guitar-based settings.

Musically, it's the same kind of electro R&B with which radio is already awash--in large part because it's produced by the same small coterie of hip producers, with Timbaland appearing to take the most prominent role amongst the likes of Detail, Jerome Harmon, Pharrell Williams and Ryan Tedder.

The results are looser and less formal than might be expected, more imbued with soulful swing, slipping back and forth between the modes and incorporating ecstatic gospel-style call and response passages against a patinated backdrop of shakers, percussion, swooping synths and droning organ.

On this album, you find yourself drifting in and out. She tackles trolls, racism, overpopulation and the internet age. You crave solutions as each track closes, or perhaps more of those sublime, witty character studies she offered on Let Them Eat Chaos.

The impression is of someone picking obsessively at an emotional scab, which is effectively what The Wall is all about.

It’s a peculiar record and one that involves a push-and-pull between two extremes; on the one hand, the instrumentation is wound tight and built around sharp melodies that, at their best, are difficult to shake off--‘Bellarine’ and ‘Sister’s Jeans’ in particular are real earworms.

Not an easy listen, but a satisfying one.

While copious application of phasing offers a link to Tame Impala’s psychedelic roots, the absence of guitar wig-outs may disappoint some fans.

Experimentation is generally to be applauded, but too often here it works to the detriment of the songs.

While there’s a moreish quality to the off-key guitar of “Imperfect for You” and an unexpectedly golden flush of brass on “Ordinary Things”, Grande’s delicately conversational tone is often left having to compensate for her lack of strong melodic snags.

Bill Callahan's follow-up to 2011's gorgeous Apocalypse finds him in the company of a small, discreet band, whose gentle shuffles are coloured mostly by guitar, fiddle and flute, as his muse flits haphazardly about him. [The Independent scored this a 3/5 in the actual printed edition not 5/5 as seen on its online edition]

There are moments when it all starts to feel a little bit too doom-laden. But Williams saves not only the best, but the most hopeful, until last. ... An impressive but relentless album.

An album that frets gently and artfully at the wounds of human attraction and rejection.

Sadly, this is about as deep as their politics go on Hot Sauce Committee Part Two, the more articulate sentiments of To the 5 Boroughs having been largely abandoned in favour of fairly standard bring-the-noise, boast'n'diss hip-hop pablum.