Prisoner sticks to the well-trodden highways, whether it’s the echoes of U2 in the grand guitar stabs and earnest vocal tone of opener “Do You Still Love Me”, or the spangly, flanged guitars and relaxed sense of space that lend “Anything I Say To You Now” the laidback stadium sound of The Police.

Six years on from the last Teenage Fanclub album, not much seems to have changed.

Nash is a maestro and, although less experimental than previous efforts, his cosmic almost dreampop Americana featured here provides proof that music comes in many sounds as well as names.

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.

Set to a messy blend of waspish blues guitar and wild fiddle, it's a typically barbed, angry set.

Let It All In is stylishly rendered in simple instrumental colours, but it's not the cheeriest of experiences.

Drum machine led “Swan Song” is the album’s most inventive and surprising song, proving that the creator of “Tusk” has still got his knack for innovation and creating a daring pop hook. While the weakest tracks here tend to veer into self-pity.

On the surface, Who sounds like a classic Who album. ... There are moments when Townshend stops questioning his own relevancy, but to dubious effect: “Beads on a String” is a limp metaphor for human connection, while “Hero Ground Zero” is just as clumsy.

Okay, but not much more.

Clearly, these New York math-rockers have yet to learn the values of de- cluttering, with most of these dozen pieces involving furious industry to no great advantage.

It's impressive, slick alienation for the Y Generation, but as with Del Rey, it's a one-trick-pony sort of act.

It's confessional solipsism, lacking the musical compulsion to make one care.

The problem with albums about depression is that they are the most literal exposition of the principle that an artist has suffered for their work, and now it’s our turn--and doubly so when it’s a 90-minute punk-opera wrenched screaming from their very soul, as here.

Jim Moray's filtering of traditional folk music through a mesh of modern sensibilities continues on Skulk.

It’s hard not to become overly aware of how the similarity of both the musical settings--basically, strings allied to rhythm programmes of skittish or explosive beats--and especially Bjork’s delivery tends to leach the individual songs into one another.

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.

Wagner's hesitant delivery is poignantly underscored by Tidwell's more emotive phrasing, while the arrangements of neat picking and weeping fiddle are applied with customary understatement.

Grizzled Americana veteran Ray Wylie Hubbard cooks up a steamy stew of voodoo magick and rock’n’roll mythos on Tell The Devil I’m Gettin’ There As Fast As I Can, a title whose droll self-deprecation is reflected in the weary sprechstimme style with which Hubbard delivers his narratives, homages and sermons.

The title track draws on gospel traditions to confront police killings--“Not everybody that’s brown can get the fuck on the ground”--while in “Overtime” and “Believe”, Booker expresses the desire for faith and direction in a rootless world.

The three-year gap between albums will ensure this tops next week's album chart, but it's a drab, unrewarding experience.

Sometimes the recurrent mood of ecstatic affirmation of life that's evident in her singing can be short-changed by arrangements that fuss to no great purpose, dissipating their impact in brittle beats and pointless detail.

It's mainly brusque and strident raunch-rock, with an unappealing cajoling tone that virtually dares you not to find the songs clever and the hooks contagious.

The most revelatory song of the now mature songwriter is, though, “My Father’s House”, from Nebraska (1982). There’s a sluggish, nightmare feel as Springsteen dreams of a bramble-tangled house in a haunted field, a home where he’s no longer known; a past he can’t return to. The merits of this rough, questionable compilation lie in such small revelations.

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.

There's a familiar elemental tone to the Dirty Three's latest album – except this time the oceanic influence is replaced by snow and sky and rain.

The record is divided into two sets. The first half is a jagged-edged electro backed spleen-splurge with all seven tracks titled with the CAPS LOCK ON. The smoother, more soulful second half finds him in more reflective, lower-case mood.

On [Cat Power] Marshall has changed direction yet again, abandoning her soul charm for something much less appealing.... But her natural grace shines through on "3, 6, 9"... and "Ruin."

Paranoia, Angels, True Love is too long and rambling to bring Christine and the Queens any new fans, or much action on the singles chart. Its self-indulgence may even tire some existing fans. But if you give it time to grow its wings, it can really lift you up.