Sometimes it's hair-raisingly great... Elsewhere, this incandescent music can stray into baroque perversity.

Packed as it is with all this goodness, Art Angels fails to comprehensively blow your mind. Ultimately, Grimes has not reinvented the pop wheel, she’s just driven it off road a little.

Overall this record is much like its predecessor, 2011's You & I.

Thompson narrates this break-up in a voice tinged as much with near-eastern devotional music as it is traditional song.

Combining the sounds and textures of jazz quartet and string quartet is a tricky business, and there are moments here when the two seem about to come unstuck.

Odell has shown his promise but he has yet to prove his range.

A little string-plucking, some groaning cello and the odd beat adorn Obel's tightly focused set of songs, which approximate the sound of snow falling on a disused chapel while a solitary candle burns inside.

It’s a compilation that doesn’t merely compile; these tunes were laid down specifically for the project, taking cues from US trap sounds as well as London’s Caribbean forms.

Here are 12 songs about emotional hurt and partial recovery; some cliche-ridden (yes, one song here is really called Love Is Blind), others classy and nagging.

Sometimes this feels a bit like being lectured in a pub car park on a Friday night.

The contrast between the rough and Ne-Yo’s ultra-smoothness only adds to his appeal.

Ample evidence of why Mercer's songs are so widely cherished. But there remains something a little clinical about the efficiency with which he dispatches these studies in perky wistfulness.

The 90s electronic titans use vintage analogue synths, subtly retro-fitting their sound in a way that, ironically, brings it bang up to date.

If Wanderer promised more bold artistic statements, Covers pivots on sorely needed understanding. That feeling is relayed in turn to the listener: hugs galore.

Whether you meet All Or Nothing with the same energy depends on your hunger for more of a style already so thoroughly revived; for an album whose songs champion agency and resistance, its sounds are somewhat off-the-shelf.

Harris's production has become increasingly homogenised and, despite the array of vocalists, everything here risks sounding the same.

Much of it is pretty dispensable, with new songs Smiley and Acid Horse generic and lacklustre, offering little of the gift for transcendent melody twined around tough beats that made Orbital so iconic. Fortunately, the tour-ready updates of Chime, Impact (The Earth Is Burning) and Halcyon + On + On are much more engaging, and a trippy, strung-out Belfast rivals the original for quality.

Ultimately, like a hipper London Grammar, Poliça are too dreamy and refined for their own good.

The title track and single Tantor are decent, and Shakedown a warm beachside strut, with Brown’s lyrical ice shards speared through. Bass Jam is lovely nostalgia, shimmering harmonies surrounding him like ghosts of his former selves. Otherwise, the beats feel slightly tired, casting a pall greater than any of Brown’s recent misfortunes.

They careen through a wide range of moods – coquettish, horny, craving approval, irony – with a zeal you rarely hear in other bands. Occasionally those stories can come across as a little juvenile, but where they lack finesse (and, indeed, it’s great to hear a punk band that still sounds like one, the edges unsmoothed), they make up for in ambition.

Over a brief seven tracks, the 40-year-old superstar confirms his production prowess, veering between sparse, hyper-modern styles and compositions which hark back to the soulful bent of the producer-turned-rapper’s early career; a volatile mix of the sweet and the acrid, the sentimental and the tendentious.

These squelchy tunes pack much summer sunshine, and even kitsch jungle noises on the title track. But the long-range outlook is a little more mixed.

Though Pallett is guilty of trying too hard to impress ("Even as a child you felt the terror of the infinite," begins Song for Five & Six), the Canadian's melodies seldom disappoint.

There are fractured beats, and tendril-like melodies, but here nothing really lands--as either protest or revelation. ... But mid-album, Cherry and Hebden hit a very sweet spot indeed as Natural Skin Deep finally syncs Hebden’s rhythmic dub jazz and Cherry’s pop nous.

Contemporary, ancient, tropical and cosmopolitan: Ibeyi’s debut album pulls off an audacious series of culture clashes.

The Terror is by no means a bad record. It's just the low that comes with the highs.

This album is crammed with tweeting electronics, hydraulic rhythms, sleights of hand and Smith’s own backseat vocals; she hints at non-western forms and systems music, but never so you are not charmed.

Overall, it does the job, but no more than that.