These 11 songs balance mainstream appeal (Someone I Don’t Know) alongside an intimate sense of being cocooned with someone who has plenty of worth to impart.

Tracks such as Hearts, the gently pulsating Your Domino and Last of the True Believers (featuring the Blue Nile’s Paul Buchanan) all perfectly showcase Ware’s crystalline vocals--you just wish she’d step out of her comfort zone more often.

The Way Is Read gets better the further in you get, the thrilling closing title track highlighting the talents of both parties.

A repetitive wash of acoustic guitars and consoling choirs dull the emotion, and Sandé is too polite to go for the jugular.

For the most part these more outward-looking conceits are housed in familiar musical settings--the Bond theme-lite Guilty feels like a song she’s released five times already--but there’s fun to be had in Til I’m Done’s plastic disco shimmy and the skipping, featherlight pop of Kings and Queens.

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 feather-light touch of La Havas’s voice can be deceptive; for all her apparent ease, there are sufficient quirks and depths to her writing, not least the scientific analogies on Wonderful (electricity) and Unstoppable (astrophysics).

Black Sabbath's first album with Ozzy Osbourne since 1978 is bluesier, leaner and substantially less cringe-making than a great many reunion cash jobs.

Gaslight seem so hellbent on heroics, they often end up more Bon Jovi than Boss [Springsteen].

This is the band’s first self-produced album, and it’s stronger on detail than as a unified structure or statement. But there are plenty of ripe pickings, revealing a new depth to Teen, and intriguing potential for the future.

It might not be the craven product of a marketing meeting, but it sounds like two talented, successful guys making nice tunes, no less, no more.

The project's brevity certainly explains the lack of coherence over the 14 tracks, although that's not to say there aren't some thrilling individual moments.

Stewart remains a firebrand intent on creating skull-splintering sounds and society-skewering words.

There’s a decent amount of groove and swagger here too, not least in the low-slung funk of Smashed Pianos, and singer Tom Ogden’s vocals, are pitched engagingly between the rough-edged croon of Alex Turner and the florid yelp of Brett Anderson.

The Trouble, with its richly twangy slide, spooky reverb and oblique enchantments, is particularly powerful, but throughout, Middleman’s voice is dark and engaging, her songs possessed of a deceptively subtle charm.

A skilfully aerated record in which loneliness, the far east and naff cologne all play a part.

A set of songs that, if not remarkable, are at least an upgrade.

Ultimately, you conclude, Jones's golden voice was built for hooting, hollering and hubba-hubba-ing at the ladies, not mulling things over.

It’s all consistently inventive rather than dull, but also endearingly daft rather than chilling. Still, that makes for Muse’s most enjoyable album since the 00s.

Freak-folk currents still run through tracks such as Fireplace, but Grapefruit is more wilful and abrasive than his last effort, 2013’s Bowler Hat Soup.

The album sags a little in the middle but there is much here to justify a nearly five-year wait.

The best songs – Give a Little, Say It, On + Off, lean harder into the hip-hop grooves, Rogers’s strong and soulful voice gaining a bit of grit. Overnight and The Knife, however, fall into melodic predictability, Fallingwater drowns a more interesting structure in ersatz gospel and Past Life, the overportentous, dragged-out ballad at the album’s heart, reminds you that viral doesn’t always mean catchy.

May's an engaging and entertaining storyteller on the more breakneck material, particularly the dynamic Wild Woman and the melodically astute Hellfire Club. The ballads, however, are less distinguished.

Yes, musically, these songs – all co-written with former Morrissey sideman Michael Farrell –are for the most part her stock-in-trade windswept power ballads and unremarkable soft rock. But while there’s nothing as thrillingly angry as You Oughta Know, it’s a far more palatable set than 2012’s insipid Havoc and Bright Lights.

Automaton seems an audacious comeback, to say the least, but also strangely listenable.

Bloated and self-indulgent, it plods along, with barely a memorable melody or thought-provoking lyric among its 17 tracks.

The mordant songwriting redeems The Civil Wars.

Despite the divergent inputs, Pollinator still has the feel of a coherent album that’s enjoyable, if hardly essential.