Rainbow is both stranger and more normal than you expect; uneven--does Kesha really rhyme “highway” with “Hyundai”?--but likable.

This record is crying out for the calibre of musicians that helped Bowie make Blackstar, or Bill Callahan’s painterly band, or a truly dial-moving producer – or perhaps some intellectual assaults on the very notion of music itself to pin the listener down and inform them that John Cale – John Cale! – is in the building.

Sweet Heart Sweet Light is another one of these perfectly serviceable Spiritualized albums.... But there's a lot of old rope here, let down further by Pierce's singing.

It’s a bold, fun gamble, and one with ample winnings.

The trouble is, much of it still sounds about as vital as Coldplay Babelfished into Icelandic.

At 11 songs (yes, the title is a trick) and just over 25 minutes, it all makes for a short, sharp, exhilarating blast, closing with the question we’re all asking as things fall apart: What Can You Do But Rock’n’Roll?

Two 10-minute pieces relegate song and vocals to second place behind ambitious but lumbering orchestration--producer Adrian McNally is, alas, no Gil Evans.

Telling of new beginnings and lost love, the breeze in her voice and her easy-going melodies act as a smokescreen: these are often direct takes on pain.

The more direct songs work best – most notably the simmering Shadowbanned and the contrastingly carefree bonus track Juliefuckingette – but there is just as much to enjoy in the album’s hinterlands too.

This is an encouraging partial return to form from an underrated talent.

The quality tails off quite dramatically, with a string of unremarkable ballads closing the album, but this is still a pleasing return to something approaching their best.

Compared to the live versions you’ll find on YouTube, these studio takes lack the undersong of the concert hall, the beating pulse of the audience’s internal clocks, the blood-in-the-ballet-shoes of performance.

Bailey’s refusal to be pigeonholed artistically is admirable, but frustrating.

Gone are the meandering, proggy excesses of 2008's Real Emotional Trash, and in their place are sharper, melody-driven tracks that foreground Malkmus's distinctive oblique wit.

Coyne’s quivering voice still captures the frailty of the human spirit, and his band have made songs that will draw tears from frazzled audiences until the Earth slides into the sea. Yet too many of his death-obsessed drug lyrics are lamely predictable and uninvolving, and swaddling his vocals in effects until he sounds like Rob Brydon’s “man in a box” doesn’t help.

Bleeds opens with a tirade against the free market labels pretty much everybody as bastards. That bitterness resurfaces elsewhere on the album but the urgency, so bracingly misanthropic on Hard Bastards, starts flagging halfway through.

The slower songs are this album’s great strengths: the magnificent Czech One, Lonely Blue and Logos all deal rivetingly with relationships (“her solvent’s dissolved”), while more guitar-oriented tunes such as Dum Surfer recall Jamie T.

Standout tracks such as Special Girl, with its intricate percussion, offer an insight into the intriguing, playful sonic flavours Clark could be exploring more thoroughly.

Lemon Glow is particularly engrossing, a curdled night sky of a tune whose constituent parts weave in and out of focus. Black Car provides even more enthralling unease, where the various elements become unexpectedly off-kilter and 3D. ... Elsewhere, though, it’s business as usual.

A few tracks can pass by in a pleasant period fug. Stay with him, though, and the curveballs become more obvious.

Ultimately, Heaven Knows needed to move beyond PinkPantheress’s TikTok formula to break new ground, but is still stuck in the sounds of the past.

What rescues Oshin from being a set of aqueous dream-pop search engine tags is the band's latent Krautrock bent. Past Lives and Human really could go on for another couple of minutes, such is the lock of their grooves.

For all their wiggy sonics, Thee Oh Sees rarely lose their way, and these nine tracks scamper along, unfettered by genre hang-ups and aided by guest guitarist Mikal Cronin.

It doesn’t quite match the standard of late-career high point The Liberty of Norton Folgate (2009), but the album is not without its moments.

Easy-going vintage soul that rolls magnificently on the ear.

Too often, though, style triumphs over substance, and too many songs flail in their own restrained elegance. Worse, the hidden track featuring a child mangling the alphabet is painfully self-indulgent rather than cute.

Part of the pleasure of covers albums is comparing the original with the nuanced update; this album misses that moment when the three Horsepeople wrap their dulcet pipes and jazzy arrangements around an ancient, oaky institution. The past, though, is still very much present.

Flamagra is too considered, burdened, and what were once cosmic, mind-expanding polyrhythms come over as inconsequential and annoying.