The predictable result is an album that sounds far too reverent to the originals.

High point Honest Town, gives a slick, new-Millennial pulse to all the retro heartache. But title track Big Music is a wince-inducing reminder of naff, leather-trousered bombast.

The blatant, stocking-filler money-grab of tagging these songs on to a quirky hits compilation (minus Bohemian Rhapsody) isn’t in the Christmas spirit.

The lyrics cleverly incorporate words and ideas from each programme. But a soundtrack featuring all the oddball artists from the series would have been more interesting.

Although the 18 tracks (12 of which are co-credited to Wright) are short on catchy tunes, it’s still an effective 53-minute trip.

It’s a long way from the rocker's angry persona, but he’s always had a soppy side. Sometimes the lyrics are also sloppy.

It can be a little underwhelming but it is music with its heart in the right place.

She oversings to compensate, as if by keeping notes moving we won’t notice weaknesses, and there are moments of synthetic fluctuation that suggest recourse to autotune techniques routinely used to polish performances of lesser contemporary pop singers. The material does her no favours.

She still packs too many showboating notes into each songs. But she’s also finding a unique vulnerability on ballads like Loud, where she effectively confronts the haters with her humanity.

An enjoyable and soulful album, the highlight of which is the title track Indian Ocean.

Failing to commandeer some stormy rockers, Faithfull proves most evocative on a couple of tender, stripped back ballads, Love More Or Less (written with Tom McRae) and Nick Cave collaboration Deep Water.

If you take this album in the spirit of throwaway fun in which it seems to have been concocted, it is harmlessly engaging, although all of these tracks have been delivered more persuasively before.

This record falls into all the icky, celebrity duet traps.

She shows in Everything Changes that she can keep up with the times.

As Watson sings about love, kindly and thoughtfully, the whimsical delivery and outdoorsy imagery recalls his fellow Oxfordians, Stornoway. At times it gets too pretty and shallow.

Inevitably, the singer’s less appealing views do invade the material.

Recommended for the drive home from festivals.

Everlasting is an eclectic mix.

It is genuinely embarrassing at times, compounded by the intrusive sense that the songs were really written for an audience of one (who, like the rest of the world, has reportedly shown no interest in listening to it).

If this record feels like a triumph of style over substance, I still like its style.

There are things going on here that will, in all likelihood, percolate through to stadium pop in due course but Hyde lacks the vocal presence or structural songcraft to shape the material into something greater than its parts.

A nice comeback album.

Love Frequency only occasionally sets the pulse racing.

It contains Frankie Knuckles-era house music, hip-hop breaks and some interesting electronica. However, the band are not the genre-defying pioneers they think they are.

Without the hip-hop beats that peppered her first album, the songs here lack a sprinkling of brashness--a little of the Kim and Kanye touch would have helped.

The result is a quirky and poignant little time capsule.

It’s a shame to see a talented guy rushed into making the wrong record.

There are big, generalised emotions: hurt, love, loss, transcendence. But none of the tiny, idiosyncratic observations that make and break relationships.

Although rejected by the singer in his lifetime, this is pop, not high art, and it has been handled with considerable care, giving us a glimpse, however illusory, of what this extraordinary talent might actually sound like had he lived.

The result is not bad: though you miss the unpredictable blasts of raw hellfire from the cult classic Surfer Rosa era, the band find some gritty, grindy melodies in the bigger, slicker vein of 1991’s patchy Trompe Le Monde.

It may be nothing new but her punchy, uplifting set of pastiche Sixties and Seventies soul, r’n’b and disco is perfectly pitched with just an appealing hint of exaggeration.

Wilson has nothing wildly original to say about the state of modern Britain, but sounds authentically angry on behalf of people on minimum wage or zero-hours jobs.

Full of sparkling hooks, the results do a good job of melding Minogue’s effervescent pop grooves with the dense, heavily treated vocals and deep sub bass of modern electro dance trends.... Subject matter and delivery are strained by coquettish pandering.

Lakeman again shows off his fine multi-instrumental skills--songs such as The Wanderer buzz--and there is a delightful slow lament called Portrait of My Wife.

The 14 songs ooze energy and style and feature long-term collaborators such as Alan Kelly, Ian Carr, Roy Dodds and John McCusker.

Not really a blockbuster, it’s the kind of album that makes most sense in the small hours, after the party is over.

It feels more like a primer for live shows rather than an end in itself, a set of water colour sketches to be inked in later.

It is quirkily appealing without quite being convincing. Lacking an emotional centre, it’s not really deep and dark enough to posit Ellis-Bextor as a sensitive singer-songwriter.

There’s a lot of great stuff on here, but it doesn’t hold together and doesn’t come close to being one of Springsteen’s great albums.

This album continues the striptease of Britney’s career. But behind each discarded veil there is just another veil, an insubstantial gauze masking teams of (presumably unphotogenic) producers, writers, stylists and sloganeers.

One Breath may not be a masterpiece but it does enough to suggest she has a chance of making one someday.

The Fifth sees Dizzee dropping his aitches between generic, anthemic, autotuned American choruses.

Sting sounds earnest and isolated: like a man singing bleakly out to sea. But he veers towards hammy at times, laying his Geordie accent on a little too thickly.

Some of it is boring and the two songs from his George Harrison session chug along forgettably. But I’d swap my unloved copy of Self Portrait for this box set any day.

It's nice. A bit boring. The melodies are likeably predictable, warm and gentle.

The New Yorker's music has become less urgent and original ... This album sounds the musical equivalent of being chauffeur driven around Jay-Z's kingdom in an air conditioned, bullet-proofed executive limo while the man himself reclines his plush leisure seat beside you, casually pointing out the scenes of his former glories.

With the hard-hitting yet loose-limbed playing of Rage Against the Machine drummer Brad Wilk, there is a real sense of top professionals at work.... Osbourne’s singing, by contrast, is strangely unexpressive, perhaps because there is no real possibility of emotional connection with lyrics that strain for grandiose effect but are flattened by clunking phrases and trite rhyming schemes.

Agnetha: still as seductively normal, beautifully boring and enigmatically familiar as ever.

Only a couple of cumbersome yet oddly elegiac acoustic ballads push the Stooges outside of their comfort zone.

Simple but lovely.

Mostly this is a gimmicky album with ill-fitting techno and electro influences on plastic, poppy songs.

Elusive and ethereal, it hints at the late night soulscapes of the Blue Nile but remains boldly, if at times frustratingly, out of focus.

The country singer turns 80 at the end of the month and although much of the album saunters along, Nelson can still fill a song with emotion, as he shows on his own composition The Better Part of Me.

Recorded in just three days, it suffers many of the problems familiar from blues or jazz jam sessions, a sense of introversion as musicians focus their attention on each other rather than the listener, producing overlong grooves full of technically audacious moments and no overall purpose.

If you're already a Biffy Clyro fan, Opposites might be your idea of a masterpiece. If you're new to Biffy, it'll just give you a headache.

As with previous Tarantino soundtracks, this is an enjoyable, carefully constructed set, throwing up more hits than misses--and the occasional gem--but ultimately its songs will be brought to life on the big screen.

These soft shoe shuffles sway up and down the same few notes, with the affectionate embrace of mother of the groom dances.

It is not unimpressive, with energy and attack and flashes of wit but there are too few of the kind of mad pop moments that make you stop in your tracks and not enough evidence that Williams is stretching and growing as a songwriting talent.

The central weakness is that, no matter how good the songs, you don't get swept away with the emotion of great (hit) lyrics.

It's a mixed bag.

It's a loose album, an indulgent album, and not all likeable but, unlike any other outfit of their tenure, they maintain a raw punch as if recording in a local bar for the sheer blast of it.

It's frustrating, then, when Swift reverts back to type. Too many of the songs on this bloated 16-track album revisit the gently strummed verses and characterless choruses of her previous work.

ADespite occasionally drawing blood, The Haunted Man doesn't live up to its stripped and dangerous cover, often retreating to gambol about in the backwaters of Khan's imagination.

Too much of the record sounds like generic, Katy Perry-esque power-pop.

There's definitely real talent with LeBlanc but he needs to forget about having an image created for him and concentrate, as one of his musical heroes Townes Van Zandt might have put on, on writing for the sake of the song.

For every perfectly observed vignette of English life (Sunny Afternoon, Autumn Almanac) and pithily satirical narrative (Village Green Preservation Society, Dead End Kids) there's a clunking, unwieldy, elaborate novelty song (Supersonic Rocket Ship, Skin & Bone).

The five and a half hours of unreleased demos/live recordings do give a warmly inclusive insider's feel but there's nothing I'd listen to more than a couple of times.

The album has to be judged a late-period triumph, even if I am not entirely convinced The Voice's avuncular judge is quite as deep as the material demands.

The fifth album by Great Lake Swimmers, called New Wild Everywhere, is melodic and graceful.

Madonna's infinite varieties have certainly staled.

In short, if you're stuck in a traffic jam, this is a record which will make you want to open the sunroof.

Their once-ebullient anthems have been replaced by a collection of mid-tempo, uninspiringly ponderous tracks.

Chopped and diced from a variety of sources, it packs a lyrical punch, but nothing here transcends his internet hit.

Sing In My Meadow is unsettling, interesting and, when it works, very affecting.

There's a nourishing warmth in their bittersweet laments.

It's wholly derivative, yet the tuneful, instantly gratifying choruses often trump one's desire to play spot the influence.

Her worthier sentiments are balanced by maturing wit, self-awareness and the distinctive snap'n'slap of her funky guitar grooves.

Their bluesy approach doesn't draw anything truly rich and strange from their vintage Cambodian material.

The covers of their favourite maverick songwriters more than matches for the originals.

[It's] orchestrally enhanced, romantic balladry of fair beauty.

For now Birdy remains a novelty. Her rich, malleable vocals suggest, however, that she won't be caged for long.

There are good things here, but nothing especially new.

It's a pleasure to hear her scatting her way through moods and melodies, sketching vocals out, even when they don't work.

It's not an album that takes itself too seriously (one song is called I'm No Elvis Presley) but it's an upbeat romp of a CD with some fine song songs such as Black Fly.

The result is both silkily seductive and moodily narcissistic.

Their sixth album, however, sticks too rigidly to the formula.

The Dreamer is occasionally powerful and moving as James ranges across memorable songs including Otis Redding's Champagne & Wine.

The results sound as if Lynch's old protégé Chris Isaak had taken a left turn into lyrical eccentricity, pulsing synths and sinister atmospherics.

Her overemphasised enunciation puts Boyle firmly in the Julie Andrews stage show tradition but, at her best, she rises above inoffensive background music to gently brush the emotions.

Reed's words dictate the musical structure. Often, Metallica simply fall in behind them in a free-form drone. Like much of Reed's late-period work, this is abstract and literary but even by his standards, Lulu is gruelling.

It's a fully-acoustic affair (guitar, piano, upright bass, drums, etc), with a luxurious, live-combo presence and some gruff musings on time, humanity and music.

It's all precisely mixed and impressively textured, but lacks Blake's more raw, emotional connection.

Business as usual, then, with few new thrills.

Nothing on this, her fourth album, rivals that hit [1234] for toe-tapping immediacy, but it is rich in atmospheric beauty.

His fifth album, however, finds him still in peak form, voicing socially aware hip hop and outré electro-disco, all with an eloquence which often eludes the newer generation.

The quintet's debut is pretty good fun, fusing Stones-y raunch with brash Caribbean rhythms.

Sparer instrumentation and slack tempos mean that singer Luke Pritchard dominates, and his reedy voice fails to enliven trite lyrics about lust and fame.

14 songs over an hour's running time is a lot of nonsense to digest. For the Chili Peppers, songwriting is a medium without a message, unless it's just to let your inhibitions go and dance.