Despite having been layered and processed through Autotune, her voice conveys genuine intimacy. Cabello had a hand in the writing, and a few songs convey a charming honesty and vulnerability, perhaps a relic of the album’s original themes. But there remains a gulf between the craft of commercial pop and the artistry of confessional songwriting, and there is not much doubt about which has been prioritised on Camila.

Alpha Games should please their established fanbase, but Bloc Party still sound strangely ambivalent, trapped between the visceral thrill of lean, modern guitar music and their doubts about its form and function.

It is bright and busy, peppered with guest appearances. But the risk is that this extremely versatile star winds up sounding like a guest at his own party.

An all-killer, no-filler approach ensures every track pulls its weight, yet the album never quite adds up to more than the sum of its pleasant parts.

All in all, another real treat from the 63-year-old queen of English folk.

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

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.

He brings real feeling to his own compositions such as Let Me Sleep (At the end of a Dream).

There's plenty of variety on Watkins Family Hour, with each member of the band getting a turn as lead vocalist.

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

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.

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.

Crazy In Love aside, this generically pleasant and wafty album makes a better accompaniment to laundering sheets than rolling in (or being tied up with) them.

That this is Manson’s most accessible and focused album in years counts for very little; there is simply no shock value when all you have to offer are cheap shocks.

Even where the musical ideas are strong, they're sapped by the determinedly relaxed ambiance.

Hardcore fans should be satisfied, but Road recycles outdated myths of rock machismo from a pantomime villain determined to go out in a blaze of clichés.

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

Business as usual, then, with few new thrills.

The problem with Justice is that Bieber thinks his music is more powerful than it actually is.

Madonna's infinite varieties have certainly staled.

Though the materials accompanying Nobody is Listening insist that it’s Zayn’s most personal record to date, and the one over which he’s had the most personal control, it’s hard to find much trace of him here.

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

Coated with a West Coast varnish and filled with radio-friendly melodies Hope St will provide great background music for warm evenings in the garden. With continued listening, however, it's liable to leave you cold.

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.

Making music by numbers shouldn’t be this tiring.

Throughout, the arrangements are as relentlessly upbeat and playfully retro as the album’s Alan Fears-designed artwork, stuffed with vocoders, peacocking basslines and laser-beam synth sounds. They’re also wildly referential, and largely fail to add anything either fresh or memorable to the conversation.

The first half's vocal tracks woefully resemble standard-issue chart fodder. There's some better instrumental stuff later on, but, overall, it's ordinary.

The more time you spend with each song, the more it sounds like a variation on something you’ve heard done better before, a formula in search of a hook.

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.

While the tricksy chord changes upon which most tracks are founded may be clever, or possibly ground-breaking, these recordings seriously lack oomph.

Their tenth studio album kicks off in fine form with the first single, San Quentin. ... If only the whole album was like this, but instead listeners will get whiplash from all the genre changes, which spans American rock, country and frat-boy pop.

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.

All Bay has really done is exchange one set of generic production clichés for another.

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.

A string section and gospel choir barely add nuance to straight-ahead karaoke versions of Oasis classics and a few of Liam’s solo songs.

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

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

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

The songs are weak, the sounds cheesily overfamiliar and a slightly second-rate string of collaborators (he wanted Lady Gaga and Rihanna but settled for Kylie Minogue and Britney Spears) fail to sprinkle the beats with any magic.

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

SERPENTINA isn’t a coherent whole but rather a doggerel and ill-considered mishmash of disparate parts.

Most tracks here aim to be an anthem, but none has the requisite melodic clout. It's hard to see them entering the super league on this visit.

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.

Ultimately it amounts to two decent tunes in the singer-songwriter pop idiom, padded out with angsty filler and hot air.

A legion of co-producers attempt to recreate the slick dance-pop for which she is famed, but too often her husky voice and arch delivery are given short shrift by bloated house beats and perfunctory hooks.

All 4 Nothing ultimately fails to expand his sound.

Rap has been around for four decades now, and you might have hoped it would have evolved beyond this kind of backwards, deeply misogynist, abusively macho, greed- and status-obsessed posturing.

The foray ultimately fails because Laurie's voice is no more than adequate.

Shackled by its own turgid competency, Dear Scott fizzes with all the life of a demo tape recorded in a local community hall double-booked with a bingo night. No matter how loud you turn up the volume, it still sounds quiet. It sounds uncomfortably naked, too.

The most disappointing thing is how thin much of Donda 2 sounds, how messy and badly structured the songs are, how few pop hooks or memorable melodies it conjures, and how weak and repetitive West’s rhymes often are.