Lovely album from a true one-off.

Back to Forever moves things into the 1980s--all fist-pumping verses and “Kids-in-America”-like big choruses.

One Breath draws on choppy emotions--grief, depression, anxiety--but Calvi commands the tides with the imperious authority of Barbara Stanwyck leading her posse in Sam Fuller's wild western Forty Guns.

It’s still the instrumentals, with their bass growls and motorik rhythms, moody ambience, psychedelic wig-outs and violent moodswings, that have the most flavour.

There’s less barn-floor stomp than on previous albums, but Country Mile is still rousing, with trumpet, fiddle and much--occasionally dicey--harmonising.

While newer tracks “My Song 5” and “Let Me Go” snag by throwing surprisingly moody shapes, Martika-esque closer “Running if You Call My Name” sounds like something smoothed for A-list romcom duties.

Very few of them add anything much at all to the original versions, which may be out of reverence or it may be a testament to the fierce identities of the songs themselves.

This album shimmers.

Whatever they say, this isn’t the “comeback story of a lifetime”: it’s the low-risk re-entry bid of a band who know where their bread is buttered.

The set list's rather obvious and the interstitial chat goes on a bit, but the heart of the man is there to be heard.

It sometimes meanders like a wasted hipster at an Animal Collective after-show. Yet it preserves enough presence of mind to yield gems such as the sing-song "Alien Days" or the deliquescent "Mystery Disease."

Ageing is a war they can’t win, but by facing it head-on, the Manics have found the spur to move forwards.

There’s something artificial and experimental in the project’s very DNA, but that need not be a bad thing, and it isn’t.

Though his appeal remains frustratingly specialist, with each release it becomes clearer that Callahan is the natural successor to Leonard Cohen.

It's his best group for eons.

Tales of Us has a stately pace and woozy beauty, with cinematic orchestration of swaying strings over acoustic guitar or mossy cello.

Expect more straightforward, big-vocal, soul-funk numbers, and fewer immediate hits. But compared with most R&B records, Monae is still lightyears ahead.

A sassy self-overhaul, AM issues lubricious R&B come-ons over a self-assured narrative arc with personality and open potential cannily spliced.

Rizzle Kicks are best when brisk and larky--more heartfelt musings on love and being true to yourself are banal.

[A] bog-standard shamateur indie rock, with riffs borrowed from The Smiths and Velvets, lyrics borrowed from Dylan and Iggy.

It all hangs together quite nicely if, as ever, rather uninvolvingly.

It's a Gary Barlow idea of what indie music sounds like.

In spirit, their third album takes them back to their origins as an independent group from Glasgow making defiantly direct music in an age of detachment.

Brilliant, frustrating, thrilling and irritating. In other words, exactly what we’ve come to expect from an Edward Sharpe album.

As an 19-track collection of rarities from the period 2003-present, TTEC is necessarily a mixed bag of styles and qualities.

There’s singing going on, all right, it sounds lovely, but little is conveyed other than loveliness. However, there’s no arguing with their authenticity or technical excellence.

Sadly, they simultaneously fail to disguise a whole bucketload of ponderous, self-indulgent navel-gazing from the same source.

After an average third LP and a four-year hiatus, the art-rockers are once again all kinds of excellent.

An example of its genre it most certainly is.

Apart from a bit of pedal steel and some gospel backing vocals, it sounds a lot like a Snow Patrol record, rendering the whole exercise somewhat redundant.

Honest, soulful, happy-sad, warm and welcoming.

They show a weakness for the winsome, but Faye O'Rourke's fabulous foghorn fixes that: when she takes the mic, Cars' promise rings out loudly.

Their self-titled debut, aptly enough, is one of the most bitterly anti-romantic albums this side of the third PiL offering.

The small print is that Travis are still doing what Travis have always done.

Fluent melodies, nature metaphors, and expressive settings are the robust ties that bind these reveries.

Nothing much happens in it, but there is plenty to be seen

“Organic moonshine music” she calls it, and no one could argue with that.

Funny, sad, perfect.

It's loud, it's brash, it's real and it's utterly exhausting.

While the presiding atmosphere is retro, the Avila brothers' production keeps things properly real.

See You There revisits his classics as well as finding room for one new track and a beauty of an alternate version of "What I Wouldn't Give."

White Lies have just enough elegance and intrigue beneath the bluster to carry it off.

A rapid sugar rush, followed by a gradual crash.

Arrangements are simple, bluegrass-inflected and rich in acoustic textures. Warm and thick as a hayrick.

With its unrelenting positivity, Yes, It's True sounds like the Flaming Lips fronted by Deepak Chopra, and valiantly courts the daytime radio play that will inevitably elude it.

At times, listening to The Civil Wars is like wading through a swamp of still-raw emotion. It is an album that is more haunted than haunting.

They're reunited with vocalist N'Dea Davenport but don't really need her, their dressing-up-to-go-out groove being the thing.

While this may once have been filed under 'shoegaze', now we can call it 'noisy dream pop' and just wade in its wash of guitars.

It’s what The Feeling might sound like if they were American; endlessly “nice”, but with nothing to stir the soul.

It's the sound of a deeply dim man backed by competent-but-conventional musicians.

Michigan auteur Hawthorne has synthesised his influences into perfect power pop, with the help of producers including Pharrell Williams.

They've done a respectful job of augmenting the atmosphere of melancholy, contemplation and unease.

Pleasant, sad, classy and thoughtful. No more than that.

Within the first 60 seconds it's alluded to Blue Peter and Taxi Driver in successive lines. Wind in the Willows it ain't.

It's an assured collection of pure pop with an independent sensibility, equal parts Kylie and The XX.

He sounds utterly burnt out. Poor.

A real gem.

Nothing to see here.

Enough promise here to keep listening.

There's no progression or narrative, it's immersive rather than engrossing. Slow Focus is an album to steep yourself in.

It's a pop record, which means one killer track would redeem everything. Predictably enough, it never comes.

Meta-pop doesn’t come much more moving than this.

An almost comically deep, rich baritone croon, it carries echoes of Scott Walker, Nick Cave, Elvis Presley and, more prosaically, the guy from Crash Test Dummies.

His 12th album is certainly magnum: 59 often leaden, mostly hubristic minutes to make that 1215 Grand Charter seem like light relief.

There’s a personal context (Mac’s dad was a famous singer of spirituals), the band is great, the vibe folksy.

Sistrionix is a hugely enlivening 41 minutes of deliciously distorted vocals, instantly memorable fuzz-up guitar riffs, handclap breakdowns, and vicious put-downs of cheating lovers and sleazebags.

There isn’t a shadow of doubt expressed here about where Mavis is going, but there is plenty of feeling that the journey, like all journeys, is bordered with darkness.

Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon and Pugwash’s Thomas Walsh strike another fine balance between cricket’s arcane specifics and its universal metaphors in cucumber-crisp batches of catch-all pastiche-pop.

What’s inside? Nothing. Which is, coincidentally, what this album adds to the treasury of human art.

A fascinating collection of songs from the 19th and early 20th centuries.

He specialises in staggeringly banal lyrics ("Grow old with me", "When you hold me in your arms I can feel your heart") delivered in an overwrought cry-baby warble, and song structures with big predictable sub-Keane, sub-Arcade Fire crescendos.

Though it's far from his worst album, it's his least commercial – with its harsh beats, mangled vocals, and Marilyn Manson samples, it mimics the aesthetics of a DIY mixtape.

However much you think it a tired formula, this lot shake it awake with their relentless charm.

It's a clever, sensitive record.

This is smooth jazz raised to a high art.

Ice on the Dune is a seamless suite of elegiac synthpop, with fairydust-flecked melodies, a perpetually peaking bass end, chord changes that reach into your heart, and fantasising falsetto vocals.

Katie Stelmanis's emotionally tortured vibrato meshes with her band's lush textures to often-potent effect.

Those moments [where it's stirring, sentimental, and altogether too safe] aside, there's plenty more that is beautiful, forgettable and primed to aid a little light Sunday-afternoon catharsis.

A couple of tunes, including the title track (one of two West Side Story selections, along with "Tonight"), can even sound a little pedestrian, the swing faltering. But, given time, most of it works.

If his follow-up doesn't evince quite the same exuberance, it still twinkles with a well-travelled exoticism.

Planta feels lightweight; not much really catches the ear or imagination.

It's that rare thing: an album that will reward repeated listening by drip-feeding you its secrets.

There is joy in these grooves; the attentive care of studio perfectionists, and the warm embrace of an old friend.

It sounds like a Sabbath album, from the tortuous lyrics to the eight-minute track lengths. But something about it feels wrong.

Much of the time, it's reheated Madchester. The rest, it's over-literal psychedelia.

The weird, aquatic-sounding requiems are getting better all the time.

Its chances are boosted by Ian Broudie's bright, bold production, but, apart from one obligatory Beatlesy ballad, it's full of route-one glam-rock stompers with not a single interesting or original twist and lazy stuff-that-rhymes lyrics.

The band return to the slow-and-low, sinister alt-boogie that made their name, with Homme's satisfying dirty badass guitar sound in full effect.

Desire Lines lacks the hooks of their best work, with no obvious hits.

It's bright and brash, sometimes almost life-affirming, but leaves you wondering two things (the influence of Graceland and singing in a comedy "foreign" accent).

There is nothing not to love about it.

Spread over a 67-minute album, their second with new voice William DuVall, that grinding insistence first impresses, then just grinds.

It remains the case that this kind of thing only has something to say about distance travelled, no more.

CocoRosie [is] squat, inventively, somewhere between Fever Ray and Joanna Newsom.

Fans of Springsteen's downer side might flow with the music's riverine vibe.

The duo often leave any sense of taste with their gumboots outside on the doorstep.

In short, if Land of CanAan were a Stevie Wonder album, it would be Hotter than July rather than Innervisions.

The occasional off-kilter touch throws things sufficiently askew to deny listeners any complacency.