For all the virtuosity in his fingers, Jerry is no singer, and this collection of tasteful exhibits needs faces [guest singers]. The faces save the record.

Jamal sounds close to his 1950s Chess Records best.

Her talent and pain are equally raw and equally audible.

It's two-thirds pretty good, all the same.

One day, maybe the Lips will play nice again. Until then, they and their Fwends have given us plenty to get our heads around.

He wins you over, eventually.

Never, whose song titles are nearly all one word, isn't as daunting as the avant-garde approach might suggest.

The wisdom expressed is crusty but benign, poetic and sometimes witty.

While there's perhaps a surfeit of synth-washes, the beautiful "Winter Elegy" superbly fulfils the opening promise.

Gossamer is hard to fault, besides the fact that it's more of the same.

This is one of the most exhilarating albums of the year.

It is derivative and woebegone and its musical twists are seldom hard to predict, but it is also finely crafted and devoid of the phoniness which can make such works unbearable.

"I wanted", Ocean wrote, "to create worlds that were rosier than mine. I tried to channel overwhelming emotions." Mission accomplished, and then some.

Thankfully, the Knife have remained true to their essential principles.

On record, this is a joyous burst of blissed-out world pop.

[Life is Good] proves once again that Nas is one of the smartest and most skilled players in the game.

This is a belting return to form by the best vocal artist in jazz.

It isn't long before their second album goes sour, settling into a pattern of either doctrinaire psych-rock or alt-country which recalls the Dandy Warhols in their more meandering moods.

The slightly sterile neo-soul fump of the Roots may lack the feel of their progenitors but the songs make up for that.

The odds-and-ends nature of this compilation is spelt out by its title, but the quality barely suffers for that.

With treasurable details – the dubbed-up refrain of "Black Icy Stare", the Merseybeat-ish groove of "Karmatron" – feeding into an overall ambience of lotus-eating sensuality.

Not a perfect debut, but one that leaves you with the feeling that we're dealing with a living, thinking artist here, not just another Brit School waxwork.

A hitherto only-hinted-at humour (try "UK Blues") punctuates this hypnotic and haunting glimpse into an imperial isolation.

It may not be for everyone, but it's evidence that there are still some restless minds out there.

When it's good, it's a thrilling and ambtitious state-of-the-nation address.

The Blue Note debut can be as frustratingly tentative as his first outing for RCA 15 years ago.... Things do heat up, with drummer Eric Harland stoking the fires, but there's no big flame.

Most of the beloved Feat features are featured.

Sadly for the listener, this is mostly a collection of one-paced songs more heartbroken than heartbreaking.

Sounds like Kraftwerk's Autobahn driven by a tractor. Forget Krautrock, and say hello to Yokelrock.

The sooner this bunch of plums fade back into obscurity, the better.

Well, they were demos once; and here they are, in all their functional glory.

Oceania is best listened to in bits.

Cherry's version of Suicide's "Dream Baby Dream" is an unmissable marvel... Elsewhere, it's not the freedom of the backing that's the problem so much as the randomness of the material, with several songs feeling as if they were chosen to look hip rather than sound interesting.

Boy manage to tease something close to pop perfection.

A patchy affair which too often fails to transcend its blatant P-funk influences.

Every once in a while, the results can be more enjoyable than the main event (see Stephen Stills' Manassas). And this may be true of CRB.

A passionate, heartfelt, serious, dogged effort, pregnant with reflection and as wise as you could hope for.

IOH is their most emotional release yet and also their most philosophical.

A partial return to top form for the widdly-diddly axe-meister.

Yes, it sounds like you imagine: slightly artificial, pop-inflected chunk-rock, with dustbin-lid drums, loads of guitars and even a hint of voice box/Auto Tune.

Few bands do that thing - spitting the venom of the dumped, but somehow staying romantic at the same time - better.

Their most consistent and accomplished album to date.

Nobody does this kind of thing quite like the Swedes, and NATD are a welcome addition to that nation's synthpop hall of fame.

You know exactly what to expect: high-energy, hugely entertaining garage rock. And, with the odd exception, that's what they deliver.

An unexpectedly enjoyable late addition to a formidable body of work.

ODIGTS is the soul album of the century. It might yet turn out to be the album of the year

It is cursory, lumpen and dull.

A cloudless orgy of nostalgia.

Almost every track sounds like a potential single in an indie rock/Americana kind of way.

The songs? Melodically flat, feel-driven jive from the hip.

Although it is both loud and quiet, it neither rocks nor swings.

It's the drift, eddy and thrust of the whole ensemble that tells the main story.

Like the late Johnny Cash, Jones has reinterpreted the venerable songs in a bare, bluesy style. Unlike Cash, he never quite makes them his own.

Though less folky than their 2010 debut, Blood Speaks sticks to the harmonies and arpeggios formula that made their Jack White-produced "Gastown" single so memorable.

The most compelling Spanish album I've heard in ages.

Stapleton's writing for this recording, satisfies on every level.

Nothing you wouldn't expect.

What We Saw..., then, is the usual Spektorish mixed bag of literate genius and "look at me" showboating.

Balminess, after all, is the chief asset of this second album's slow-rolling, harmonic country-gospel jams.

With a little luck, and the careful choice of singles, there might be life in this party yet.

Obscure or not, they're songs worth learning, especially when sung as gorgeously as this.

Ferguson's smoky tones recall the young Aretha Franklin at her more restrained, [but] it's all ever so slightly boring.

Difficult to fault, [yet] it's equally difficult to get excited about.

This quickly becomes the stuff of a thousand, middling US soft-rockers and when they're not whining like Maroon 5, they're whining like Blink-182.

A barrel of laughs it ain't. Over sparse, semi-orchestral backing, Gahan tackles the big ones.

Words and Music, the first full studio album in an aeon from Sarah Cracknell, Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs, is a masterclass of pop theory and practice in perfect harmony.

An aural Waltzer, exhilarating and nauseous. On the plus side, there's oompah brass, jaunty jigs and a song channelling Fraggle Rock for vocal inspiration; and on the minus, oompah brass [and] jaunty jigs.

Mostly it's clichéd Pelion heaped on cheesy Ossa in a mountain range of sickly gestures.

Solid, polished, dancefloor-friendly, and other damningly faint adjectives.

This comeback album suggests a hiatus spent in a cryogenic freezer. Which is to say that they sound the same ... only rather less vital.

[On Bloom] Alex Scally and Victoria Legrand have finessed their vision to perfection.

Through the Night aims for Dusty in Memphis, but it lands closer to Petula Clark.

Ditto & co ... appear to have disastrously lost their fire. Only "Love in a Foreign Place" shows the sort of strutting disco beast they are capable of. It's too little. But not, one still hopes, too late.

Buckinghamshire band SBP return for their third album with a far more complex musical palette.

Everything's turned up to 11 but content is absolute zero. If the Cribs were any more landfill, they'd have seagulls following them around.

A classy, well-made record.

Strangeland is drenched in reverb-heavy piano, Chicken Soup for the Soul maxims and moderately maudlin musings about not being young any more.

The latest retro sensation, Waterhouse is a 25-year-old from San Francisco ... who's trying to sound like Ike Turner circa 1958. And he's pretty good at it.

An undiscovered diamond.

It's exquisite, of course, but dull.

The eighth Marilyn Manson album features some of his finest lyrics yet and, musically, it often approaches the heyday of Holy Wood and Mechanical Animals.

A mature, reflective, intelligent, Americana-inflected [album].

Electra Heart is too professional to be truly terrible, but it's never clever enough to be more than merely toytown.

It sees Golightly staking her claim once again as the Brenda Lee of the Medway scene.

Fear Fun is the kind of album that can name-check Sartre, Heidegger and Neil Young in the same song.

Every intro twinkles and every chorus swells effectively enough. But if indie carries on like this, we're gonna need a bigger landfill.

New project HDBA (a translation of the German name for the board game Frustration) sees him actually having fun, after a fashion.

This is jouncey, mostly R&B-derived pop with a keen ear for what supports a melody. It's good.

Bewitching.

Two non-trad covers (Anais Mitchell and Fleetwood Mac) remind you that he's earnt the right to do what the hell he wants.

Blunderbuss does, at times approach his finest work. But it doesn't do anything he hasn't already done.

The results can be more interesting than listenable – and the musical contents do seem wilfully random.

Lakeman writes, sings, plays, produces and mixes, which may or may not explain the rather dry, stoney sound of the album and the rhythmic forthrightness of the playing.

Tuneful enough, his debut is an MOR bricolage of prevailing musical styles.

If mainstream and soulful's your country bag, you can do a lot worse than this.

There's enough on the highly politicised Macaroni to justify stepping outside to find him.

It's a rather beautiful thing.

He comes on like a Conor Oberst meets Brian Wilson in a ramshackle approach that sounds to these ears like a refreshing burst of honest emotion in an often pallid musical landscape.