Marcus Mumford leaves his Irish-folk years behind and adopts a transatlantic burr for “The Wolf”, whose chugging riff and sappy lyrics (“You are all I’ve ever longed for”) pinpoint the album’s core failings: absences of both lateral intrigue and the elemental oomph its track-titles (“Broad-Shouldered Beasts”, indeed) hint at.

It is not a substantial offering, nor does it plough a new furrow--but it is a buzz.

Charmless kiss-offs (“Don’t”) and sappy sentiments (“People Fall in Love in Mysterious Ways”) dominate otherwise, landing with the thud of the authentically uninspiring.

Their heat-haze hybrid of soul grooves and falsetto-funk chic feels too under-cooked to sustain a whole album.

“Bitter Virtue” pursues a familiar James theme--condemnation of repressive moralities--but elsewhere, things are more ineffectual.

Ultraviolence is more of the same, but less.

You’re not listening to songs so much as attempting to pull up the past as if it were an old pair of trousers, and then rope it into place with lengths of digital cable. It is both ridiculous and oddly moving.

It adds up to a shallowly appealing, summery package; glossily produced and personality free.

What Corazon certainly contains is a brightly recorded, punchy collection of “Latin” beats and melodies, plus some rock, featuring a handful of distinguished guests and the familiar overflying drone of Carlos’s own guitar obbligati.

After a four-year hiatus, Shakira’s 10th album is full of raggae-tinged, bouncy melodies and absurd, occasionally quite poetic lyrics.

It won’t frighten the horses, but it might encourage you to buy an overpriced T-shirt.

Like the latter’s Random Access Memories, it’s an enjoyable dance-pop album lacking a central focus. But one whose diffident charm makes a pleasant change from the overwrought wailing that routinely afflicts R&B.

Here, the North-east new-wave revivalists refresh their default angular moves with nervy propulsion (“Give, Get, Take”), elegant synth-pop (“Brain Cells”) and electro-glide reflections (“Is it True?”).

The ballads will be the tracks from Little Red to own the charts for the foreseeable future, but it’s on the 5am dancefloor that Katy B’s second album will score its biggest impact.

The Vega songwriting style is hardwearing.

The album’s end stretch meanders, but the fidgety techno bounce of “Got Well Soon” makes its point, which is that Breton have it in them to draw converts on their own outsider terms.

It is not a bad record--Danger Mouse doesn’t make those--but it does feel safe and predictable rather than fresh and exciting.

So Long’s strenuously busy patchwork leaves you wondering how something so superficially impressive ends up making so little impact. The answer lies in the way the Bicycle Clubbers rarely deliver these gap-year reports with decisive force enough to thrill, or dwell on an idea for long enough to fulfill its promise.

Moon is bookended by the structurally perfect melodies of "I Heard the Owl Call My Name" and "Heart of the Woods"--but what’s in-between is often too airy-fairy to really grab.

Penny has garage-rock form, but Too True is a light-footed, echo-heavy pop makeover with a 1980s gloss, frothy but forthright.

So far, so Mogwai. However, a few surprises have been chucked in, too.

Good songs, largely, if songs broadly governed by the imperative to “heal”: a worthy intention, for sure, but fluffed up massively in a compressed space like this, also a rather stifling one.

Those who endured Williams’s recent X Factor performance need not fear: this brassy sequel to 2001’s big-band LP Swing When You’re Winning, is actually rather listenable.

The result is refreshing but also a bit boring, although things get interesting towards the end.

The very home-made, amateur-sounding production, coupled with what was obviously a fully formed musical vision, carries great charm and will appeal to fans of Scottish indie jazz weirdo Bill Wells as much as funkers, although only the first two of eight tracks excel.

It’s depressing to find more of the disco-tooled super-producer [will.i.am] same here, allied to faintly atypical ballads that, nonetheless, add little to Spears’s synthetic sex-doll sheen.

Mostly No End sounds like pretty much anyone noodling about in their shed.

There are too many plodding ballads, sentimental on the piano and heavy on the cymbals.