The music? It is of course exciting, youthful, dazzling in its energy and simplicity.... However, you may feel, given the track listing, that you have been this way before...

Throwaways (“Jewels n’ Drugs”) and power-ballad (“DOPE”) digressions weigh heavy on the pacing, but the arch “Mary Jane Holland” and “Swine” occupy livelier turf.

This feels like a wearisome exercise in reasserting his market appeal.

Precocious, certainly, exhilarating, at times, Lorde’s debut album is almost but not quite as good as it thinks it is.

Low-slung, dub-ish beats are appealing, though lead some tracks to Snooze Town.

Self-help and sauce remain the remit, which might have been less tiring if “Roar”, “Walking on Air” and “This Moment” offered forms fresher than, respectively, the robo-stutter of Rihanna’s “Umbrella”, weary Italo-house pianos and strenuous stadium bluster to enliven their empowerment-speak.

At its best, in the opening “All Will Surely Burn” and in a thrilling closing version of “Rivers of Babylon”, this is mesmerising trance music of great power.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

A rapid sugar rush, followed by a gradual crash.

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.

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.

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