He's not breaking any moulds--it's solid, guitar led, pop-rock--but then Marr is the man for that job.

Yorke's lyrics, consisting mainly of repeated aphorisms and clichés ("A penny for your thoughts", "I've made my bed, I'll lie in it"), don't suggest any great depth.... But the sounds, bringing in elements of tropicalia, Afro-funk and laptronica, with glitches, rainforest sounds and superb analogue-synth squelches (if anyone steals the show here, it's Godrich), mean you hardly notice.

Flitting between 1980s soul-pop and jerky indie, it has its big, brash, pop-rock moments.

His breathless, this-really-matters delivery is ill-served by lines such as "Ain't a fan of vegetables/ It ain't about the peas".

It's nothing that Best Coast and the Magic Numbers don't do better.

Collections constitutes a fairly sharp decline.

Most of disc one consists of ponderous, blustering nonsense, with a black chandelier used as a metaphor for depression. Disc two shows more promise.

Nice is the word.

With A Wonder Working Stone, Alasdair Roberts continues to blur the borders between ancient and modern, between heady myth and harsh reality, and between folk and whatever sounds right in context.

It might be more accurate to say that nearly all of the songs on Whispering Trees aim for "Satellite of Love" but come closer to achieving Sky dish of desire.

In most cases, the cupboard seems its best home.

She's an oblique writer and arranger, though, often interesting, never predictable.

As a soundtrack, sure; as a record, one for the completist.

It is mainly charming.

Humbugness aside, though, it's a serviceable collection of jazzy covers and duets.

The main duty of pop is to be catchy, and it's a duty which DNA mostly shirks miserably.

Based on his native London, its themes are hardly original but he handles them with likeability.

The arrangements for a small rock band are rudimentary, leaving everything to depend on the song and the singer.

When he isn't sounding like a Police album track ("Locked Out of Heaven") or a Musical Youth album track ("Show Me"), he's mostly sounding like a Wham! album track (the disco-pop "Treasure" being a case in point).

This is Green Day doing what Green Day have always done.

Like most pop albums, it's front-loaded. The banging club tunes, like the chart-topping "Young" are at the start, then it slumps into a series of obligatory ballads on which her unremarkable voice is somewhat stretched.

There's such a belt-and-braces approach that the array of sounds (strings, choirs, tubular bells, beats and synths, dubby blurbs and squeaks) can come across as overbearing.

All elegantly arranged and written in self-consciously prosy style. He'd say wry. I'd say borderline sententious.

Not for the faint-hearted, nor those offended by religion. Often brilliant.

Evolution is a perfect Frankenstorm of over-produced American R&B.

If you loved Williams the way he was, rejoice. If you didn't, it may be time to switch off the radio and television for a few months, and bury your head in a bucket of calamine lotion.

Her fifth studio album is dominated by navel-gazing auto-therapy sessions.

Like most of Unapologetic, it's ["Nobody's Business" is] instantly forgettable.