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.

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.

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

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.

Their most consistent and accomplished album to date.

It is cursory, lumpen and dull.

A cloudless orgy of nostalgia.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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