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

Big only because Arcade Fire think big, Reflektor stretches stadium rock’s reach in the acts of self-reinvention and revitalisation. Now that’s entertainment.

A good “deluxe” remaster job will do at least two things: one, it’ll strip away centuries of digital compression and make the music sound as if you’ve never heard it properly before; two, it’ll include additional material that gives insight into how the finished work was shaped. Moondance delivers on both counts.

The warm human purr of her ethereal vocals is juxtaposed towith fluid electronic elements and the occasional welcome interjection of bluesy guitar and jagged off-beat percussion.

Happily, the North Carolina’s modern hippie’s second album is too ambitious, too fluently fluently surprising and too lovely to appeal to 1970s retro-heads alone.

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.

Even though the album comes in at nearly 80 minutes, surprisingly it doesn’t feel too long. This is largely because it doesn’t get stuck in an Afrobeat rut.

It’s business as usual, only with a lusher production than expected and a tad too much emphasis on Western rock’s tired tropes in some of the licks.

Lovely album from a true one-off.

Back to Forever moves things into the 1980s--all fist-pumping verses and “Kids-in-America”-like big choruses.

One Breath draws on choppy emotions--grief, depression, anxiety--but Calvi commands the tides with the imperious authority of Barbara Stanwyck leading her posse in Sam Fuller's wild western Forty Guns.

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.

There’s less barn-floor stomp than on previous albums, but Country Mile is still rousing, with trumpet, fiddle and much--occasionally dicey--harmonising.

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.

This album shimmers.

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.

The set list's rather obvious and the interstitial chat goes on a bit, but the heart of the man is there to be heard.

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."

Ageing is a war they can’t win, but by facing it head-on, the Manics have found the spur to move forwards.

There’s something artificial and experimental in the project’s very DNA, but that need not be a bad thing, and it isn’t.

Though his appeal remains frustratingly specialist, with each release it becomes clearer that Callahan is the natural successor to Leonard Cohen.

It's his best group for eons.

Tales of Us has a stately pace and woozy beauty, with cinematic orchestration of swaying strings over acoustic guitar or mossy cello.

Expect more straightforward, big-vocal, soul-funk numbers, and fewer immediate hits. But compared with most R&B records, Monae is still lightyears ahead.

A sassy self-overhaul, AM issues lubricious R&B come-ons over a self-assured narrative arc with personality and open potential cannily spliced.