Michigan auteur Hawthorne has synthesised his influences into perfect power pop, with the help of producers including Pharrell Williams.

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

Pleasant, sad, classy and thoughtful. No more than that.

Within the first 60 seconds it's alluded to Blue Peter and Taxi Driver in successive lines. Wind in the Willows it ain't.

It's an assured collection of pure pop with an independent sensibility, equal parts Kylie and The XX.

He sounds utterly burnt out. Poor.

A real gem.

Nothing to see here.

Enough promise here to keep listening.

There's no progression or narrative, it's immersive rather than engrossing. Slow Focus is an album to steep yourself in.

It's a pop record, which means one killer track would redeem everything. Predictably enough, it never comes.

Meta-pop doesn’t come much more moving than this.

An almost comically deep, rich baritone croon, it carries echoes of Scott Walker, Nick Cave, Elvis Presley and, more prosaically, the guy from Crash Test Dummies.

His 12th album is certainly magnum: 59 often leaden, mostly hubristic minutes to make that 1215 Grand Charter seem like light relief.

There’s a personal context (Mac’s dad was a famous singer of spirituals), the band is great, the vibe folksy.

Sistrionix is a hugely enlivening 41 minutes of deliciously distorted vocals, instantly memorable fuzz-up guitar riffs, handclap breakdowns, and vicious put-downs of cheating lovers and sleazebags.

There isn’t a shadow of doubt expressed here about where Mavis is going, but there is plenty of feeling that the journey, like all journeys, is bordered with darkness.

Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon and Pugwash’s Thomas Walsh strike another fine balance between cricket’s arcane specifics and its universal metaphors in cucumber-crisp batches of catch-all pastiche-pop.

What’s inside? Nothing. Which is, coincidentally, what this album adds to the treasury of human art.

A fascinating collection of songs from the 19th and early 20th centuries.

He specialises in staggeringly banal lyrics ("Grow old with me", "When you hold me in your arms I can feel your heart") delivered in an overwrought cry-baby warble, and song structures with big predictable sub-Keane, sub-Arcade Fire crescendos.

Though it's far from his worst album, it's his least commercial – with its harsh beats, mangled vocals, and Marilyn Manson samples, it mimics the aesthetics of a DIY mixtape.

However much you think it a tired formula, this lot shake it awake with their relentless charm.

It's a clever, sensitive record.

This is smooth jazz raised to a high art.

Ice on the Dune is a seamless suite of elegiac synthpop, with fairydust-flecked melodies, a perpetually peaking bass end, chord changes that reach into your heart, and fantasising falsetto vocals.

Katie Stelmanis's emotionally tortured vibrato meshes with her band's lush textures to often-potent effect.

Those moments [where it's stirring, sentimental, and altogether too safe] aside, there's plenty more that is beautiful, forgettable and primed to aid a little light Sunday-afternoon catharsis.