Over 13 tunes, Akinmusire and his very hot quintet (featuring Walter Smith III on tenor sax and a great drummer, Justin Brown) take the basic format of post-bop straightahead jazz and tease it around with absolute authority.

It's still a cut above most epic global-influenced rock.

It's a brilliant record; probably her best.

A potent shot in the arm for Afrobeat.

It marries a downbeat songcraft to an expansive sound courtesy of producers Guy Garvey and Craig Potter.

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.

The vibe is convivial. And though the great man can't put his cancer-strangled voice to every number, he can still swing the nuts off a Slingerland kit in between chesting a nifty mandolin.

With a little luck, and the careful choice of singles, there might be life in this party yet.

Charges of over-solemnity may be levelled its way, but only occasionally are the melodic and narrative threads lost to a focus on miasmic, brush-stroked atmospherics.

The Village largely whispers rather than shouts, and it's all the more powerful for it.

As long as you don't ask too much of it, it's good knockabout rowdy fun.

Most of LTHS consists of thumping soul-pop reminiscent of JoBoxers or high-energy Hives-like garage rock, and even if it errs on the side of sameyness, it's rarely dull.

In spirit, their third album takes them back to their origins as an independent group from Glasgow making defiantly direct music in an age of detachment.

It's as close to a perfect Americana album as there's been this year--fans of the California sound from CS&N to the Jayhawks will find much to love.

It's an album about what war does to the aggressor, as much as what it does to the vanquished victim.

Though some of the good-girl-gone-bad shtick has been sacrificed on the altar of go-for-it jangly pop, she's still as good as it gets when she finally opens her pipes on "Dallas".

It happens to be their most cohesive and convincing effort yet.

The sound is a return to the Whigs' finest and the mood is whiskey, cigarettes and damnation.

It's a bright, optimistic, emotive world, Heidi's, and well suited to the neutral "roots" pop sound which frames it.

Stuart Staples and his band delivering nine pieces of beautiful bossa-nova noir, daydreamy reverie and existential easy listening.

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

On record, this is a joyous burst of blissed-out world pop.

While the presiding atmosphere is retro, the Avila brothers' production keeps things properly real.

Conor Oberst has always been an artist to inspire, irritate and frustrate, and on what he says will be the final BE album he does these things in equal measure.

The impeccably hip credentials of HN's Roberto Carlos Lange are rather at odds with the wonderfully gloopy Latin-cheese of this Spanish language, old school synth-session's best tracks.

Ten out of 14 tracks are outstanding, especially considering Bugg's only 18.

With its unrelenting positivity, Yes, It's True sounds like the Flaming Lips fronted by Deepak Chopra, and valiantly courts the daytime radio play that will inevitably elude it.

Subjects resulting from such reveries include imperialism, the environment and the more familiar home turf of love and longing. Nobody does it better.

There are no standout songs but that's kind of the point: GTTW washes over you like a cooling stream on a hot day.

If Mala wasn't conceived as Devendra Banhart's Europhile album, it's doing a damn fine impression of one.

It sees Golightly staking her claim once again as the Brenda Lee of the Medway scene.

It's on close personal terms with magnificence.

Walker is almost unique among his generation in continuing to provide mind-food instead of cosy nostalgia. If you go into Bish Bosch half-wishing he'd belt out a ballad, you leave it with absolutely no regrets.

For all its faux-primitive origins, their seventh studio album is every bit as likely to ship platinum as the previous six.

As so often before, the duo’s choice of vocal collaborators is timely and transformative, bringing fresh, unexpected angles to their pieces.

Helpnessness Blues is, like its predecessor, archaic and pastoral to the last.

Very musical, it is, if ever so slightly coffee table.

Gossamer is hard to fault, besides the fact that it's more of the same.

It's a skilled blend of the organic and the electronic.

From the self-mockingly banal title onwards, it confirms them as that rare thing: a band able to combine grandiosity and groundedness.

After an average third LP and a four-year hiatus, the art-rockers are once again all kinds of excellent.

It may not be as mind blowing as FutureSex. But, frankly, what is?

If the band can let go of their younger selves completely, that masterpiece will be theirs.

This rocks harder and faster than those fellow Tuareg bluesmen, partly due to the noticeable pop influence of another Malian act, Amadou & Mariam.

For the most part it works well, provided you can live with Dawn's butter-wouldn't-melt ingenue phrasing and tone.

Nonchalant no more, here they spike their sparse blues-print with humour and humanity, dub grooves and Southern gothic flavours.

This is light and breezy pop that marries summery synths with dreamy female vocals.

They don't significantly compromise the essential charm and glitchy poetry of the songcraft.

The upbeat tracks are as catchy as conjunctivitis.

They have now cracked out the synths, ramped up the drum machines, and found their calling in giddy, lovelorn electro-pop.

Nobody does this kind of thing quite like the Swedes, and NATD are a welcome addition to that nation's synthpop hall of fame.

The Manics’ band identity proves robust enough to withstand the tweaking.

Neville almost levitates through doo-wop, soul and R&B standards.

Krall's smoky contralto lacks the pungency of Wilson's, but compensates with greater mobility.

Right at the end of what is officially the most depressing month of the year comes a shaft of unadulterated sunshine.

Watson packaged up the month that he spent riding the train, using his original recordings, adding his own narration, throwing in some interviews, and creating something magical.

The second studio album from the experimental New York trio oozes colour.

Boy manage to tease something close to pop perfection.

Another sweet viper's bite of post-Freudian dyspepsia from the singersongwriter who loves to mistrust.

Believers is made of a darker, spookier Americana than its predecessor: full of small-g gothic, anti-Chris Isaak-ish songs that submerge you deeper and deeper in their dark charms.

Mostly, though, this lingered-over comeback offers sumptuous returns for those prepared to linger over it.

This is smooth jazz raised to a high art.

The second Nixey solo album is a thing of subtle gorgeousness, with Nixey's none-more-English, sexy school-mistress diction dealing with topics as bleakly improbable as the Bridgend teenage suicides.

Drake is revealed as a serious artist whose gossamer-light songs can sound painfully vulnerable, and there's more than a bit of black dog in the poems.

Even looking backwards, Springsteen finds ways to light the road ahead.

There are collaborations with Bobby Womack, Sheila E and George Clinton. All driven by the heavy funk bass of Collins. Which is never a bad thing.

In short, if Land of CanAan were a Stevie Wonder album, it would be Hotter than July rather than Innervisions.

The band return to the slow-and-low, sinister alt-boogie that made their name, with Homme's satisfying dirty badass guitar sound in full effect.

The results are fluent, tasteful, ghostly and more than a little wistful. Ideally served with morning coffee.

Slinky, spooky, superb.

Buckinghamshire band SBP return for their third album with a far more complex musical palette.

There are times in this 100-plus minutes of a concert recording duplicated over two CDs and one DVD where you want to jog Mehldau's elbow, but overall it's a triumph of imagination and structure.

With new recruit Earl Slick on guitar they've made a third reunion album filled with ramshackle glam and girl-group trash, reverberating with street-corner romanticism and hard-won wisdom.

Darwin Deez, a New York-based artist for whom the word "offbeat" seems to have been invented. Not that there are any in his music--all straight 4/4 and po-mo lyrics--but there are plenty of tunes, not a little charm and a fair old sense of humour.

The most rewarding part of this double-disc is the first quarter. Not that the hissy old demos and rarities on the rest of the collection are without their charms. But it's the opening section which really whisks you back to another age.

Finn's second album continues the project he undertook with his first – namely to shake off the shackles of being "Neil Finn's son" by swamping his dreamy, Beatles-esque pop songs with moments of electronic and percussive madness.

Giddily debunking sacred falsehoods with good, honest scepticism, Bauer’s raucous rebirth offers the best of both worlds: intrigue and instant reward for Walkmen doubters and acolytes alike.

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

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

While there's perhaps a surfeit of synth-washes, the beautiful "Winter Elegy" superbly fulfils the opening promise.

It may not be the best Wilco album ever, but with care and consideration it may well turn out to be your favourite.

Classy pianos, minor chords and brushed drums back her ever-elegant, half-spoken syllables.

Fluent melodies, nature metaphors, and expressive settings are the robust ties that bind these reveries.

In its own downbeat, understated way, Tinsel and Lights does more for festive good cheer than any number of more traditional Christmas albums that go straight for the razzle-dazzle.

Commendably, the Bury band's fifth album doesn't see them chasing the mainstream or pandering to the ear of the daytime radio dilettante.

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

Just like Levi Stubbs, he can't help himself.

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

Taken on its own merits, however, there's plenty to enjoy, as Bush sings new vocals over remixed and re-edited backing tracks in a deeper, more weathered voice.

It's close to the best of all music I know.... A second CD of later, unreleased material with some genuine gold among the dross.

As we glide through Post Tropical the tracks steadily grow bigger, with gospel-style harmonies and languid slide guitar lending texture to create a dreamy, if cold, soundscape that may leave some with a sense of frustration, as if we are building towards an ever-shifting point on the horizon.

[On Bloom] Alex Scally and Victoria Legrand have finessed their vision to perfection.

It's the drift, eddy and thrust of the whole ensemble that tells the main story.

This is an album that deserves at least to reacquaint the Ting Tings with the outskirts of Somewheresville.

It's a blast.

You won't have heard anything like it before.

Pianist Matthew Bourne goes all English-pastoral in this largely lovely solo suite.

More important on first contact, anyway, is the feel of the music, which grooves. Really good.