Its best moments are its electro-pop numbers.

If mainstream and soulful's your country bag, you can do a lot worse than this.

It's loud, it's brash, it's real and it's utterly exhausting.

Not one for Bon Iver fans, but the kid's got something.

From dancehall/nu-metal hybrids to dubstep-meets-Bond theme balladry, its bombastic stuff, but also finely tuned in its balance of sincerity and showmanship.

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

It is not a bad record--Danger Mouse doesn’t make those--but it does feel safe and predictable rather than fresh and exciting.

Given its sudden sharp downward turn, it’s hard to unreservedly recommend Another Country. But there are enough decent moments to justify a bit of iTunes cherry-picking, at least.

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.

Their heat-haze hybrid of soul grooves and falsetto-funk chic feels too under-cooked to sustain a whole album.

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.

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.

Historic reunion of the piano and vibes duo-masters starts unpromisingly on a hit-you-over-the-head-with-a-mallet version of "Eleanor Rigby", but recovers with gorgeous treatments of Weill's "My Ship" and Jobim's "Once I Loved".

Uno! starts promisingly, but it's soon obvious that the Clash of "Tommy Gun" is still their template.

Low-slung, dub-ish beats are appealing, though lead some tracks to Snooze Town.

It is stately, rather imperious music, conveying emotion through the deployment of technical effects rather than through the revelation of a voice.

Desire Lines lacks the hooks of their best work, with no obvious hits.

There's an excess of bog-standard radio-friendly pop-rock, and a couple of wet weepies à la "Don't Speak".

The album’s end stretch meanders, but the fidgety techno bounce of “Got Well Soon” makes its point, which is that Breton have it in them to draw converts on their own outsider terms.

Sadly, the Showgirls star is no Alicia Keys (who contributes three songs), and while she unquestionably has a voice, the material's nothing you'll want to remember.

The more you listen, the less the album reveals; her vocals fall between sultry and sterile, and you wish, to take two of her professed influences, that she was a little less Sade, and a little more Chaka Khan.

So far, so Mogwai. However, a few surprises have been chucked in, too.

Each song sounds much like the last but with hooks like this, who needs prizes for subtlety?

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.

Oceania is best listened to in bits.

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.

Difficult to fault, [yet] it's equally difficult to get excited about.

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.

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

Its chances are boosted by Ian Broudie's bright, bold production, but, apart from one obligatory Beatlesy ballad, it's full of route-one glam-rock stompers with not a single interesting or original twist and lazy stuff-that-rhymes lyrics.

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

Nothing much happens in it, but there is plenty to be seen

This long-delayed third album sets out to make the Hackney diva "current" again.

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

Fans of Springsteen's downer side might flow with the music's riverine vibe.

A genuinely odd collaboration.

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

At its best on the quasi-techno anthem "Low Times", it's claustrophobically compelling, if too formulaic to be truly super-natural.

Well, these things are relative, and this record is still jam-packed with purest filth and unrepentant excess.

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).

Revelation Road proves, though, that form may come and go, but class is permanent.

Those who endured Williams’s recent X Factor performance need not fear: this brassy sequel to 2001’s big-band LP Swing When You’re Winning, is actually rather listenable.

Solid, polished, dancefloor-friendly, and other damningly faint adjectives.

The sound is gothically cavernous and frames her seized phrasing with tasteful restraint.

Penny has garage-rock form, but Too True is a light-footed, echo-heavy pop makeover with a 1980s gloss, frothy but forthright.

Slipstream is welcome, despite large portions of it sounding generic to the point of self-parody: funky, strolling, sunny California blues-rock with lashings of soul.

Its main virtue: brevity. Most songs are sub-2 minutes, and the entire album is over in 20.

Sadly, they simultaneously fail to disguise a whole bucketload of ponderous, self-indulgent navel-gazing from the same source.

Wrecking Ball is as surgical as a ball of pig-iron on a swinging chain.

Throwaways (“Jewels n’ Drugs”) and power-ballad (“DOPE”) digressions weigh heavy on the pacing, but the arch “Mary Jane Holland” and “Swine” occupy livelier turf.

After a four-year hiatus, Shakira’s 10th album is full of raggae-tinged, bouncy melodies and absurd, occasionally quite poetic lyrics.

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

“Bitter Virtue” pursues a familiar James theme--condemnation of repressive moralities--but elsewhere, things are more ineffectual.

Electra Heart is too professional to be truly terrible, but it's never clever enough to be more than merely toytown.

She's good when not covering Mary Margaret O'Hara. But you'll need to hear through the still-life mannerisms to get to the good stuff.

Moon is bookended by the structurally perfect melodies of "I Heard the Owl Call My Name" and "Heart of the Woods"--but what’s in-between is often too airy-fairy to really grab.

High on saccharine and low on fidelity, LATBOTS has one foot in the recent 8-bit scene, the other in Merritt's own back catalogue.

A barrel of laughs it ain't. Over sparse, semi-orchestral backing, Gahan tackles the big ones.

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

It is mainly charming.

It sounds like a Sabbath album, from the tortuous lyrics to the eight-minute track lengths. But something about it feels wrong.

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."

There's no "Chasing Pavements"-style killer, but she has murdered the Cure's "Lovesong" using Heart FM-friendly jazz-lite as her weapon.

The Atlanta singer delivers soulful, socially conscious meditations.

It's exquisite, of course, but dull.

The small print is that Travis are still doing what Travis have always done.

Well, they were demos once; and here they are, in all their functional glory.

This critic cannot in all honesty say, with a clear conscience, that their second album is absolutely terrible. Because it plain isn't.

It's mostly a thing of pleasing lonesome grooves--but there are moments where it sounds like the Mahavishnu Orchestra tuning up.

It's seldom terrible. And seldom does much to persuade you that it wouldn't be a better idea to cut out the middle man and listen to Gillespie's old LPs instead.

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.

Overlong at 19 tracks, it has its moments.

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

The latest retro sensation, Waterhouse is a 25-year-old from San Francisco ... who's trying to sound like Ike Turner circa 1958. And he's pretty good at it.

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

Surprises are few and what Delta Machine lacks is one big, arena-ready, fist-in-the-air synthpop stormer.

Enough promise here to keep listening.

She has ... created a sound which is almost absurdly ill-matched to her songs.

Recorded in Hollywood, which figures - there is a near-visual sense of overstatement to the bleakness.

It's all pretty good, but you want to see them live more than replay the album, though "504" needs downloading.

Ward's at his best when he ditches the troubadour formula, as on the glam-pop romp he takes through Daniel Johnston's "Sweetheart".

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

A rapid sugar rush, followed by a gradual crash.

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

A chastened affair: instrumentally pared-back, vocally wan and full of unremarkable Brill-Building-meets-Belle-and-Sebastian ditties.

Turn a deaf ear to the Cowell-connected producer Labrinth's uninspired Brit-hop beats and instead concentrate on the surely intentional comedy of Tinie's "I've got so many clothes I keep some of them in my aunt's house" and "I've been to Southampton but I've never been to Scunthorpe" (both from number-one single "Pass Out").

Most of the beloved Feat features are featured.

Never, whose song titles are nearly all one word, isn't as daunting as the avant-garde approach might suggest.

Like the latter’s Random Access Memories, it’s an enjoyable dance-pop album lacking a central focus. But one whose diffident charm makes a pleasant change from the overwrought wailing that routinely afflicts R&B.

He wins you over, eventually.

Not to say Cohen is not an artist to be treasured, just that Old Ideas may not be entirely essential.

The results can be more interesting than listenable – and the musical contents do seem wilfully random.

There's an undercurrent of sentimentalism running through Come of Age....But originality is hard to come by.

The music? It is of course exciting, youthful, dazzling in its energy and simplicity.... However, you may feel, given the track listing, that you have been this way before...

The ballads will be the tracks from Little Red to own the charts for the foreseeable future, but it’s on the 5am dancefloor that Katy B’s second album will score its biggest impact.

Collections constitutes a fairly sharp decline.

A dance album that spins the decks back to the turn of the millennium.

Here, the North-east new-wave revivalists refresh their default angular moves with nervy propulsion (“Give, Get, Take”), elegant synth-pop (“Brain Cells”) and electro-glide reflections (“Is it True?”).