Marcus Mumford leaves his Irish-folk years behind and adopts a transatlantic burr for “The Wolf”, whose chugging riff and sappy lyrics (“You are all I’ve ever longed for”) pinpoint the album’s core failings: absences of both lateral intrigue and the elemental oomph its track-titles (“Broad-Shouldered Beasts”, indeed) hint at.

It is not a substantial offering, nor does it plough a new furrow--but it is a buzz.

Charmless kiss-offs (“Don’t”) and sappy sentiments (“People Fall in Love in Mysterious Ways”) dominate otherwise, landing with the thud of the authentically uninspiring.

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

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

Ultraviolence is more of the same, but less.

You’re not listening to songs so much as attempting to pull up the past as if it were an old pair of trousers, and then rope it into place with lengths of digital cable. It is both ridiculous and oddly moving.

It adds up to a shallowly appealing, summery package; glossily produced and personality free.

What Corazon certainly contains is a brightly recorded, punchy collection of “Latin” beats and melodies, plus some rock, featuring a handful of distinguished guests and the familiar overflying drone of Carlos’s own guitar obbligati.

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

It won’t frighten the horses, but it might encourage you to buy an overpriced T-shirt.

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.

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?”).

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.

The Vega songwriting style is hardwearing.

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.

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

So Long’s strenuously busy patchwork leaves you wondering how something so superficially impressive ends up making so little impact. The answer lies in the way the Bicycle Clubbers rarely deliver these gap-year reports with decisive force enough to thrill, or dwell on an idea for long enough to fulfill its promise.

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.

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

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

Good songs, largely, if songs broadly governed by the imperative to “heal”: a worthy intention, for sure, but fluffed up massively in a compressed space like this, also a rather stifling one.

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.

The result is refreshing but also a bit boring, although things get interesting towards the end.

The very home-made, amateur-sounding production, coupled with what was obviously a fully formed musical vision, carries great charm and will appeal to fans of Scottish indie jazz weirdo Bill Wells as much as funkers, although only the first two of eight tracks excel.

It’s depressing to find more of the disco-tooled super-producer [will.i.am] same here, allied to faintly atypical ballads that, nonetheless, add little to Spears’s synthetic sex-doll sheen.

Mostly No End sounds like pretty much anyone noodling about in their shed.

There are too many plodding ballads, sentimental on the piano and heavy on the cymbals.

[Since I Saw You Last] falls below Barlow’s best--“Patience”, “Rule the World”--at just the point when he needed to up his game.

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

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...

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.

This feels like a wearisome exercise in reasserting his market appeal.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

Rizzle Kicks are best when brisk and larky--more heartfelt musings on love and being true to yourself are banal.

[A] bog-standard shamateur indie rock, with riffs borrowed from The Smiths and Velvets, lyrics borrowed from Dylan and Iggy.

It all hangs together quite nicely if, as ever, rather uninvolvingly.

It's a Gary Barlow idea of what indie music sounds like.

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

An example of its genre it most certainly is.

Apart from a bit of pedal steel and some gospel backing vocals, it sounds a lot like a Snow Patrol record, rendering the whole exercise somewhat redundant.

They show a weakness for the winsome, but Faye O'Rourke's fabulous foghorn fixes that: when she takes the mic, Cars' promise rings out loudly.

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

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

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

A rapid sugar rush, followed by a gradual crash.

At times, listening to The Civil Wars is like wading through a swamp of still-raw emotion. It is an album that is more haunted than haunting.

It’s what The Feeling might sound like if they were American; endlessly “nice”, but with nothing to stir the soul.

It's the sound of a deeply dim man backed by competent-but-conventional musicians.

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

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

Enough promise here to keep listening.

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.

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

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.

Planta feels lightweight; not much really catches the ear or imagination.

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

Much of the time, it's reheated Madchester. The rest, it's over-literal psychedelia.

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.

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

It's bright and brash, sometimes almost life-affirming, but leaves you wondering two things (the influence of Graceland and singing in a comedy "foreign" accent).

Spread over a 67-minute album, their second with new voice William DuVall, that grinding insistence first impresses, then just grinds.

It remains the case that this kind of thing only has something to say about distance travelled, no more.

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

The duo often leave any sense of taste with their gumboots outside on the doorstep.

A genuinely odd collaboration.

Bracing stuff.

In place of the suavité we associate with Songbook Rod, we get a whooping, sequenced modernisation of 1970s Guitar-Rock Rod.

This is a sweet, light confection, but insubstantial as whipped cream and too sugary for some tastes.

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.

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

This is a very capable attempt to update that swoonable sound, and the arrangements do offer a few contemporary touches.

If you replace the techno with ambient tones and piano noodles, he can sound a little reedy and exposed.

Even without the unpleasant association of the Chris Brown guest slot here, #willpower (we're letting people hashtag their album titles now?) is a charmless listen.

Save Rock and Roll features unexpected excursions into rave-pop, and numerous celebrity cameos, but enough airbrushed pop-punk to prove they haven't forgotten which side their bread's buttered.

It's difficult to tell, though, how much is sock and how much darn.

Throughout, we get a wounded and fragile man setting his hope-filled heart to music.

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

It is a lush thing that, were we writing for a certain type of women’s mag, might have us reaching for words such as "candles" and "bubble bath."

He's not breaking any moulds--it's solid, guitar led, pop-rock--but then Marr is the man for that job.

Yorke's lyrics, consisting mainly of repeated aphorisms and clichés ("A penny for your thoughts", "I've made my bed, I'll lie in it"), don't suggest any great depth.... But the sounds, bringing in elements of tropicalia, Afro-funk and laptronica, with glitches, rainforest sounds and superb analogue-synth squelches (if anyone steals the show here, it's Godrich), mean you hardly notice.

Flitting between 1980s soul-pop and jerky indie, it has its big, brash, pop-rock moments.

His breathless, this-really-matters delivery is ill-served by lines such as "Ain't a fan of vegetables/ It ain't about the peas".

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

Collections constitutes a fairly sharp decline.

Most of disc one consists of ponderous, blustering nonsense, with a black chandelier used as a metaphor for depression. Disc two shows more promise.

Nice is the word.