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.

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

Ferguson's smoky tones recall the young Aretha Franklin at her more restrained, [but] it's all ever so slightly boring.

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

Any good songs sound like demos awaiting their final form.

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.

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

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

It's all a bit "junior school music project" at times, and there's nothing John Cale wasn't doing half a century ago, but it's nevertheless an impressive work.

DeMent cuts through the sheen with a simplicity that reaches back through decades.

For anyone who lived through grunge, this is mere nostalgia. Anyone who didn't is advised to go straight to the source.

With A Wonder Working Stone, Alasdair Roberts continues to blur the borders between ancient and modern, between heady myth and harsh reality, and between folk and whatever sounds right in context.

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.

The Atlanta singer delivers soulful, socially conscious meditations.

Their most consistent and accomplished album to date.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Bradley, a 62-year-old ex-plumber and James Brown impersonator, has a raspy, infinitely pained voice but there doesn't appear to be any real interaction between him and the band.

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

Not for the faint-hearted, nor those offended by religion. Often brilliant.

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

Casual bystanders might wish for more memorable songs or some advancement of the form.

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