Despite the diversity of themes and styles, the sense of a confident single voice comes through much louder and clearer than before in this new context.

Schmilco seems diffident and restrained, mostly built around the folk-rock strummings of Jeff Tweedy’s acoustic guitar, with minimal embellishments. But it’s exactly the right approach for the bitter, painfully personal songs he has written here, which address the living and the dead, the loving and the lost, and most of all Tweedy’s own furies and frustrations.

Six years on from the last Teenage Fanclub album, not much seems to have changed.

Some of the backing tracks have novelty appeal--the cartoonish, kazoo-like loop of “Bird Song”, the Qawwali elisions percolating through the Zayn Malik duet “Freedun”--but the most striking work here is her virtually acappella treatment of “Jump In”, with just a sparse beat beneath her rhythmic vocal repetitions.

Throughout, he creates an absorbing sound-bed from folk-rock grooves embellished with unexpected tones and texture.

Six years on from the vivacious Bang Goes The Knighthood, Neil Hannon’s latest Divine Comedy outing seems to lack the bite which gives the best of his work its raffish frisson.

One step forward, two steps backward: having produced perhaps his best album with 2014’s Carry On The Grudge, Jamie T is at best stationary, and often retrograde, on Trick.

Although it marks no significant shift in style--she’s still mining the same pop-R&B seam--it’s undoubtedly a better effort than its predecessor.

As the album proceeds, the band’s strident Mumfordry becomes all too wearing, these songs patently designed more for festival singalong than introspective reflection.

[A] sparkling, multi-faceted comeback album.

Despite Andrews’ occasionally overwrought attempts to conjure up a mood of malevolent fate by channelling his inner Nick Cave, it’s an absorbing journey.

Less structured and song-oriented than Channel Orange, it’s a long, meandering ramble through Ocean’s passing interests and attitudes, hopes and memories, alighted upon like scenes briefly glimpsed from a train window and then dropped into tracks that aren’t so much sung as delivered in an undulating sprechstimme that seems to be avoiding the difficult choice of a compelling melody.

This debut album has a slick sonic design and retro flavour akin to Random Access Memories, but ratrher than the 70s, he’s gazing fondly back at the early rave era.

Blending Cline originals and recent covers with reimagined standards by the likes of Jerome Kern and Rodgers & Hart, all realised in beautifully enigmatic arrangements which wrap woodwind, horns, strings and tuned percussion around Cline’s guitar. Throughout, atmosphere is paramount.

Pure & Simple sticks for the most part to an agreeable neo-traditional approach.

Her own third album suggests she’s every bit [Damien Rice's] equal in tracking the heart’s mysterious emotional undercurrents.

On John Paul White’s Beulah, the dark emotions of tracks like “Fight For You” and “Hope I Die” mingle with the bitterness of “The Once And Future Queen” and the low self-esteem of “I’ll Get Even” to create a strangely subdued portrait of emotional turmoil, couched in Southern folk and country modes.

“Riser” features Jaki Liebezeit-style tom-toms behind cosmic contrails of synth trapped in a cavernous ambience; while string synth and wordless vocal keening drape like fog around “Abandoned/In Silence”, whose clarinet line establishes accidental but apt echoes of the theme to Exodus.

Throughout, the band’s gorgeous harmonies temper the sombre mood.

It’s really interesting seeing how much chemistry Dubz and Giggs still have; it feels like there’s still some space for Ard Bodied 2.

It’s hard not to become overly aware of how the similarity of both the musical settings--basically, strings allied to rhythm programmes of skittish or explosive beats--and especially Bjork’s delivery tends to leach the individual songs into one another.

As with many great albums, successive hearings reveal more clearly the elliptical tunes at the heart of these eight quietly intense pieces, climaxing with the eight-minute “Age Old Tale”, a masterly band performance.

It’s well-wrought and entertaining for the most part, though there are moments, as in “The Palest Of Them All”, when the archness becomes top-heavy and capsizes the song.

There’s unintended comedy and a few overlooked gems amongst the lesser lights unearthed here.

The issues she covers are complex at times--“Called You Queen” recounts a problematic period partnering a gay man, “before your body betrayed you”--but “Blue Diamond Falls” closes the album on a positive note, affirming feminist possibilities that “you can be whatever you like”.

Its dark, unflinching songs certainly ponder humanity’s less attractive traits, with arrangements to match.

Wreathed in mellotron, vibrato guitar and ghostly backing vocals, several songs evoke the windswept psych-pop of The Coral, whose singer James Skelly co-produces Blossoms.

The results are quirkily, unexpectedly appealing.

Other highlights include Los Lobos’ typically confident swagger through “Bootleg”, and the unusual alliance of ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons with Colombian singer La Marisoul on a wonderfully gritty “Green River”.

The result may be the band’s best album yet, one on which they come closer than ever.

Only occasionally does the survey of this interpersonal battlefield afford an optimistic light.

The Warrington quartet was clearly in the process of defining their own sound.

The album only develops a steely ragga rasp in the last few tracks, when the hometown likes of Bounty Killer, Capleton and Sizzla make their presence felt.

It’s Robinson’s soul-scorched vocals that hold everything together, his relaxed charm shining through whether he’s engaged in perplexing, mystic narratives or offhand, recreational encouragements to “relax your mind”.

His voice, which should be the focus, sounds muffled by effects. Neville’s fluting, melismatic vocal is much better served on the slow waltz hymnal “Heaven”, a persuasive reflection of his faith.

With songs about mountain men and sentient country houses, it’s like a more pompous (and crucially) humourless version of The Incredible String Band built around flutes, celesta and caterwauling: okay in very small doses, but unbearable at album length.

The deceptive geniality of his delivery, meanwhile, recalls Gilbert O’Sullivan, enabling him to bring darker undertones to apparently pleasant pieces like the lilting waltz “I’m Gonna Haunt This Place.”

He’s helped by the sleek production of Ry and Joachim Cooder, the former lacing delicious guitar lines through Outlaw’s songs while his son adds subtly illustrative percussive flourishes.

It’s an attractive, still beguiling attitude that courses through the album like ambrosia, offering a welcome, if unworldly, alternative to pop’s prevailing discourse of acquisitive antagonism and automated emotions.

Vessels’ remix of “E.V.A.” and Copy Paste Soul’s “Tomorrow” both temper brisk, scuttling pulses with tender string textures, while Petar Dundov’s take on “Sputnik” builds from spartan beginnings to an epiphanic, widescreen electro synthscape.

Though not wholly succeeding, he offers music as a sanctuary, and world of its own.

Recorded in one take, with drums, bass, guitar and backing vocalists huddled around two microphones, the results have a rustic charm akin to a more grizzled Leon Redbone, with rolling rumba-rock and reggae grooves.

The songs rely on cringeworthy conceits like “Red, White & You” or rote expressions like “Sweet Louisiana”, while the refurbishing of the domestic abuse anthem “Janie’s Got A Gun” just tips it further over into queasy melodrama.

Guitarist Carmen Vandenberg and singer Rosie Bones are on hand to bring focus to Beck’s vocabulary of guitar sounds.

“Cold Little Heart” builds from piano and the merest shiver of strings to a Morricone-esque pitch of intensity, before Kiwanuka himself arrives five minutes in. It’s a big, powerful statement of intent that the rest of the album doesn’t quite live up to.

Ellipsis finds Biffy Clyro reverting for the most part to the core blend of melody and heaviness that draws comparisons with Muse.

It’s all delivered with welcoming warmth and humility, over impeccably buttoned-down soul-funk grooves.

The 10 songs of this debut album are all about character, change and companionship, from various angles.

Her debt to Grace Jones is evident in the elegant melodrama of “Ten Miles High”, but her application ranges much further on an album of intriguing strategies.

The wonderful Wildflower is cause for celebration, its Zappa/Beasties-style collage of voices, samples, beats, sounds, and especially laughter offering a joyous affirmation of life.

The production/remix duo of Richard Norris and Erol Alkan here offer a retro-psychedelic throwback to a more imaginative time, one where the Krautrock grooves of Neu! and Can collide with spacey Ibizan house synth washes and the whimsical acid fairytales of classic ‘60s Brit psychedelia.

It’s a weird one, mysterious and mildly menacing, but eerily engaging nonetheless.

Devonté Hynes’ latest outing as Blood Orange takes the soft-soul stylings of 2013’s Cupid Deluxe and mashes them together with African voices and percussion, saxophones and vox populi samples to create a sonic collage that seeks to marry the vision of Marvin Gaye with the methods of Frank Zappa. That’s a considerable ambition, and unsurprisingly it falls well short much of the time.

The result emulates, and equals, Joanna Newsom’s Divers, another ambitious album about the inescapable inter-connectedness of love and death.

The blues and soul power are real, even as racial lines are leered and sneered at, the sort of ballsiness that could make rock breathe freely again.

The brittle garage-punk of this debut positively seethes with trebly guitars, reedy organs, waspish fuzzboxes and urgent drums, with singer Mike Brandon exploring the ramifications of titles like “What Happens When You Turn The Devil Down” and “Flowers In My Hair, Demons In My Head” in tortuous, passionate manner.

Interspersed with vox-pop musings on matters like police shootings, The Last Days Of Oakland is a state-of-the-nation address akin to Sky Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On.

An enjoyable diversion.

Working with a lo-fi palette of mostly acoustic instruments, they’ve conjured a weird wonderland in which Angela Carter meets Bjork round at Robert Wyatt’s.

There’s a dispiriting aridity about The Mountain Will Fall, which lacks the joyous eclecticism of DJ Shadow’s earlier albums.

Erykah Badu lends a childlike charm to the sunburnt fizz of Glasper’s bossa nova version of “Maiysha (So Long)”, with Miles’s trumpet shining through towards the end.

Though not quite as potent as Shangri La, but it constitutes a confident negotiation of the “difficult third album” hurdle.

It’s musically ambitious, if over-stuffed at times, but unashamedly impenetrable lyrically, even with the “help” of the accompanying gobbledegook short-story and supposed Map of Eyeland.

The result is an album of rare beauty and intelligence, rendered in imaginative arrangements containing sometimes startling harmonies.

As ever, California gets plenty of mentions, though there’s less filler than usual, the album reaching a yearning epiphany in the string-draped song for a son, “The Hunter”.

Skin is brilliant across the board.

Why Are You OK finds dad-of-four Bridwell reflecting honestly on the ennui of everyday, surburban life. Unfortunately, the result is largely forgettable.

It’s relentlessly dull, the sort of feyly English, unfunctional dance music Hot Chip pioneered to declining effect. Okumu’s airy voice barely brushes the listener’s sleeve, never mind mending their soul.

This second album since returning from an absence caused by lack of interest offers nothing new musically, but Manson at full-strength.

A country-gospel stab at Ellington’s “Come Sunday” badly misses the mark, and Toussaint’s innate funkiness is only lightly felt, sometimes sacrificed for too much tastefulness. There are still many American treasures here.

Few songwriters can juggle seriousness and whimsy as adeptly as Paul Simon on Stranger To Stranger, his best album in several years.

It’s a lovely, laidback collection, with percussionist Willie Bobo adding a languid Latin feel, and multi-instrumentalist David Lindley excelling on guitar and violin, while Reid’s sepiatone delivery is expertly framed by master producers Eddy Offord and Tom Dowd.

The predatory, hypnotic swamp grooves that have been Tony Joe White’s stock-in-trade throughout his career lend a magical backwoods bayou ambience to the nine tracks of Rain Crow, on which his peculiar songcraft and grizzled Woodbine baritone conjure up gripping regional narratives.

As might be expected, the favourites chosen by Mark Kozelek for his covers album are predominantly those reflecting cloudy, sometimes ambivalent emotional responses.

Too many of these tracks are slight ideas and punning phrasework over-egged into grotesque wedding-cakes by Dudley’s billowing strings, leaving Fry stranded in the position summarised in “Brighter Than The Sun”: “I’m a man out of time/Looking for a mountain to climb”.

The main problem is that overall, the aptly-titled By Default just lacks excitement and panache.

All told, probably The Monkees’ best album, after their hits compilation.

Perversely set to chortling, bustling electropop synth figures, these songs present existence as “bounded by brackets of life and death, alone from first to last”, delivered in Middleton’s glum brogue, with only the most wafer-thin hints of humour tempering the onslaught of self-recrimination and hypochondria in a track like “Steps.”

It’s a fascinating oddity streaked with sex, violence and sorrow, a sort of seedcorn of the Robert Rodriguez aesthetic, presented complete with the lithographs that accompanied the original, albeit in cramped CD size.

Played entirely by Shauf save for the lush string arrangements, it’s a baroque-pop exercise with echoes of Seventies smarties like Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman and Steely Dan, though rather more empathetic than them. And less cynical.

Bryce Dessner brings his minimalist experience to bear on “Garcia Counterpoint”, a Reichian exercise of layered guitar lines, but only Wilco’s Nels Cline comes close to the spirit of exploratory abandon in Wilco’s live version of “St. Stephen”. And amongst a tranche of dutiful replicas, Anohni’s “Black Peter” stands out for its transformative orchestration and delivery.

Richard Ashcroft’s first album in six years is a dismal affair.

Even when he strains to keep in key or pitch, he manages to make a virtue of his shortcomings, bringing a sense of long-distance exhaustion to “All The Way”, and applying a sort of Gallic shrug to “All Or Nothing At All”, in stark contrast to the jauntier tone of Frank Sinatra’s and Billie Holiday’s interpretations.

It’s not a perfect album--like so many, at 17 tracks it’s way too long, and there’s too little variation in tempo and mood--but it’s yet another confirmation of what can be achieved when subtlety and sensitivity are the driving forces.

It’s Vance’s sepia growl of a voice that grips most on The Wild Swan, bringing raw conviction especially to the opener “Noam Chomsky Is A Soft Revolution.”

Sadly, following the great strides made on the grief-stricken The Sea, with The Heart Speaks In Whispers, Corinne Bailey Rae reverts to the blandly serviceable beige soul of her 2006 debut.

This third album is a delight, riddled with hooks and energy that hark all the way back to the early 70s heyday of Big Star and The Raspberries.

With Konnichiwa, Skepta hoists grime to another level. It’s not just a case of his lyrical prowess, which goes some way deeper than most of his peers; it’s the way that he has fiercely retained control over his own destiny, overseeing everything from mastering to merchandise through the Boy Better Know collective.

Drawing on the embattled, hopeful possibilities of early Seventies soul, rock and folk, its chamber-classical and folk instrumentation allows for pleasure as well as despair. This is a Radiohead album to make you feel, better.

Save for three traditional songs, Strange Country comprises brilliantly-wrought original material haunted by themes of uncertainty, lassitude, jealousy and spite.

The process of recovery shifts through numbness, melancholy and tentative hope in an admirably straightforward, touching manner that suggests Cohen’s previous tenure in edgy art-rockers S.C.U.M. was another world entirely.

A bitterly beautiful album.

It’s not completely without merit--some of the backing tracks have a mesmerisingly entropic grip, as well they might, with 14 writer/producers involved in a single track--but the overall effect is utterly wearying, and unpersuasive: after all, only fools waste pity on the wealthy.

Lemonade is fiery, insurgent, fiercely proud, sprawling and sharply focused in its dissatisfaction.

The Ship is a strange amalgam of Eno’s familiar ambient approach with poetry--the latter delivered in a sonorous basso profundothat resonates with a sort of looming, warning warmth.

With its serene harmonies and Byrdsy jangle of arpeggiated guitars, “Quiet Corners & Empty Spaces” heralds the most potent Jayhawks album in ages, with some of Gary Louris’s best songs captured at their sweetest by producers Tucker Martine and Peter Buck.

Although comprised of re-worked leftovers from last year’s excellent Wire album, Nocturnal Koreans finds the band still managing to find new routes to take away from that tightly-focused project.