Smith’s voice remains a thing of wonder throughout.

His facility with the form is evident on songs like “Easy To Love”, which aptly has the smooth, easy manner of a standard, and more dramatically with “On The Waterfront”, which renders solitude in epic fashion. ... Elsewhere, he reverts to form with the rolling blues arrangement of “Love This Way”, with his signature piano to the fore, and terse blues guitar punctuating his account of being “lost inside the darkness and the howling wind”.

Though obviously sincere and heartfelt, Gregory Porter’s tribute to his greatest influence falls a touch short in some cases. His voice, while smooth and warm, lacks the silky, creamy timbre of Cole’s on “Mona Lisa”, and on some songs he sounds more like Kurt Elling or Sammy Davis Jr.

Irish folk quartet Lankum’s second album offers an object lesson in how to perform old songs in new ways, without losing the essential sense of continuity that gives traditional music its timeless appeal.

When the funk gets this good, with a relaxed, propulsive charm that belies the P-Funk density of the arrangements, why bother modernising?

Musically it’s pleasant enough, with string and wind flourishes either emboldening or offering solace from the folk-rock arrangements; but it’s all a bit samey, and after a while, rather dull.

The limp, autotuned love song “Happy” and drearily positivist “Good Morning” are lazy nods to the mainstream, but elsewhere Wretch is better served by the dark sparkle of arrangements featuring grimy sub-bass synths and itchy electro beats tinted with eerie vocal samples, thumb-piano and synthetic pan-pipes.

Lyrically, Horan pushes no envelopes, sticking to earnest love plaints and poignant reminiscences for the most part, and even offering to listen to his girl’s problems in “Fire Away”.

It’s a revelatory affair, bringing a fresh, raw focus to brilliant songs steeped in lust, death and loss with a blend of sly rockabilly and blues-tinged country-rock.

The piquant combination of Morrissey’s blithe aloofness and double-edged, acidly humorous lyrics with Johnny Marr’s endlessly inventive, precociously African-influenced guitar parts was rarely more effective than here.

This collection of re-recorded themes confirms his keen attention to mood and tonal colour, though the alterations are sometimes irritating--notably the itchily urgent percussion track rattling along beneath the familiar keyboard motif of Halloween.

Secure behind the protective pop wall erected by producers such as Max Martin and the ubiquitous Greg Kurstin, there’s little room for originality here. Which may be for the best, given the mid-album limpness imposed by the gratingly wistful, cello-draped childhood yearning of “Barbies”, which oozes insincerity. Pink’s on safer ground riding the pumping pop-funk of “Secrets” and the title-track.

A set of songs seething with dark knowledge, as Bejar peeks behind the curtain of appearances in search of underlying motivations.

A masterclass in modernist antiquity.

Grizzled Americana veteran Ray Wylie Hubbard cooks up a steamy stew of voodoo magick and rock’n’roll mythos on Tell The Devil I’m Gettin’ There As Fast As I Can, a title whose droll self-deprecation is reflected in the weary sprechstimme style with which Hubbard delivers his narratives, homages and sermons.

With the skirling, Arabic-tinged drone-rock textures of his band The Space Shifters augmented by cello and Seth Lakeman’s violin, the album’s miasmic charm imbues even the rockabilly standard “Bluebirds Over The Mountain” with new, mysterious depths.

A brilliantly-realised evocation of addiction building to crisis-point before the inevitable comedown heralds a change in priorities, it gives some idea of what Clark herself may be building towards.

All told, it’s pretty crowded territory, with too many jams.

Even when required to accommodate passing trends like mambo or funk, Hooker’s blues simply bent a little, but never broke. Its atavistic power, he knew, resided in its hypnotic grip, which effectively crystallised rock’n’roll years before the style was recognised.

JD McPherson’s Let The Good Times Roll was one of the most joyously unvarnished rock’n’roll delights of recent times, and this follow-up continues that album’s ingenious blending of heritage and modernity, sometimes recalling The Black Keys’ reliable way with chunky groove and quirky hook.

Following the largely insipid twinklings of his Beady Eye, As You Were suggests that, given the right conditions and appropriate collaborators, Liam Gallagher could become a more potent force than expected--especially if he could broaden his musical outlook beyond such predictable parameters.

An elegant, understated pop masterpiece.

Van’s fellow Brit-blues icons Georgie Fame, Chris Farlowe and Paul Jones take turns to duet, in a relaxed manner which exemplifies the overall mood: comfortable rather than inspirational.

[“Monkey Bizness” is] the most animated Ubu has been in ages, with an atmosphere of vertiginous dark energy accreting around the jagged guitar riff of “Red Eyed Blues”, while even the slower, more subdued melancholia of “The Healer” wields a strangely sinister poignancy as a desolate Thomas regretfully confesses, “I see too much”. But what visions!

In truth, the move towards country music made on Younger Now is fraught with potholes that she and producer Oren Yoel rarely manage to avoid. The main problem is the half-heartedness of the move.

Sløtface are a pleasing antidote to the cluster of guitar bands being peddled in the UK, drawing more on the grunge of Wolf Alice or the Riot Grrrl attitude of Sleater Kinney. In some cases they try too hard to sound cool.

Outrage! Is Now is a deeply satisfying record to listen to, and one that the band seem to have had fun making. It’s sarcastic, witty, and the best thing they’ve produced so far.

It’s playful and elaborate.

Wonderful Wonderful is an album that doesn’t let the listener look forward to the next track, because the album is restlessly glancing backwards over its shoulder, haunted by past successes of The Killers, and the great artists who came before them.

The Spark is Enter Shikari’s most eclectic and accomplished album to date.

Most of the album’s tracks also date from an earlier era, four of them retreads of songs originally recorded for his 1967 flop album New Masters. Sadly, they haven’t matured well.

With its classical and avant-garde stylings and Clementine’s sometimes queasily operatic delivery, I Tell A Fly won’t be to everyone’s taste--which in this era of increasing conformity may be its most valuable asset.

When they stray from their core heavy rock duties, there’s an Oasis-like magpie quality to the songs, be it the way that the acoustic harmony-pop of “Happy Ever After (Zero Hour)” recalls ‘60s pop trifle “Sitting On A Fence”, or the way Dave Grolsch’s Lennon-esque inflection on “Sunday Rain” is winkingly set within guitar and dynamics echoing Abbey Road’s “I Want You”.

While the overall Detroit/Memphis tone is tempered somewhat on the second CD, where Steve Wickham’s fiddle is featured more prominently. Scott’s amorous enthusiasm can be a tad gauche at times, but the languidity of his riposte, in “Kinky’s History Lesson”, to an ill-judged slur on British courage during World War Two, is belied by its razoring impact.

Having spent so long exploring the intensely personal, she struggles here to find the right tone for more public matters.

It is an incredibly cohesive album though--it operates in its own defined space and has an intense frostiness to, which, for The National, is saying something.

Here, deprived of Crazy Horse and Young’s tectonic lead guitar, “Powderfinger” assumes its natural form as an antique folk ballad, while the haunting “Pocahontas”, minus overdubs, is likewise more nakedly vulnerable.

Like Randy Newman, the Mael brothers have a knack for voicing the hopes and regrets of diverse, sometimes unsympathetic characters; and the latitude afforded by their operatic arrangements allows them to add commentary in real time, like an instrumental Greek chorus.

For his final recordings, Allman returned to Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, where gospelly backing vocals and burring horns bring a deep-soul tone and texture not just to a soul standard like “Out Of Left Field” but also to material like “Going, Going, Gone” and the Dead’s “Black Muddy River”.

While Martin Simpson’s peerless fingerpicking is in full effect throughout Trails & Tribulations, what’s equally impressive is the way his arrangements reflect the material with empathic sensitivity.

The most impressive item here is the deep-soul duet with Miley’s sister Noah Cyrus, “Waiting”, in which Bugg’s aching delivery is perfectly tempered by her fragile sweetness, like vocal salted caramel.

Though rooted in familiar influences--“Crossing The Road Material” is like a more anchored Neu!, while “Old Poisons” is old-school psychedelia, with squealing organ and guitar swathed in drums--Mogwai apply subtle details that are unmistakably their own.

Too many tracks, however, suffer from a shortfall of melodic potency, and a lack of lateral development, especially in longer pieces such as the 12-minute sci-fi musings of “Black Screen” and the declamatory nine minutes of “How Do You Sleep?”.

Eugene Hutz’s gypsy-punk combo--a sort of Balkan-American Pogues--functions best here on galloping grooves of fiddle and accordion like the opening “Did It All” and “Break Into Your Higher Self”. But the latter, in which discontent prompts the search for a more transcendent purpose, hints at the cod-philosophising which damages Seekers And Finders.

Art In The Age Of Automation finds the group expanding their sound to accommodate strings and horns alongside their core armoury of drums, bass, keys, sax and hang, the latter’s steel-pan timbres pleasingly sprinkled over the slow drift of “Objects To Place In A Tomb” and prominently featured in “Beyond Dialogue”, two of the better tracks.

It’s all too controlled and unambitious; and just aping Dylan’s wheeze doesn’t make it any more intriguing.

The band have retained their brusque character but it’s less ponderous than before, with several tracks taken at an unfeasibly rapid tempo; while Ronson has brought production clarity and a punchy funk sensibility that transforms QOTSA’s trademark robot-rock rhythms into something much more dynamic and danceable.

The euphoria of parenthood is effusively conveyed in several tracks, though the overall mood created by the heavily reverbed vocals, drones and pulses remains pregnant with potential distress.

It’s a fascinating journey, presaged by Cluster’s 1974 shift from avant-garde to pop with “Caramel”, taking in the pulsing minimalism of Monoton’s “Tanzen & Singen”, the simplistic electropop of Die Gesunden’s “Die Gesunden Kommen” and the more sophisticated soundscapes of Yello, Vangelis and Klaus Schulze.

Despite most of his well-known songs being crammed onto this album’s 2014 predecessor, there’s no dip in quality here as Richard Thompson revisits material ranging from Fairport Convention classics like “Genesis Hall” and “Meet On The Ledge” through to 2007’s “Guns Are The Tongues”.

Max Richter’s only motive here is beauty, drawn from all corners of his musical interests, which are many and varied. The result is a journey that takes one from Renaissance choral polyphony to the inventive precocity of teen duo Let’s Eat Grandma, via Bach and Handel, minimalism, post-rock and electronica, with nary a misstep in sound, selection or sequence. ... A rare treat.

24/7 Rock Star Shit has to be one of the all-time great rock’n’roll titles; but sadly, lurking behind it is an album which struggles to fulfil such vagabond promise. Rather, it seems terminally enervated: most of these songs have a shrugging, slovenly manner.

Though frowned on by some purists expecting the traditional fare of the family band The Watersons, the siblings’ original songs were eagerly accompanied by luminaries like Martin Carthy, Richard Thompson and Ashley Hutchings, who bring a roguish enthusiasm to tracks such as “Rubber Band”, on which even the horns seem to have their cap at a jaunty angle.

As ever on Welch & Rawlings records, their harmonies are sublime, warmed by guitarist Willie Watson’s third part; but there are fewer dark shadows here than usual, with songs like “Good God A Woman” and “Yup” offering light-hearted fables of God’s and Satan’s dealings with women.

Where previous albums had been bland landfill electro-pop rendered even more indistinguishable through her heavily autotuned vocals, Rainbow offers a range of approaches, from pop and R&B to country and funk, applied to material that brings greater depth to her characteristic sassy attitude.

It’s a public catharsis which succeeds through a combination of subtlety and the determination to derive general observations from personal experience.

It’s not a bad album, but you still get the feeling that, as Ryder notes elsewhere, “someone who looks like me is living in my skin”.

While not entirely successful, this high-level summit meeting of two giant talents from half a century ago confirms that neither of the principals’ distinctive talents has suffered serious decline.

While there are plenty further examples on the bitterly disillusioned Dark Matter, the most effective songs here are those which pack a more personal emotional punch, echoing the solitary desolation he’s mined throughout his career.

Dan Croll’s follow-up to Sweet Disarray suffers from a kind of creeping anonymity: immediately after hearing it, it’s virtually impossible to recollect the salient features of any track.

With Golding’s expansive, questing lines riding Boyd’s rolling, polyrhythmic funk, the duo set displays a focused musical intimacy, while the band set is immediately more incendiary, thanks to Parker wailing wild over Golding’s more rooted part in “Valley Of The Ultra Blacks”.

Bulging with 55 previously unreleased outtakes, Come All Ye is an education, and as entertaining as it gets.

Flower Boy presents a surprisingly sensitive, thoughtful, even pleasant personality.

The EP becomes more industrial as it progresses, with vocal hums, instrumental drones and dark ambiences fractured by progressive dissonance and the occasional brutal howl.

Musically, you know what to expect when Cooper and producer Bob Ezrin join forces: metal turmoil, churning beats and slashing guitar flourishes, letting up only for Ezrin to indulge his Pink Floyd heritage with the ponderous “The Sound Of A”, with its apt message, “Meaningless noise is everybody’s toys”. Quite.

Paul Heaton & Jacqui Abbott’s third album as a duo is disappointing, with Heaton’s lack of musical intrigue leaving some of his poorest songs badly exposed.

Ultimately these fixings lack the transformative quality to transmute depression into art.

Ironically, despite the phalanxes of American producers involved in the album, it actually sounds less desperately transatlantic than The Fifth, possibly due to Dizzee’s enjoyment in using parochial British expletives like “bloody” and “knackers.”

Departures in sound are often unwelcome when we're already so happy with where a beloved band are, but, in this case, their experiments are a complete success.

Del Rey’s deliciously twisted pop fuses hip hop beats with her breathy vocal delivery; their mutual power is in their ability to keep things hidden, whilst seeming utterly explicit. It’s a heady mix to be caught up in.

Oddball fun, and educational too.

Robinson’s blues-rock background gives the CRB a soulful edge evident here in the funk shuffle “Behold The Seer”, where liquid guitar licks and quacking clavinet carry his invocation to “put on your dancing shoes, we got nothing to lose, it’s only space and time”.

It’s the overall cool/warm Tropicalismo tone that’s most engaging about Mellow Waves, established through the light accretion of sparse piano, percussion, synth and guitar parts supporting his soft vocal on opener “If You’re Here”.

The free rein afforded by this latest solo effort renders most of these 15 tracks unrecognisable as songs.

Unlike their earlier tyro works, the simplicity is rarely matched by killer tunes on this album, which yokes together the first-ever stereo mix of Wild Honey with a tranche of outtakes and fragments, and an extra CD of efficient but uninspiring live performances.

For his debut as Mr Jukes, former Bombay Bicycle Club frontman Jack Steadman uses deftly-applied jazz samples, restoring his youthful interest in that genre after years in the indie salt-mines.

The quiet piano pieces of Eirenic Life are intriguingly low-key.

The group’s most ambitious work yet. ... Elsewhere, “The 55 Quintessence” castigates “fascist terrorists with hashtags”, while a modicum of counterbalance is provided by the romantic throbs of “Julian’s Dream” and especially “Effeminence”, a hypnotically shuffling, sensuous piece which demonstrates that Quazarz is just as vulnerable to the lure of the ladies.

The group’s most ambitious work yet. ... As if heard through alien ears, the arrangements have a weird, woozy character, with the abstract beats and trickly, liquid synth parts punctuated by unusual instruments like the bass clarinet on the opening “Since CAYA.”

The Queen Of Hearts, a sublime collection of old songs given contemporary heart transplants without ever betraying their essential original truth and spirit.

Oddly, there’s nothing here from Echo & The Bunnymen, despite the inclusion of borderline cases like The Damned, The Mission and Adam And The Ants, and a host of lesser bands creating the musical equivalent of smeared mascara. But there’s a broad range of tangential directions sheltering under the otherwise welcoming umbrella of Silhouettes & Statues.

Jupiter’s songs remain daringly iconoclastic, from the anti-monarchist critique of “Benanga” to the anti-materialist slant of “Pondjo Pondjo”; but there’s still plenty of room for pure pleasure, as per the dashing, ebullient celebration of dancing, “Ekombe”.

Rather than the optimistic, outward-looking The Race For Space, on Every Valley he tells the grim story of the decline of Welsh coal-mining, from the title-track’s proud proclamations, declaimed in Richard Burton’s Rushmore rock-face of a voice, through to the poignant conclusion of “Take Me Home”, a Welsh Male Voice Choir’s plea to “let me live again”.

For all the broken dreams, what’s impressive about the album is the way that BSS balance tones, textures and themes.

These songs are as limp as long-lost lettuce, several of them barely meriting the appellation “song” at all.

It’s a typical contacts-book R&B exercise, with an impressive cast of guests (including Frank, Pharrell, Snoop, Nicki, Katy, Ariana and others) on a fairly underwhelming series of grooves.

Former Only Ones frontman Peter Perrett sounds as languidly wasted as ever on How The West Was Won, though thankfully it’s the kind of wasted that demands the devotion of his sons, both involved in this solo debut, and sparks insights and locutions that enable him to make sense of his life.

The results range from the soothing yacht-rock soul of “Don’t Believe” to the soft, weightless folk-soul momentum of “I Would”, which, with its acoustic guitar arpeggios tinted with strings, resembles an outtake from Nick Drake’s Bryter Layter.

His songs are clusters of dark, foreboding images--“Spray your days with coffin nails”; “Entrails made into garlands to welcome my way”--reaching an apogee in “Greatness Yet To Come”, a mystic vision akin to the Crossroads Myth. But the darkness is spiked with sweetness in songs such as “The Hermit Census.”

An album heralding a talent as intriguingly fully-formed and distinctive, in its own way, as Marling, Mitchell and Bush.

For all its apparent homogeneity, there’s considerable diversity in approach, with the resonant, vibes-like tones and cyclical guitar waves of “Strand” a continent apart from the shadowy, almost Krautrock manner of “Fog March”.

His band certainly nails Jennings’ trenchant country-rock tread on the title-track, a warning of the downside of the outlaw lifestyle for which Earle’s joined by Waylon’s old buddy Willie Nelson.

Evolve involves mostly devolving back into the hoariest of tired rock cliches (including what sounds like roto-toms), and plodding grimly towards the summer’s festivals.

For Together At Last, Jeff Tweedy revisits choice items from his back catalogue in solo unplugged mode. It’s a brave step, given the imaginative depth with which Wilco animates this material, but it does allow the songs’ core characters to come through more strongly.

There are a few irritations--I hate the ghastly synthetic-strings sound used on “Da Next Day”, and I hate Adam Levine’s hook on “Mic Jack”, no matter how impressively Patton piles rhyme upon rhyme. The hit cuts, though, are quirky novelties.

A late-career lapse into gimmicky covers of “Silent Night” and “Can Can” aside, this compilation is a marvellous confirmation of pop’s fringe possibilities.

Fuelled by a black humour that’s almost become her trademark, there’s heartbreak and ecstasy, desire, fear, uncertainty, acting on impulse, making mistakes and (maybe) learning from them. And those are tunes we can definitely dance to.