It's an unashamedly middle-aged affair, from the quietly moving affirmation of devotion in "Two Children" to the comforting reverie of "I Remember You".

It's beautifully presented in an absorbing blend of acoustic guitar, piano, cello, and the occasional tint of vibes or ambient colouration.

There's precious little of the experimentation or variety you might expect.

It's a feisty, assertive affair, but let down by weak production and a lack of musical focus.

White's own voice lacks the character to drive his songs, but Big Inner is a hugely impressive debut nonetheless.

It's a virtually faultless set, with plenty of neat touches personalising familiar material.

Centralia is by far the most satisfying release to date by the Brooklyn-based minimalist post-rock duo Mountains.

Let It All In is stylishly rendered in simple instrumental colours, but it's not the cheeriest of experiences.

The Lost Sirens actually bests its parent album, which was not New Order's finest hour.

With results both as pleasurable, as inventive and as absorbing as these, there seems no danger that the impact of {Awayland} will be merely momentary.

An album that perhaps skips too easily from one style to another for its own good, though there are other sublime moments.

It's all delivered with customary warmth and swing from Miller's home studio.

It's an absorbing, sometimes harrowing ride.

The Menahan Street Band have proven a fertile sampling source for such as Jay-Z, Kid Cudi and 50 Cent, and it's not hard to tell why listening to the grooves on this latest album.

It's presented as 39 miniature sonic studies in the vein of European "library music" fragments, interspersed with dialogue clips from the movie and sound effects to evoke the protagonist's deteriorating mindset.

Stockport quartet 10cc were, in this regard, the British equivalent of Steely Dan, applying advanced musical and lyrical skills initially to the humble task of sardonic pop pastiches like "Donna" and, as they developed, to the socio-political satires ("The Wall Street Shuffle", "Clockwork Creep") that made up their second album, Sheet Music.

The 10 albums that comprise this box set depict one of the most extraordinary career arcs in all of pop music, testament to the questing intelligence with which Joni Mitchell approached music.

The erosion of control is palpable as the show progresses, though it's hard to tell whether it's due to damage or just boredom.

Tracey Thorn takes a wider brief than usual for her Christmas Album Tinsel & Lights, mostly avoiding the routine carols and standards in favour of left-field choices.

Part of its success is due to Stevens' uniquely ambivalent position, at once ingenious and ingenuous.

[Title track "Mars" is] a rare misstep on an album that looks to both East and West, and reaches simultaneously into the past and the future.

Traveling Alone sounds like her best album yet.

Van Morrison's best album in some while is a set of songs that, despite the relaxed tone of their jazz-blues settings, foam with indignation about the venality of capitalist adventurism.

Truly, the album of a lifetime.

Elsewhere, these grand new performances with the Danish National Chamber Orchestra serve to pinion some songs too fixedly.

The result is an engaging, softly sensuous air of desolation, emotion recollected in tranquility.

The big Brill concept doesn't work, Cahn, Cooke and Ellington not being song-factory writers.

Wu Block suffers from the absence of a few vital presences, in particular Wu Tang producer the RZA.