Comprising as it does outtakes from the sessions for The 20/20 Experience, it's hardly surprising there should be a drop-off in quality for this follow-up; but it's a pretty steep fall.

Cooder requires considerable forces to realise his amalgams of blues, rock, folk, reggae and Mexican music, and here his band is expanded by the extraordinary, shrill horns of the 10-piece La Banda Juvenil.

This debut album proper fails to develop or change-up his formula of predatory sexuality expressed in tremulous tones.

Bill Callahan's follow-up to 2011's gorgeous Apocalypse finds him in the company of a small, discreet band, whose gentle shuffles are coloured mostly by guitar, fiddle and flute, as his muse flits haphazardly about him. [The Independent scored this a 3/5 in the actual printed edition not 5/5 as seen on its online edition]

His own sepia baritone summons some of that warmth on versions of “Solitaire”, “Autumn Leaves” and “You Only Live Twice”.

Another dilettante excursion with little to recommend it. [The Independent scored this a 2/5 in the actual printed edition not 5/5 as seen on its online edition]

The bawled slur that passes for Doherty's vocals is less agreeable the older he gets, while the flaccid grunge plaints and raggedy punk thrashes have diminishing appeal.

With their lyrical focus on teen sex, money and the misplaced glamour of crime, at times it's like “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”, for boys.

A nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live here.

Not an easy listen, but a satisfying one.

While the Bootleg Series cupboard appears as well-stocked as ever, the value of outtakes from a notoriously weak album (Self Portrait) is debatable, though there are gems among the oddments.

The cult-like enthusiasm of The Magnetic Zeros is best experienced live, where their massed forces translate into a somewhat muddy morass.

In a year already host to some brilliant albums, it seems tired and dated.

With the hindsight afforded by this monumental 17-disc career retrospective, he seems somewhat less than The One, an idiosyncratic talent undermined by MOR inclinations.

The only failure is the routine indie chugger "Children of the Future".

It manages to grip the imagination for a while but ultimately, not knowing the root cause of the action, leaves one adrift in amorphous emotional distress. But there's much to admire here.

Drenge brothers Rory and Eoin Loveless exhibit virtually no overt blues influences, relying instead on the heavily distorted guitar riffs common to grunge and garage-band psychedelia.

After a while the regretful, melancholy tone wearies one's sympathies.

This collection of re-recorded hits and newer material lacks both that album's imaginative approach and its understated nobility.

The chief virtue is the immediacy that courses through tracks like “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton” and “Fall of the Star High School Running Back”.

The vibe on this debut for Jack White's Third Man label is pre-rock'n'roll.

The trio's manipulation of euphoric rave dynamics on tracks like “Therapy” brings a fresh approach to a tried-and-tested form.

Pleasant and pleasingly melodic, but lacking the risky edge that makes a band truly great, The Silver Seas are like the living equivalent of a guilty pleasure.

Though marginally better than its predecessor, BE can in no sense be considered a progression.

The combination works best on the single Attracting Flies; less engaging is the descent to playground chanting on Best Be Believing.

Originally recorded on a home four-track machine, the songs were subsequently re-done with Trevor Horn at the helm, which has applied a little polish to what still sound like under-written sketches rather than compelling pop material.

It's confessional solipsism, lacking the musical compulsion to make one care.

Thicke's wheedling tone and sylvan falsetto are engaging enough on this sixth album, though his clumsily backhanded way with a compliment deteriorates as the album proceeds.

The dominant mode throughout is tepid bluegrass, heating up a little for “Phoebe.”

It's a sound with all flesh stripped off the bone, but Lynch himself sounds like an intellectual playing bogus trailer-trash.

These tracks offer a similar union of the imaginative and the inspirational, with Lee Perry and The Orb's Alex Paterson and Thomas Fehlmann making musical magic from the most minimal of resources.

Jay-Z, being Jay-Z, spends most of the time banging on about how rich he is, how brilliant it is being married to Beyoncé, and how irritating it is that some people don't find him quite as wonderful as he does.

On Between the Walls, About Group continue to explore the space between free collective improvisation and Alexis Taylor's songs.

Connick displays his versatility with the bossa nova sway of “I Love Her”, the New Orleans R&B of “S'pposed To Be” and “You've Got It”, and the sentimental country stylings of “Greatest Love Story”.

The Editors here step backwards into the crepuscular netherworld of Eighties new wave from whence they took their original inspiration.

In between, there’s nimble bluegrass picking on the chipper two-step “The Wind” Less welcome are Caribbean incursions like the tourist-reggae drivel that is “Island Song”.

Long Way Down is stuffed with bogus sensitivity, crystallisations of emotional disquiet couched in chant choruses, and polite piano arrangements reliant on a few chord-changes.

It finds Skelly in more emotive manner than with The Coral.

It lacks impetus, panache and compulsion, just for starters.

Kodaline offer a musical barometer of bankable current rock trends, but display scant originality on this debut album.

It's Tunng's most direct effort yet, eschewing the “folktronic” bricolage of albums like Good Arrows; but there's plenty happening beneath the surface.

On track after track, the falsetto vocals and surging electropop pulses ultimately congeal into too saccharine a sonic experience, an artificially sweetened aural marshmallow.

The Talk Talk of their era.

Produced in understated manner by Tucker Martine, the songs' clean pop lines are revealed with the minimum of decorative detail.

Stephen McRobbie's wan vocals remain an acquired taste, but the way the music lightly folds in dark and light, innocence and experience, reserve and euphoria, lifts the likes of "Slow Summits" and "Summer Rain".

It certainly goes beyond his retro-jazz comfort zone, with piercing electric organ and electric piano lending a vibrant, visceral edge to several songs.

Wilderness uses wildlife traits as jumping-off points for enigmatic tales in typical Handsome Family manner.

"Irish" and "Jetplane" bring a late flicker of focus to the proceedings, but the band's resolute primitivism works to their detriment.

MS MR deal in a similar kind of blandly alienated, metrosexual pop to Hurts, with Lizzy Plapinger's sultry-soulful vocals allied to Max Hershenow's electronic pop arrangements.

The teaming of Mark Lanegan with multi-instrumentalist bluesman Duke Garwood is an alliance of congruent attitudes and approaches.

It all goes wrong later on, in a limp succession of ersatz disco ("Sexual Religion"), routine raunch-rock ("Finest Woman") and empty sentiments like "Pure Love", yet another gloss on Pachelbel's Canon.

Experimentation is generally to be applauded, but too often here it works to the detriment of the songs.

The follow-up to Let Them Talk follows a similar format of easy-rolling jazz arrangements and simpatico guest spots supporting Hugh Laurie's blues piano.

All very authentic and in the room.

Behind the rococo charm lurks a subtle emotional power.

Oddly appealing overall, when not tending too much toward the twisted.

While it's pleasantly effected for the most part, it's hard to get involved in someone else's nostalgia.

In places, it's a disastrously over-egged pudding.

Virtually every piece is too leisurely extended beyond its natural span.

Sadly, the decision to tell Feltrinelli's story in the same period technopop music as Stainless Style sabotages its impact.

Throughout, he's supported by Stooges guitar riffing of brutal directness and simplicity, occasionally fattened by the horns that lend an apt touch of soul sleaze to the latter track.

The title track slips from minimalist cycling harpsichord to portentous organ and guitar arpeggios before fading mid-lyric, while the cod-oriental motif of “Entertainment” offers a fond memory of a time when such things didn't seem quite so patronising.

It's Bruni's intimacy that's the album's most alluring aspect.

#willpower is stuffed with sounds that, while in no sense as cutting-edge as he likes to make out, crest the wave of the popular.

It's punk-folk pop with its heart on its sleeve and urgency overwhelming reflection, closer to Green Day than, say, Leonard Cohen.

It's an album as hard to pin down as fog, but redeemed by moments of transcendent beauty.

Way To Blue avoids the usual patchwork-quilt pitfalls of style and quality that afflict most tribute albums.

It's Springsteen territory, occupied with pride in songs like “21st Century Blues” and the elegiac closer “Remember Me”.

State sees Todd Rundgren deliver his customary laconic commentaries on a world gone mad from behind a wall of rock, techno and dubstep riffs.

Sadly, WOAPD is devoid of the sly wit of Vile's early material, and consists of mid-paced alt rock, reminiscent of the Dandy Warhols in a coma.

Valhalla Dancehall found British Sea Power somewhat becalmed, but Machineries Of Joy gets them moving again, albeit in a variety of directions.

It features blues standards remodelled as reggae skanks, bland takes on the Great American Songbook, and too much acoustic guitar and dobro.

They're virtually unrecognisable as the band that made their game-changing debut, save perhaps for "All the Time."

It's ironic that soul music dominates, given Collins' lack of its most crucial element: a commanding vocal presence.

Depeche Mode's weakest album in some while.

Off the Record contains few surprises, with several tracks pleasantly echoing his time as co-composer of some of the group's most glorious pieces.

This throws most of one's attention on the vocals, always the most engagingly evanescent aspect of their sound.

Only much later, in “There Will Be a Reckoning”, does the familiar Bragg anger kick in significantly.... it's outnumbered here by more sensitive songs about things like relationship difficulties and dying.

Olafur Arnalds' third album, For Now I Am Winter, is an exemplary suite of Icelandic music, blending American minimalist techniques with European sensibilities.

“Here We Are” and “Back When We Were Beautiful” treat ageing with wistful nobility, Harris's voice cracking poignantly on the latter, while Crowell delivers a trenchant version of Kris Kristofferson's self-lacerating drug song “Chase the Feeling.”

It shifts desultorily from style to style, with songs barely hanging around long enough to state their case.

It's all warmly wrought and pretty, if a trifle insubstantial at times.

While Graffiti on the Train is a significant improvement, it's still something of a patchwork affair.

Tracks such as the languid instrumental “Easy Blues”--which lives up to its name--and “Earth Blues”, a slippery sci-fi number, are worth the price of admission.

It ticks along unremarkably on smudges of synthesiser and shuffling drum programmes, augmented by acoustic guitar or synthetic brass stabs.

The folksy, pastel tints and subtly uncoiling emotional landscapes have been supplanted by cluttered arrangements and astringent timbres.

Saxophonist Lovano's third album with his two-drummer quintet is a very mixed affair.

For all his personable self-deprecation, the blend of operatic pop on which his reputation is built seems strangely thin and insipid.

Large parts of Blak and Blu are spent crooning falsetto soul numbers or cranking out chunky rockers in the vein of the Stones and Bob Seger.

It's all typically hard work to decipher, both lyrically and musically, but unlike Yorke's earlier endeavours with Radiohead, this time I'm rather less convinced that it's going to be worth the effort. It's certainly less fun.

Some of the riffs are winners, but it's just not enough to carry the album.

Heidi Talbot employs an engaging blend of ancient and modern on Angels Without Wings.

On their tribute to The Everly Brothers, Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Faun Fables' Dawn McCarthy avoid the obvious hits in favour of more unfamiliar items from the brothers' repertoire.

As ever, it's an eclectic mix of styles.

There's often a mismatch of temperament between the most brutally juddering of Lidell's quacking synth grooves and the floaty, unanchored manner of his vocal lines.

It's a one-sided album: following the soulful “Late Night”, things plummet badly in the second half.

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.