The raw indie-punk grinds and krautrock pulses have a brutish drive and determination, though lingering this long among a cast of "wasted people in a wasted world" leaves a grim aftertaste.

In places, Portico Quartet's third album recalls old-school jazz-funk, from the chamber-jazz end of the spectrum rather than the party end.

Sometimes, the changes simply frustrate, as when Josh Homme rations out the hellhound gallop of "Mickey Bloody Mouse" too sparingly. But the additions can bring extra layers of exhilaration.

The splendid The Politics of Envy simply ratchets that process up a few notches.

The format sustains on subsequent tracks; but despite its apparent concreteness, the music is surprisingly warm.

Debut album Up All Night consists of 15 installments of inoffensive daytime radio pop.

Despite this obvious recommendation, the more radio-friendly follow-up still proves hard to love.

He's devised a musical backdrop that subtly evokes the innocence, warmth and zoophiliac empathy of the film's message.

The homegrown characteristics of her distinctive style have been all but washed away in a flood of R&B clichés on All of Me, a routine blend of fidgety grooves and tiresome ruminations on life and love.

A pleasant-enough handful of easy-going songs, in which the focus on warmth has left them lacking bite... but the warmth of that voice is undeniably beguiling.

There's a familiar elemental tone to the Dirty Three's latest album – except this time the oceanic influence is replaced by snow and sky and rain.

Set to a messy blend of waspish blues guitar and wild fiddle, it's a typically barbed, angry set.

"Moonlit Car Chase" and "Base 64 Love" come perilously close to generic technopop.

Some of the better songs lack that adhesive zeitgeist quality that used to be the group's stock-in-trade. But at its best, there's enough variety and invention to recall The Beatles, sometimes directly. [Review of UK release The Future Is Medieval]

Love at the Bottom of the Sea marks a return to The Magnetic Fields' abrasive electropop, which isn't always to the songs' advantage.

There are a few too many tracks on which the hook outclasses the actual rap.

The impression is of someone picking obsessively at an emotional scab, which is effectively what The Wall is all about.

It has a winning blend of respect, technique and humour.

Meat Loaf's latest, which covers much the same territory [as The Wall] but without any depth or desire to understand.

White's albums have tendrils that imperceptibly wrap themselves around one's attention; and such is the case here.

It's Wagner's mix of the enigmatic and the demotic that dominates, his songs fill of understated apothegms and startling lines.

[Shows a] lack of development involved in either the music or the creators' worldview.

It's pleasant enough ... but somehow lacks the cutting edge.

An engaging blend of slinky Tropicalia, soulful Bacharachia, and enigmatic Euro-thriller themes.

Speech Debelle shows some welcome signs of maturity on this follow-up.

There's an awful lot of music crammed into Plumb's 35 minutes, but it's rarely organized into the most attractive shapes - and on the few occasions it is, they alter course within seconds and head off in some less appealing direction.

Has the dense, occasionally cluttered manner of the obsessive bedroom producer.

The loss of its uplifting chorus harmonies deprives "Map Ref" of its sunny appeal, but "Two People In a Room" bowls along briskly with dissonant monochord tension.

The lite-jazz treatment of standards on Kisses on the Bottom seems like a misstep.

Pleasingly, it's all comically cosmic, as befits the host movie.

Mindset is short by Necks standards--just two tracks of 22 minutes each--but it is typically involving.

The interpretations range from the admirable to the abysmal.

If You Want Loyalty Buy A Dog is a textbook Little Axe album, stuffed with dub-blues grooves that manage to be simultaneously soothing yet unsettling.

In song after song, she offers variants on the same theme, in infatuated erotic reveries of submission to bad-boy or sugar-daddy lovers with fast cars and lots of money.

There's no denying the aplomb with which Isaak handles even Presley's vocal parts, which are respectful without being slavish copies.

Finn has a nice line in sardonic, declamatory assessments – "Certain things get hard to do when you're living in a rented room"; "I'm alive, except for the inside" – but there's little comparable imagination to the arrangements, which lean towards ironic country-rock and dispirited blues-rock.

There's plenty to enjoy.

The 16th GBV album is business as usual: plangent garage rock.

It comes across as unimaginative and rather needy when applied to the singer Johnny Lloyd;s wistful inbetweeen reminiscences of fumbled romance and aimlessly anthemic pleas for decisive direction.

Laidback and tidy, but fun.

A few decent songs may be lurking behind all the sonic detritus; but perhaps they ought to ditch the multitracks and get themselves a ukulele.

Norah and fellow vocalist Richard Julian bring a warm, smoky charm to their harmonies, while lead guitarist Jim Campilongo stitches together songs.

The unambitious nature of Given to the Wild is all the more disappointing for the intriguing glimmers of inspiration furnished by their collaboration with Roots Manuva.

It's mainly brusque and strident raunch-rock, with an unappealing cajoling tone that virtually dares you not to find the songs clever and the hooks contagious.

The blend of simplicity and sophistication is fairly well suited to the material, avoiding cloying sentimentality and religiose bluster.

What's impressive is the consistency of approach and execution.

while Seal's voice is a natural fit, it's hard to discern what these versions add, given their general faithfulness to the originals.

Dirty Jeans And Mudslide Hymns is full of typical John Hiatt tropes: old-timers and hard times, devotion and desperation, in roughly equal measure.

Adele's engaging ebullience is powerfully persuasive on this DVD/CD package.

A sort of also-ran footnote to the diva tropes handled with so much more panache by Mrs. Z.

While "Lioness" is a far better posthumous collection than Michael Jackson's Michael, from almost exactly a year ago, it's a poor substitute for the high-octane musicality of Frank and Back To Black.

It seems a huge effort being expended to achieve so little.

The second album from Franco-techno duo Xavier de Rosnay and Gaspard Augé is decidedly less pop-tabulous than their career highlights to date.

It's a pleasant enough ride which reveals some of Panda's tastes.

The high priestess of emotional turmoil returns to her apparently turbulent personal life on this latest album, vacillating between obsessive devotion, self-assertive morale-boosting and the kind of masochistic abasement depicted in "Mr Wrong".

"Cockiness" is barmy enough to stand out from the routine dubstep/electro beats cooked up by such as Stargate, Calvin Harris and Dr Luke.

The songs themselves are low-key and unexceptional.

Green's delivery is too Estuary-Eminem, scattershot hip-hop asperity snarled out with a mockney menace that is too secondhand to be effective.

Overall, it's their most spirited effort yet, and the changes have been deftly effected in a way which shouldn't alienate their core fanbase too much.

It's not a bad album as much, but to anyone familiar with Lynch's other work, it's entirely predictable in sound and style.

The stark landscape of Will Oldham's album is the musical equivalent of King Lear's blasted health.

But in cementing one style, some of the possibilities offered by Lungs have been choked off.

It's not hard to see why both parties agreed to the alliance--Metallica gain artistic cachet, Reed gains an audience--but it is not an alliance that welcomes listeners with open arms.

The results are smoothly pallid even by their standards, the usual modes of exultant melancholy and epic sympathy exacerbated by the earnest thrumming of acoustic guitars that punctuates the familiar piano vamps.

The sole constant is the skeletal, staccato patter of peppery percussion throbbing beneath each track, the everpresent heartbeat of a project in aid of Oxfam.

One can't help wondering whether this was really the album that Noel Gallagher set out to make when he contemplated a solo career, or just the one he settled for.

They may talk it up as a brave new step forward, but their first album in over eight years can't really be viewed as other than a retrograde move for Jane's Addiction.

As usual with Sawhney, it's typically eclectic, and surprisingly effective.

It's hardly groundbreaking stuff, but McCartney undeniably has an ear for melody.

Henry's stubbled delivery pitched somewhere between Randy Newman and Tom Waits as he negotiates the galumphing waltz "Strung" and the ramshackle cakewalk groove "Sticks & Stones", which best exemplifies the album's mythopoeic blues mode.

Due to the choice of material, the arrangements lean heavily towards the dramatic and angst-ridden--well, it is Peter Gabriel--with the sole recourse to mellow calm reserved for the undulating strings of "The Nest That Sailed the Sky".

Merritt's main problem may be that his baritone croon makes him sound cynical even when he's baring his heart, an impression only partly undercut by his occasional ukulele strum.

Most are dully baffling.

There's barely a shred of truly memorable content here.

The only reliably engaging elements of the compositions are the wonderful choral arrangements that provide most of the mortar connecting Björk's voice to the instrumental parts.

Scott's overly melodramatic delivery sometimes gets in the way of the words, although his arrangements are for the most part respectful and apt.

It's the same throughout, London relying on charm over content. But, in fairness, he makes it more fun than most.

While imparting a palpable sense of immediacy to the performances, there are some tracks that could do with more work.

Seven years on from Satan's Circus, Death in Vegas' prime mover Richard Fearless doesn't seem to have moved on at all.

There's a pronounced shortfall of his usual joyous eclecticism here, with many pieces settling for basic repetitive sequences; some sound like little more than extended intros.

Here, they find unsuspected connections between disparate sounds.

Meg Baird, formerly the frontperson of Philadelphia-based psychedelic folk-rockers Espers, is left a little exposed on her own solo album.

Despite the propulsive energy sustained throughout, some tracks lack focus.

The Jayhawks release their most insipid, uninspired album in years.

The sad fact about supergroups is that they are rarely the result of any musical imperative. This is painfully confirmed on the debut offering from the alliance of Mick Jagger, Dave Stewart, Joss Stone, Damian Marley and A R Rahman, on which the assembled talents cast around for a style of their own without ever unearthing the natural chemistry on which great bands rely.

Cropper's needle-sharp guitar fills best demonstrate the immense debt the MGs man owes to the 5 Royales songwriter and guitarist Lowman Pauling.

Beneath the bluster it's pretty dull fare, the brittle rock-funk beats and brusque guitar riffs carrying songs that pay eager lip-service to energy and activity but actually offer a series of fairly empty experiences.

The Old Magic is stuffed with the kind of retro-styled standards that will doubtless be mined by generations of Nashville crooners to come, performed here in unassuming arrangements that try not to get in the way of the songs.

The result is a series of half-formed, indifferently performed tracks on which even gifted guitarist Hugh Harris struggles to locate the inspired touches that made Konk so impressive.

For her third album as St. Vincent, Annie Clark has jettisoned the baroque string and woodwind arrangements that marked 2009's Actor, in favour of more direct, guitar-based settings.

It's all tastefully arranged.

The cycling, Wendy Carlos-style synth figures of "Searching For Heaven" offer brief respite, but hardly enough to rescue an album promising far more than it delivers.

It's business as usual, but with diminishing returns, on I'm With You--the result, perhaps, of sticking with the producer Rick Rubin for six albums.

There's a profound valedictory tone about it, as songwriters such as Jakob Dylan and Paul Westerberg craft material custom-built for Campbell's situation.

The engaging mood is further enhanced by Condon's baffling but beautiful lyrics.

The ponderous rocker "How Long Can These Streets Be Empty?" shows up the limitations of a voice better suited to pop and soul.

It's pleasant enough, but sometimes the words do rather get in the way.

The Shjips' mesmeric approach reaches its apogee on "Flight", whose rolling groove is streaked with cascading contrails of echoey, double-tracked space-guitar.