More of a curio than a proper follow-up to May’s Deafman Glance, and is likely to be of far greater interest to DMB completists than the casual listener, but it makes for an at times intriguing project.

Phoenix is perfectly fine, but its strongest moments make you realise that it could have been great.

Although Merrie Land has its flaws, this son of Colchester is usually right about the important stuff.

Sadly, three minutes of mild excitement are no compensation for the 59 of tedium.

Little Mix albums have always struggled to find their own identity, and LM5 still owes too much to Beyoncé’s flirtation with hip-hop and top-40 trend chasing. It’s frustrating.

No track here breaks the five-minute mark; only Something Human lets the side down with an acoustic guitar.

There are fractured beats, and tendril-like melodies, but here nothing really lands--as either protest or revelation. ... But mid-album, Cherry and Hebden hit a very sweet spot indeed as Natural Skin Deep finally syncs Hebden’s rhythmic dub jazz and Cherry’s pop nous.

Too much is forgettable.

The album’s title speaks of urgency; its nearest song, Don’t Look Now, details the unwanted advances that bedevil a model. But the episode twinkles a little too prettily for the subject matter.

A decent debut, then, but with Mai’s rich voice you can’t help feeling that it could have been stratospheric. Instead, it fails to innovate, and all feels a little beige.

A litany of icy threats, Break That (ft Suspect) doesn’t advance the genre much, but like much of this mixtape it does remind his original fanbase that Octavian is a threat as well as a hedonist street philosopher.

It’s not that C5 is too little, too late; more that the baton between the generations passed some time ago.

Though life has its shadows still (the motorik psych-country epic Round the Horn, the vocoder lament Christmas Down Under), the core of C’est La Vie is radiant happiness, Houck’s familiar sounds buffed to a transcendent shine.

Dose Your Dreams is a dizzying mix of styles, often within the same song.

Roosevelt’s is an airbrushed, off-kilter kind of pop, and while he still isn’t pushing the envelope, Young Romance is a pleasant enough listen.

Dark and absorbing, The Blue Hour is never dull, although in an age of playlist-friendly immediacy it’s hard to imagine its appeal stretching far beyond already committed fans.

Although neophytes might struggle with Holley’s shruggy attitude to tunefulness--his free-ranging sound recalls, at different times, Tom Waits, Gil Scott-Heron or RL Burnside--a coterie of associates help to flesh out Holley’s non-linear storytelling into something more conventionally accomplished.

14 tracks stretches the hooks a little thin, but My Mind Makes Noises boasts pop craft to rival big-money production teams, and much better eyeliner to boot.

It’s a beautifully crafted, upbeat pop album, and MNEK’s voice is compelling and gorgeous; the only small quibble is it’s a tad long.Colour , a triumphal duet with Hailee Steinfeld, feels a little tacked on in an effort to emulate the success of his Zara Larsson collab Never Forget You, and the conversational between-song interludes likewise feel a little extraneous, if all part and parcel of MNEK’s unique, mellifluous Language.

Kamikaze finds Marshall Mathers revelling in his Slim Shady rabid underdog role, fulminating at critics, boggling at Lil Yachty, and sneering at the Migos flow on Not Alike. How riveting all this finger-wagging is probably depends upon your birth date.

She still struggles to throw off what must now be very tiresome PJ Harvey comparisons. That said, this is very much a resonant record, set in the here and now, with melodies to the fore.

Flight of Fancy and Number 10 impress too, but elsewhere the quality is more variable: Daniel Kessler’s delicate guitar lines aside, the slower Stay in Touch lacks any light or shade. The equally uninspired closer is called It Probably Matters; on this evidence it probably doesn’t.

AC plumb depths of paucity more than subtlety in this wilfully desolate expanse of dispassionate vocals and vague, awkward ambience.

The record does lean a little close to Goodbye Yellow Brick Road at times.

Although nothing is exactly under-produced, the governing principle remains loose. White is so sweet-sounding, you might blink and miss the commentary of songs such as Crashing Your Party (“gimme that bow, gimme that stone, gimme that rake, I’m gonna take my place”) or Gold Fire, the most fully realised piece of music here.

Most tracks float by in a pleasant if unremarkable funk-lite haze, but there’s an overall sense of Miller being older, wiser and more at peace than before.

Not everything here is riveting: Gurnsey’s narrative arc is a little underdeveloped.

It’s let down by a few too many unremarkable ballads (Fumes, I Would), but that doesn’t detract from the fact that Testament shows this comeback is more than simply an exercise in nostalgia.