It all hangs together quite nicely if, as ever, rather uninvolvingly.

It's a Gary Barlow idea of what indie music sounds like.

In spirit, their third album takes them back to their origins as an independent group from Glasgow making defiantly direct music in an age of detachment.

Brilliant, frustrating, thrilling and irritating. In other words, exactly what we’ve come to expect from an Edward Sharpe album.

As an 19-track collection of rarities from the period 2003-present, TTEC is necessarily a mixed bag of styles and qualities.

There’s singing going on, all right, it sounds lovely, but little is conveyed other than loveliness. However, there’s no arguing with their authenticity or technical excellence.

Sadly, they simultaneously fail to disguise a whole bucketload of ponderous, self-indulgent navel-gazing from the same source.

After an average third LP and a four-year hiatus, the art-rockers are once again all kinds of excellent.

An example of its genre it most certainly is.

Apart from a bit of pedal steel and some gospel backing vocals, it sounds a lot like a Snow Patrol record, rendering the whole exercise somewhat redundant.

Honest, soulful, happy-sad, warm and welcoming.

They show a weakness for the winsome, but Faye O'Rourke's fabulous foghorn fixes that: when she takes the mic, Cars' promise rings out loudly.

Their self-titled debut, aptly enough, is one of the most bitterly anti-romantic albums this side of the third PiL offering.

The small print is that Travis are still doing what Travis have always done.

Fluent melodies, nature metaphors, and expressive settings are the robust ties that bind these reveries.

Nothing much happens in it, but there is plenty to be seen

“Organic moonshine music” she calls it, and no one could argue with that.

Funny, sad, perfect.

It's loud, it's brash, it's real and it's utterly exhausting.

While the presiding atmosphere is retro, the Avila brothers' production keeps things properly real.

See You There revisits his classics as well as finding room for one new track and a beauty of an alternate version of "What I Wouldn't Give."

White Lies have just enough elegance and intrigue beneath the bluster to carry it off.

A rapid sugar rush, followed by a gradual crash.

Arrangements are simple, bluegrass-inflected and rich in acoustic textures. Warm and thick as a hayrick.

With its unrelenting positivity, Yes, It's True sounds like the Flaming Lips fronted by Deepak Chopra, and valiantly courts the daytime radio play that will inevitably elude it.

At times, listening to The Civil Wars is like wading through a swamp of still-raw emotion. It is an album that is more haunted than haunting.

They're reunited with vocalist N'Dea Davenport but don't really need her, their dressing-up-to-go-out groove being the thing.

While this may once have been filed under 'shoegaze', now we can call it 'noisy dream pop' and just wade in its wash of guitars.