There are motivational numbers such as Get Things Done, with its great elastic-bass hook. But more often Hesketh is in the trenches.

Even if Years & Years aren’t taking any risks with the sound of the moment, they use it to good effect.

Songs maintain a facade of well-mannered, old-fashioned structures (waltz times and Fats Domino-style “swamp pop” piano bass) that gradually reveal murkier interiors restlessly inhabited by Jones’s unique, meandering ghost-child of a voice.

Accessorised with Staxy horns and handclaps, the resulting album has a genuine groove and glow.

A record with moments of pure, solar heat.

Her new album is a successful repetition of the formula: sweet, crisp country licks with witty twists of live-and-let-live philosophy.

The lads have given this album everything, everything and then some.

All 11 original songs spiral out from a strong, controlled core of patience.

A brilliant tribute album, showcasing properly Lead Belly's cultural legacy.

There are songs about baseball, weather and enduring domestic love, acutely observed and delivered in tones so smooth they slip past in a soft blur.

The songs are weak, the sounds cheesily overfamiliar and a slightly second-rate string of collaborators (he wanted Lady Gaga and Rihanna but settled for Kylie Minogue and Britney Spears) fail to sprinkle the beats with any magic.

They don’t quite sound like the finished article, but there is a virtuous sense of their trying to make music in service of something profound.

Hucknall appears to have got some of his mojo back, with added sincerity.

Amidst skyscraping Queen harmonies and portentous Pink Floyd melodrama there are sensitive touches, with some elegant, slow-unfurling lead guitar reminiscent of Dire Straits.

As if set free from seriousness, they knock out some polished, off-kilter pop gems about inadequate individuals.

The record could do with more tunes to make use of that talent, but it’s still nice to see him back.

Welch still has the love--and the tunes--we need to see us through.

There is a lot to take in on this big, bold, madly ambitious album, but Rocky has made a frequently dazzling spectacle, another reminder that hip hop is currently setting the bar very high indeed.

You feel each artist shares your yearning to hear Dalton sing each song herself. Haunted and haunting.

Easily the best thing she has done since her album of Muscle Shoals sessions, New Routes, which she made in the early Seventies.

With dreamy lullabies, hypnotic love songs and pointed politics all delivered with emotional stridency, Saint-Marie blends rich musicality with the force of righteous conviction.

Every track offers up a smart blend of snappy lyrics and catchy hooks, and at least half are absolutely glorious.

Saturns Pattern is an album to wallow joyously in, even if the songs are as whimsical as Weller’s approach to punctuation.

She elegantly smudges the borders of a brass and banjo-driven sound with sophisticated little experiments in rhythm, production and arrangement.

This is music that is following its own agenda, whose funky energy is innate. It’s been absorbing external influences for centuries and is keeping on doing so in today’s crazy, accelerated postmodern world.

Life has been a struggle for the son of Steve but the closing track, Looking for a Place to Land, suggests there is some light at the end of the tunnel.

Canadian band Great Lake Swimmers excel on I Was a Wayward Pastel Bay, a gentle song which shows off frontman Tony Dekker’s country music skills.

It's a sprawling beast of an album and a remarkable piece of creativety from 68-year-old Russell.

The sticking point for some might be Broderick’s voice, which shares a boyish sweetness with singers like Jens Lekman and José Gonzalez--perfect for country ballads but which struggles to carry some of the slighter compositions.

There may be nothing particularly original here, but the gritty ambience of electric instrumentation suits Mumford & Sons’s way with melody, emotion and dynamics. Simply put, the Mumfords rock.

The weirder moments--the molten strings and xylophones--redefine the band as a powerful and original force.

A sparse, mid-tempo acoustic account of lost love, almost the definition of a sensitive singer-songwriter album. Yet it is so focused in intent and precise in performance, it seems to mark an advance rather than a retreat, the mature arrival at the realisation that sometimes less really is more.

[A] bravura masterpiece. There is no sugar rush of digital synthetic beats and radio-friendly hooks. This is a dense, intricate mesh of free-flowing jazz, deep Seventies funk and cut-up hip hop with a verbose, hyper-articulate rapper switching up styles and tempos to address contemporary racial politics in a poetic narrative built around a long dark night of the soul.

If it doesn’t all quite hit past heights, the gorgeous, elegiac album closer The Last Song is a reminder that Wilson set the bar particularly high.

Yet for all its exuberant DIY spirit, Young Fathers’ songs sound like another bunch of interesting demos, full of passion, spontaneity and left-field inspiration, but too often failing to really nail the song or message down.

The Magic Whip turns out to be a triumphant comeback that retains the band's core identity while allowing ideas they'd fermented separately over the past decade to infuse their sound with mature and peculiar new flavour combinations.

Delightfully daft.

They’ve always been more about energy than songs and old fans will certainly pick up on a few recycled ideas. But they’ll still find this the band’s most spirited release since 1997’s The Fat of the Land.

At every turn he unfolds the fists of self-pity into upturned palms of generosity.

Making music by numbers shouldn’t be this tiring.

No doubts about this: Short Movie is a masterpiece.

Morrison outshines everyone, with a quality of relaxed joyousness, riffing all over lush, lively new arrangements with his band.

Fans will find much to enjoy here, but it might be time for Knopfler to push himself out of his comfort zone.

Comparisons with Nilsson and early solo McCartney are high praise, but at his softer side it all threatens to go a bit Gilbert O’Sullivan. Yet this is a lovely debut and its innocence is a big part of its charm.

There is a neat cover of Creedence’s Have You Ever Seen the Rain but the best songs are her own heartfelt and brooding country ones.

It’s effectively atmospheric, giving a raw, insomniac groove to the gritty notes draining from electric guitars and a twitch of dirty old fluorescent bulbs in the glitchy drum beats.

More solid, stadium stompers bulk out this second album.

The tone switches dramatically between dynamic contemporary electro groove adventures, singalong pop and lush synthetic ballads, while veering emotionally between introspective vulnerability and strident defiance. Yet every track adheres to robust, classic songwriting principles, a kind of melodious elegance of structure gleaming through no matter how inventively deconstructed the arrangement.

Creating a 21st-century album that is still able to deal in an original and touching way with the big and interesting subjects of love and death is a trick that many folk and country musicians try to pull off and few achieve, especially in the impressive way that Gretchen Peters does with her 2015 album Blackbirds.

They do owe a musical debt to Ali Farka Toure (whose songs they started out covering), but they’re definitely etching out their own groove.

Lyrics and delivery suggest Imagine Dragons adhere to old-fashioned rock band idealism, but nothing is allowed to get in the way of a sparkling hook.

Play it soft, and it drifts into the background. Play it loud and something much more vigorous and compelling emerges.

The result is the gorgeous Tomorrow is My Turn, which shows off the full singing range and power of the frontwoman for innovative string-band trio the Carolina Chocolate Drops.

This sounds like the work of an artist who knows he is at the head of the hip hop pack, laying down a gauntlet to the whole of rap music.

For although the album’s called Into Colour, its spectrum is mostly warm vintage tints: a cosy blend of sentimentality and sophistication.

Crazy In Love aside, this generically pleasant and wafty album makes a better accompaniment to laundering sheets than rolling in (or being tied up with) them.

Badass has been criticised for failing to take his retro stylings anywhere new, but he lovingly recreates the Nineties vibe with an appealing low-slung swagger and infuses it all with a thoughtful, pavement-pounding philosophy.

Deeply infused with rich, subtle hooks, Modern Nature is a patient album that warms the bones with a steady fusion of mid-tempo Curtis Mayfield soul (muzzy organ, bongos and funk guitar), with memories of Madchester club nights (baggy beats, chunky chords, shoegazer vocals) and tasteful string arrangements.

It is a little daunting at first approach, but stylistic breadth and dynamic shifts make up for the stark brutality of their sound.

It is a lovely Valentine record, if you favour melancholic songs about missed chances. The set feels overfamiliar, though, drawing heavily on classic Seventies ballads by the Carpenters, Eagles, Elton John and 10CC.

The Third is a hot, sweet pancake stack of danceable tracks, drizzled with drama and swung by a terrific horn section.

The songwriting class shows. In addition, the musicianship is top notch.

Some will scoff, but imagine a beloved grandfather at a family gathering singing ballads of love and yearning from his lost youth, and you will get some idea of the power of this extraordinary record.

The songs on What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World, produced by long-time collaborator Tucker Martine, are more intimate and personal than some of the early Decemberists narrative songs.

She just needs to read more self-help than she spouts, and show us that she has more depth than bass.

After the wild beach party of 2007’s Volta and the shiny wonders of 2011’s Biophilia, Vulnicura is a windswept trek of a record. But one which gradually repays its difficulties with the raw exhilaration of survival.

There are inevitable misses as well as hits (House of the Rising Sun is a bit flat) but there is enough variety from musicians such as The Secret Sisters, The Milk Carton Kids, the Punch Brothers and Marcus Mumford (also the associate producer) to keep things rolling along.

The results rate with his best work, by turns reflective and attacking, on which lyrics sparkle and music breathes and flows with a sure touch.

That this is Manson’s most accessible and focused album in years counts for very little; there is simply no shock value when all you have to offer are cheap shocks.

Atlanta-based producer Ben H Allen (who has worked with Animal Collective and CeeLo Green) has beefed up their sound, although a taste for clean sonic lines and cheesy keyboards retains a power to grate.

Archive seem strangely restricted, dulling their more inventive edges with a black-and-white quality of mood, texture, rhythm and melody, that leaves you craving emotional colour.

Uptown Special veers wildly from high to low brow, stupid to sophisticated. Occasionally the mix jars but mostly it’s a compelling collision, falling somewhere between a chin-stroking jazz poetry recital and a riotous teenage disco.

The result for Take That is what you would expect: slick production-line pop that puts all the verses, choruses, hooks and beats in the right place, or at least the places we usually find them.

Its dark, off-kilter twists and trapdoors become moreish as liquorice.

If the production is too clean, it does at least reveal Johnson in glorious high definition with his Telecaster, simultaneously stabbing the chords while letting the licks bleed out with liquid heat.

Although what follows isn’t all as good as the opener, it’s solid, vertebrae-jolting stuff, often recycling old themes and melodies.

Her smarter, odder lines (“Put your hand on my piano”) stand out amid the clubbing clichés, though her high, slightly strangled, often shouted vocals don’t.

The album is full of strong characters and quirky observations.

This set is a fine reminder of his magnificent legacy of film work.

Each track has the invention to be a smash hit but the cumulative effect is rather wearing, an album of no emotional depth, in which everyone is going all out to deliver the big single.

This is some kind of triumph for Blige and for Britain.

There is plenty of passion in songs about Tennessee striking miners in the Thirties, or about the English Civil War.

It's a fine album--and well done the conciliatory middle son for bringing the family together. Well, musically, at least.

The predictable result is an album that sounds far too reverent to the originals.

Avonmore is classic, if not quite vintage, Ferry, lacking the distinctive songcraft of his finest work.

Four is hard to dislike: it's cheery, uplifting, high spirited and good fun.

High point Honest Town, gives a slick, new-Millennial pulse to all the retro heartache. But title track Big Music is a wince-inducing reminder of naff, leather-trousered bombast.

The blatant, stocking-filler money-grab of tagging these songs on to a quirky hits compilation (minus Bohemian Rhapsody) isn’t in the Christmas spirit.

The lyrics cleverly incorporate words and ideas from each programme. But a soundtrack featuring all the oddball artists from the series would have been more interesting.

Although the 18 tracks (12 of which are co-credited to Wright) are short on catchy tunes, it’s still an effective 53-minute trip.

It’s a long way from the rocker's angry persona, but he’s always had a soppy side. Sometimes the lyrics are also sloppy.

This is a warm, bluesy album of country-fuelled rock ’n’ roll that oozes old-timer class.

It can be a little underwhelming but it is music with its heart in the right place.

Sharp observation and emotional engagement raise her material above the level of celebrity Twitter spat.

She oversings to compensate, as if by keeping notes moving we won’t notice weaknesses, and there are moments of synthetic fluctuation that suggest recourse to autotune techniques routinely used to polish performances of lesser contemporary pop singers. The material does her no favours.

It’s an impressive, tantalising work from an artist who has dared to take the path less travelled.

He made this latest emotionally and intellectually supple album specifically for that dance community.

She still packs too many showboating notes into each songs. But she’s also finding a unique vulnerability on ballads like Loud, where she effectively confronts the haters with her humanity.