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.

An enjoyable and soulful album, the highlight of which is the title track Indian Ocean.

His long gestating third album is every bit as fantastic as earlier offerings, stuffed with narratives of contemporary bohemian life; wordy, free-flowing verses giving way to singalong choruses, spiced up with perky, lateral hooks.

Failing to commandeer some stormy rockers, Faithfull proves most evocative on a couple of tender, stripped back ballads, Love More Or Less (written with Tom McRae) and Nick Cave collaboration Deep Water.

Gospel choirs hum and swell tenderly beneath the rougher edges of his riffs. They add mature, universal gravitas and often a holy ecstacy to an intense, youthful lyrical tangling of religion and romantic obsession that regularly finds him poised "between love and abuse".

A genuinely superior slice of small hours electro-pop.

Tomorrow... deepens on repeated listening, with Yorke locating moments of beauty and calm in the eye of his anxiety.

What makes it so compelling is a classic rock Americana set up deftly interweaving lazy twin guitars and splashes of Hammond organ over steady rolling chord progressions that gather power with each repetition.

It is all quite delightfully nuts.

If Art Official Age is a juicy reaffirmation of Prince pop basics, Plectrumelectrum, his collaborative album with 3rdEyeGirl, represents a more intriguing departure, even if it too reaches back into the past, making a bold connection with a time when Jimi Hendrix was the last great black American rock star, before funk really left rock 'n' roll to the white man.

It is as self-indulgent as Seventies progressive rock, albeit filtered through a 21st-century indie-rock sensibility that keeps things taut and edgy, with virtuoso posturing at a minimum.

If you take this album in the spirit of throwaway fun in which it seems to have been concocted, it is harmlessly engaging, although all of these tracks have been delivered more persuasively before.

It's great to have Lee Ann Womack back with such a sad and lovely album.

Cohen’s triumphant return to the live arena is reflected in the growling assuredness of his vocals. An absolute treat.

There is a maturity and conviction to this album that makes it a step up.

A fizzy lifting drink of an album.

Still channelling Lynyrd Skynyrd, REM and the Band, the rest of the Crows keep the tyres on the tarmac like pros.

This record falls into all the icky, celebrity duet traps.

At times it does sound like it is trying a bit too hard to please. But it's more pop than Pop ever was, and it certainly does the job it apparently sets out to do, delivering addictive pop rock with hooks, energy, substance and ideas that linger in the mind after you’ve heard them.

This is not jazz for the purist but it is a heartfelt and entertaining tribute to one of the musical greats.

The Kooks have come out fighting though, completely re-evaluating and overhauling their sound and the result is an exuberant fourth album bristling with character.

She shows in Everything Changes that she can keep up with the times.

There is a joyful exuberance to Revival, which has U2 and Coldplay arranger Rupert Christie at the helm.

If (oh dear) you haven't got a Richard Thompson album in your collection, then this is a great way to get to know a truly inspired songwriter. But even if you know his work inside out, then you will still find much to enjoy listening to a master re-touch some of his best works.

Track for track, it’s the equal of anything Petty has released in a long and righteously distinguished career.

Sparks, Fun., Norah Jones and Jarvis Cocker imbue pithy vignettes with their own personalities, Jack White and Jack Black play with chirpy nonsense songs and Swamp Dogg’s soulful take on America, Here’s My Boy is heartbreaking. This is certainly more than an academic exercise.

Given Lewis’s age and retro-musical instincts, major stardom may now be beyond her grasp, but if you like your pop music grown up, she’s up there with the big boys.

As Watson sings about love, kindly and thoughtfully, the whimsical delivery and outdoorsy imagery recalls his fellow Oxfordians, Stornoway. At times it gets too pretty and shallow.

Inevitably, the singer’s less appealing views do invade the material.

Recommended for the drive home from festivals.

Everlasting is an eclectic mix.

Overall, it's a good album.

With Williams it's classy and classic country. This is a very good album.

A great deal of care has gone into the record.

It is genuinely embarrassing at times, compounded by the intrusive sense that the songs were really written for an audience of one (who, like the rest of the world, has reportedly shown no interest in listening to it).

If this record feels like a triumph of style over substance, I still like its style.

A clever range of textures (from raw cello through stuttering piano to popcorn-light synths) keep things interesting and there’s a bravery in the way she spins inspirational lyrics from her long battles with addiction and bipolar disorder.

The album was recorded in Berlin and the dark pulse of that Krautrock influence gives the songs a steely sleekness of purpose (and real cohesion), while the band layer a vigorous variety of sounds and tempos on top to keep things interesting.

There are things going on here that will, in all likelihood, percolate through to stadium pop in due course but Hyde lacks the vocal presence or structural songcraft to shape the material into something greater than its parts.

A nice comeback album.

The way their voices swoop and bend together is a delight.

This is an album full of wistful, careworn emotions and a sense of quiet profundity.

Throughout it all, Sheeran stays true to the essential artistic notions of the classic singer-songwriter genre by treating his music as a vehicle for emotional veracity, personal revelation and universal inclusion.

There’s plenty of life in the old dog yet.

Love Frequency only occasionally sets the pulse racing.

It contains Frankie Knuckles-era house music, hip-hop breaks and some interesting electronica. However, the band are not the genre-defying pioneers they think they are.

Without the hip-hop beats that peppered her first album, the songs here lack a sprinkling of brashness--a little of the Kim and Kanye touch would have helped.

You suspect that getting on the wrong side of White would be inadvisable. Thankfully, he has channelled his demons in Lazaretto to create one of the great break-up albums of recent years.

It’s a brief cloud over a lovely record that is the aural equivalent of lying down in a sunny meadow, located somewhere between Stockholm and Nashville.

The result is a quirky and poignant little time capsule.

Like Barrett and Wilson, Teleman indulge a whimsy that can tip into tweeness. But the melodic repetitions and slightly eerie echo around the guitar line give it a weird edge that works.

It’s a shame to see a talented guy rushed into making the wrong record.

This may be the most raucously uplifting divorce album ever heard.

There are big, generalised emotions: hurt, love, loss, transcendence. But none of the tiny, idiosyncratic observations that make and break relationships.

A lovely, and rewarding record.

Although rejected by the singer in his lifetime, this is pop, not high art, and it has been handled with considerable care, giving us a glimpse, however illusory, of what this extraordinary talent might actually sound like had he lived.

ere are a few moments of awkward student theatre wailing, but they're blips in an otherwise richly rewarding odyssey.

Everything is quite extraordinary; an orchestral poem of spiritual surrender that offers up a gorgeously bleak depiction of “the whole magnificent emptiness”.

Sheezus should confirm Allen’s status as a national treasure, reason enough to be cheerful.

In a mood of nostalgia, Albarn is looking back at his life as it unspools over some of his most subtle, beautiful and melancholy melodies, rendered in a slightly hung-over, low-fi tone, occasionally pepped up by samples from producer Richard Russell.

The result is not bad: though you miss the unpredictable blasts of raw hellfire from the cult classic Surfer Rosa era, the band find some gritty, grindy melodies in the bigger, slicker vein of 1991’s patchy Trompe Le Monde.

While Caustic Love is clearly the work of a maturing singer-songwriter (shedding jaunty charm for depth and ambition), it finds the 27-year-old still skittering around in search of an artistic identity.

His smooth but expressionless voice can be a little bland for a frontman (and is always improved by Thorn’s occasional harmonies) and his carefully considered lyrics have a tidiness that sometimes verges on the prosaic. Yet the gentle mesh of flowing melody, woven instrumentation and mood of hard-earned contemplation adds up to something quite profound.

These abandoned sessions probably would have been ignored had they been released when first recorded. But to ears and sensibilities realigned to Cash’s brilliance, this really is a lost treasure.

Strangers is his most measured and thoughtful album to date.

It may be nothing new but her punchy, uplifting set of pastiche Sixties and Seventies soul, r’n’b and disco is perfectly pitched with just an appealing hint of exaggeration.

There is the odd failure (23 is a saccharine ode to her husband, the footballer Gerard Piqué), but Shakira still traverses musical styles like few others.

Wilson has nothing wildly original to say about the state of modern Britain, but sounds authentically angry on behalf of people on minimum wage or zero-hours jobs.

The album never quite catches fire like their live performance but it gets close.

An unadventurous set list reworks some of his most thoughtful and sombre songs with a selection of classic covers, all given a lush production gloss by the late Phil Ramone. What lifts it to a higher plane is Michael’s smooth and expressive singing.

Full of sparkling hooks, the results do a good job of melding Minogue’s effervescent pop grooves with the dense, heavily treated vocals and deep sub bass of modern electro dance trends.... Subject matter and delivery are strained by coquettish pandering.

She brings excellent phrasing to Haggard's powerful lyrics and there are two standout songs [Sing Me Back Home and Someday When Things are Good].

The results are fantastic: an album of world-beating standard yet still intimate and friendly, an epic of the everyday, a romance of the real.

These songs are the strongest she’s written to date, with terrific hooks and melodies throughout.

This record is rammed full of fantastically fresh and challenging beats and bears the hallmarks of Cherry's streetwise style.

Beck has always been hip. Even on his 12th album, he manages to make the dawn sound like where it’s at.

It’s an assured and at times impressive debut for a blonde determined to have some fun with her image and her music.

Lakeman again shows off his fine multi-instrumental skills--songs such as The Wanderer buzz--and there is a delightful slow lament called Portrait of My Wife.

The 14 songs ooze energy and style and feature long-term collaborators such as Alan Kelly, Ian Carr, Roy Dodds and John McCusker.

This is an elegant, mature work of a songwriter and performer at the height of her powers.

Not really a blockbuster, it’s the kind of album that makes most sense in the small hours, after the party is over.

Vega’s enduringly classy knack for quirky rhythm, sleek ideas and direct-but-detached delivery shines through much of this album, though it does suffer at times from the leaden, ye olde phrasing hinted at in the title.

Assured and still in thrall to the spinning lights, Little Red confidently and unpretentiously reflects Katy B’s transition from eager young clubber with a curfew to a mature young woman with a home of her own and the ability to hold a little something in reserve.

She’s at her best channelling the mature, suburban melodrama of vintage Tammy Wynette on Stay at Home Mother and the all-out D.I.V.O.R.C.E.-style heartwrench of Waterproof Mascara, on which a little boy’s mother thanks God for a cosmetic that “won’t run like his daddy did”.

It feels more like a primer for live shows rather than an end in itself, a set of water colour sketches to be inked in later.

A gorgeous noirish set of cinematic songs with a bittersweet emotional core.

It is quirkily appealing without quite being convincing. Lacking an emotional centre, it’s not really deep and dark enough to posit Ellis-Bextor as a sensitive singer-songwriter.

There’s a lot of great stuff on here, but it doesn’t hold together and doesn’t come close to being one of Springsteen’s great albums.

For all its length (16 tracks) and elaborate staging (with videos for every song), the album has a focus and intensity unusual in multi-writer ensemble productions, a sense of purposefulness that holds the attention even when the songs sometimes drift off in search of a chorus.

There are much more vibrant records and live songs in Los Lobos's back catalogue but this is a sweet reminder of their talent.

This album continues the striptease of Britney’s career. But behind each discarded veil there is just another veil, an insubstantial gauze masking teams of (presumably unphotogenic) producers, writers, stylists and sloganeers.

It is all so swaggeringly confident and honed to a perfect point, it is hard not to be caught up in its own sense of conviction.

It is, I suppose, all very tasteful and yet it retains the original’s inherent oddness.

She doesn’t do anything wildly original with them [musical genres], but she has fun.

The result is as swaggeringly confident, brash and modern as any mainstream hip hop being produced anywhere in the world right now.

It is exhaustingly, daringly, bafflingly brilliant, but you might want to lie down in a dark room after listening.

She sounds like a woman, and an artist, who’s finally found herself.