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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The result is a quirky and poignant little time capsule.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.