Album: Loudon Wainwright III with Vince Giordano & The Nighthawks – I’d Rather Lead a Band

★★★★★ LOUDON WAINWRIGHT III - I'D RATHER LEAD A BAND Back to the Jazz Age

Loudon looks back at the Jazz Age

Those Wainwrights, they never cease to surprise. Get out your soft shoes and prepare to shuffle, for the “six-string diarist” has set his guitar aside and put on his metaphorical tux to croon with a band on more than a dozen timeless classics. Songs (to coin a phrase) that your mother would know.

Album: Andy Bell - The View From Halfway Down

★★★★ ANDY BELL - THE VIEW FROM HALFWAY DOWN Solo debut from Ride's guitarist

The Ride guitarist's solo debut gives us a glimpse of an impressive panorama

There are no one-size-fits-all solutions and Lockdown (it has surely earned its capital status) provided its own problems for many of us. For some, however, there was an upside. For people who find themselves powering through when they need to power down, it was a chance to take themselves away from the anxieties, expectations and obligations of the everyday and narrow focus. It was an enforced clarification of our lives - a diktat to breathe.

Album: Groove Armada - Edge of the Horizon

★ GROOVE ARMADA - EDGE OF THE HORIZON Dance duo produce a yacht rock stinker

First album in ten years from hit-making dance duo is a yacht rock stinker

Alongside Basement Jaxx, Groove Armada were one of the last big acts to blossom from the 1990s boom in clubland and DJ culture. They are responsible for bona fide classics in “Superstylin’”, “At the River” and “I See You Baby”, and also founded the Lovebox Festival, which was named after their fourth album.

Album: Róisín Murphy - Róisín Machine

★★★★★ ROISIN MURPHY - ROISIN MACHINE Delivering the disco goods

Murphy and long time Sheffield comrade deliver the disco goods

This is a musical homecoming for Róisín Murphy, both geographically and figuratively. She may have been raised in Dublin and spent her gig-going adolescence in Manchester, but Sheffield is where she began her life as a clubber and performer – and it’s with Sheffield scene mainstay of almost four decades, and Murphy’s friend of quarter of a century, Richard “Parrot” Barratt that she’s collaborated here.

Album: Corey Taylor - CMFT

★ COREY TAYLOR - CMFT An insipid vanity project

A wealthy, middle-aged rock star releases an insipid vanity project

The graveyard of tedious musical vanity projects – and the bargain bins of many record shops – is filled with solo albums by the lead vocalists of many fine rock bands. They may sell well initially, due to the power of well-financed record company marketing teams, but they are soon forgotten and adding to landfill sites around the country. In all likelihood, Corey Taylor’s disappointing solo effort, CMFT is destined to follow this path.

DVD/Blu-ray: Mademoiselle

★★ MADEMOISELLE Jeanne Moreau's star quality fails to save movie from cliché

Jeanne Moreau's star quality fails to save movie from cliché

Mademoiselle is Jeanne Moreau, in smouldering femme fatale mode: a school-teacher and town hall secretary in a small French village, she wreaks havoc by setting fire to barns, poisoning cattle and unleashing flood waters in a farm yard full of animals. As a seemingly uptight spinster of a certain age, she is above suspicion, and the villagers cast their eye instead on a stud of an Italian woodcutter (a suitably beefy Ettore Manni), who has sent the menfolk into jealous fury by seducing their frustrated wives.

Album: Sufjan Stevens - The Ascension

★★★★★ SUFJAN STEVENS - THE ASCENSION A brilliant song cycle for our times

A brilliant song cycle for our times

Sufjan Stevens is an artist of remarkable ambition. His 80-minute long new album, with 15 beautiful and poetic songs, belongs to a long line of pop experimentation that runs through from The Beatles and George Martin’s Stg Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to Björk’s own highly literate and endlessly inventive mix of dance music and daredevil sonic exploration.