The Dartmoor folk star’s latest album launches into a dramatic retelling of the voyage of the Mayflower, from its departure from the iconic Mayflower Steps in Plymouth (actually, the real steps are down to the women’s loo at the Admiral MacBride pub) to their landing on what the locals on the other side of the ocean called Patuxet.

There Is No Other’s third track “Vultures” is about Isobel Campbell’s adopted city Los Angeles and the music business. Instead of assuming a hard-edged tone the song is crystalline, reflecting on “vultures, circling round… tall trees reaching so high, guarded question… tall trees don’t fade away with your ego…  everybody got opinions.” Ironically, “Vultures” was recorded without knowing what was coming next.

Here it is, at last: Meghan Trainor's long-anticipated third album, scheduled for last summer, but mysteriously delayed because Trainor wanted to "add more songs". Not everyone was convinced by that story – there were rumours she was really planning to quietly scrap the whole thing because of a disappointing response to the early singles. But she didn't give up, and the final product weighs in at a hefty 15 tracks.

About half of them share the same R'n'B-lite flavour of the recent single, "Blink". And yet, you can't help thinking it was really the first offering, "No Excuses", that she should have been trying to follow. It was cheery and light, and a whole lot more fun. 

And so it is with the whole album – the songs that stay with you the longest are the sassiest or most heartfelt. "Funk" has an old-school George Clinton feel, and "Nice to Meet You" (featuring Nicki Minaj) carries off some outrageous hip-hop beats through its sheer chutzpah. A few of the ballads aren't half bad either. "Wave", a love letter to husband Daryl Sabara, is suitably lush. "Working" is slower and huskier and digs deeper into Trainor's psyche. "Never liked compliments", she sings, "because it's always been so hard believin' them".

The singer's other reflections on relationships and self-worth don't all work so well. "Baby Girl (love yourself)" is a dreary electro-pop/ R'n'B monstrosity, and "Here to Stay" is just lacklustre and forgettable. The most frustrating track is "Another Opinion" which is basically a lovely, sunny tune spoilt by its unnecessary electro-pop overtones.

Trainor has been experimenting with such styles ever since her second album when she ditched her retro candy-cute schtick in order to sound more contemporary. Since then she's also tried out other personas like the romantic balladeer on "The Love Train" EP and, of course, her sideline as a judge on The Voice. But throughout, she's been at her finest when she's kept some of her cheeky, girl-next-door charm. For all its inconsistencies, the best of Treat Myself does exactly that. 

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@russcoffey

Overleaf: Meghan Trainor's video for "Wave"

Doubters presume Kesha’s multi-million-selling success derives mainly from a decade ago, the time of her monster hit, “Tik Tok”? Since then, the thinking goes, after the gruelling, much-publicised sexual abuse court cases with Dr Luke, she’s more a figurehead for #MeToo, than an actual pop star. Not true. Kesha’s last album, her third, 2017’s Rainbow, was a chart-topper in the States and a Top Five hit here.

Mark Jenkin’s black and white masterpiece about clashes between incomers and locals in a Cornish fishing village was made on a 1976 clockwork Bolex camera that doesn’t record sound – all that’s added later, including the actors’ voices – and hand-processed by him in an old rewind tank in his studio in Newlyn.

Folk music has always thrived in times of adversity and danger and in times when (to coin a phrase) “nothing is real”. All the above apply now and folk music, its roots in the dirt of our septic isle, speaks to us eloquently as balm, warning, and call to action.

The first album from the Boston-bred songwriter Squirrel Flower opens and closes with autobiographical songs. “I-80” opens with the artist - real name Ella O’Connor Williams - giving up on lyrics, poetry and, later, giving up on love, its rootless melody channelling the road west to Iowa where Williams went to college before building to a relentless crescendo.

Since first getting together at the fag end of the 20th century, Black Lips have largely played the role of garage rockers with a hint of country and western about them. The songs on their latest album, however, turns their schtick somewhat on its head.

Dennis Hopper’s first starring role, in Night Tide from 1961, as a naïve but curious young sailor bewitched by a siren, offers a strange mirror to his role as the evil Frank Booth in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986). If anything, he offers a preview of the bemused Jeffrey Beaumont played by Kyle McLachlan in Lynch's masterpiece.

Remembrance of clubs past motivates Neil Tennant at 65. The melancholy and wit which gave ambiguity and amused bite to the Pet Shop Boy’s pop pomp has matured naturally into distanced reflections on hedonism. Recorded partly in Berlin’s iconic Hansa studio, Hotspot's vintage synths add a mechanistic clank and tactile detail to their music’s glide, the Hi-NRG pulse which so entranced them in the 1980s now part of a Proustian rather than active E rush.