Brooklyn band TV on the Radio have been critical favourites since they first appeared almost a decade ago. Always an intriguing proposition, they also seemed from their inception to be shrewdly aware of their musical Catholicism, as if they'd followed Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies before they'd even had their first jam. Brilliant, then, but tinged with Wire-friendly cerebralism.

After a couple of false starts, former Beautiful South frontman Paul Heaton’s last solo album finally received the high critical praise of the old days. But at 49 you can’t imagine him really caring too much about anyone else’s approval. This is the ex-alcoholic, after all, whose last tour was conducted by bicycle around the pubs of the North of England, who unashamedly told the world he was once a football hooligan, and who once set up a community bike park in Hull. When they made Heaton, they sure as hell broke the mould.

One of my most enjoyable gig-going experiences last year was seeing Mick Jones guesting with Gorillaz at the Roundhouse. The former Clash guitarist was clearly loving every minute of it. So much, in fact, that shortly afterwards he decided to reform his second-best band, Big Audio Dynamite, for a short UK tour, including the first of two London dates last night. But after two decades since this original line-up played together, the burning question was would this be a cynical, pension-funding slog, an arthritis-fuelled embarrassment, or something special?

This is the sound of a band who want to be big. Really big. Produced by Flood (The Killers, U2 etc) and recorded in California, the second outing from Scotland’s Glasvegas bursts with epic widescreen soundscapes, its chiming guitars designed to shimmer around arenas and festivals, its throbbing, pulsing synths adding depth and drama, the heavily treated voice of James Allan pleading and hollering.

Is Guy Garvey really as lovely as he seems? I hope so. Last night, on the first of two nights for the Bury band at the O2 Arena, their lead singer, this big bearded bear of a man, came across as clever, funny, confident, warm, positive and inspirational. He can sing a bit, too, possessing a voice of uncommon sweetness and purity and unerring accuracy, slipping effortlessly into falsetto and back when required. Really, unless you happen to be the kind of person who likes to swim through seas of cynicism, what’s not to like?

And blowing away cynicism was what this gig was all about: shamelessly, cheesily (arm waving? Tick. Singing along? Tick. Giant mirrrorball? Tick), this was an exercise in making 18,000 people feel better about themselves, about each other and about the world, using big bold and anthemic songs allied with sparkling spectacle to lift the spirits and banish the demons. Nor was this some kind of Panglossian la-la land; Elbow make music that’s rooted in real lived experience (something that’s inevitably accentuated by the northern-ness of Garvey’s delivery, sung as well as spoken), reflecting individual traumas and collective tribulations. But what shines through, always, is the big beating heart of this five-piece band.

They’ve played big festivals before, but to my knowledge they’ve never performed in a place the size of the O2, and yet Garvey was entirely undaunted, chatting garrulously, completely at ease. There was nothing here of the frenetic desperate nerviness of other great live bands such as Arcade Fire: the occasion was dignified by a sense of calmness, almost serenity, that was reflected in the rapt attentiveness of the crowd. Garvey was even unfazed when a pair of knickers landed next to him. “That’s never happened before,” he said, “in 20 years!” before calmly tucking them into his suit-jacket pocket.

Elbow’s set of nearly two hours was paced with the confidence of a band who have been together for 20 years, who know how to lay a long, slow-burning fuse, beginning with “The Birds” (from the new album, Build a Rocket Boys!), moving on through the stately big-beat waltz of “The Loneliness of a Tower Crane Driver” and culminating in the glorious explosion of joy that is “One Day Like This”. A smaller satellite stage gave Garvey (and for a while the rest of the band) a place to roam and pace, a station from which to survey the audience, while lights and screens added sparkle and colour.

Also, mention should be made of the sound system: I don’t know how it was from elsewhere in the arena, but from where I was sitting it was impeccable. I have seen countless gigs in which string sections were employed for what can only have been decorative effect, given that their sawings were almost always entirely inaudible, but here the four string players were strong and, well, stringy. And the rest was marvellously clear, too, from the deep rumble of the bass on “Station Approach” to the gently plucked acoustic guitar on “Weather to Fly”.

So, nothing to complain about? Well, in arena gigs the crowd have an important part to play in creating an atmosphere and trying to lift the lid, and here I think they shirked their responsibilities somewhat, being a bit on the passive side. But that’s all. And if I’ve given the impression that this was just the Guy Garvey show, this certainly wasn’t the case: the other four members of the band (pictured above) played their parts brilliantly, too: Elbow’s music is at times quite tricky and multilayered but they never missed a beat. It’s just that Garvey, the force of his personality, the bigness of his heart, is so compellingly watchable.

One of the great adventures of the 20th century is the story of LSD. A warped, unlikely slice of history not taught in schools, it has flavoured many aspects of life to this day. The countercultural explosion of the Sixties influenced the broader Western world - art, music, politics, religion, social issues and much more - and at its vanguard were key figures who believed that enlightenment might be found through the use of psychedelic drugs. These utopian mavericks were from all sorts of different backgrounds and they wanted nothing less than to turn society completely on its head, to change its value system.

Judging by the ballyhoo London’s Vaccines generated at the beginning of the year, it seemed a dead cert that they’d be pretty spiffy. If not the best thing since sliced bread, then they’d at least be fairly toothsome. Based on this, though – their debut album – it’s impossible to see what the fuss was about. What Did You Expect From The Vaccines? is alright, a bunch of familiar indie building blocks reassembled in a way that neither thrills nor surprises.

This impressive debut from the Devon-born Bray teems with allusions to a raft of classic British songwriters, not least Nick Drake and John Martyn, though Bray also claims to have had his synapses jangled by everyone from Led Zeppelin and Nirvana to Crosby Stills & Nash and Joni Mitchell. It's his English Pastoral mode which leads off the disc in the shape of opening track "The River Song" (obviously no possible relation to Drake's "Riverman"), with its wistful acoustic guitar, strings and harmonica.

There’s a gorgeous song on this album called “With Love”, on which singer Guy Garvey rhymes “dentures” with “adventures”. And there, in a nutshell, you have Elbow: juxtaposing grubby, prosaic earthbound reality with soaring romance, finding magic in the everyday. And what accentuates this gift of theirs is Garvey’s habit of singing in his native Lancastrian vernacular (why, apart from the Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner, don’t more English singers sound like English singers?); his accent summons up images of mottled northern townscapes and lowering skies, while lyrical flourishes such as the “simian stroll” of “Lippy Kids” add to the picture; his tenor delivery, by contrast, has a quality of sweetness and innocence. Grit and romance.

Build a Rocket Boys! treads a similar path to the one that Elbow have been following for the past 20 years, which is no bad thing – having produced just five albums in that time, they could hardly be accused of flogging a dead horse. The opening song, "The Birds", follows the familiar Elbow template, which was finally brought to a wider audience by the success of their 2008 Mercury Prize-winning album, The Seldom Seen Kid: a slow, solemn rhythm, the steady accretion of layer upon layer of instrumentation, a soaring melody, a sense of uplift, and finally a big moment of sunbursting ecstasy. Glorious. The remaining 10 tracks are a likewise familiar mixture of sweet, quiet, semi-acoustic tunes, darker guitar-driven numbers and widescreen epics, all densely textured, multilayered and packed with detail, supplemented by contributions from Manchester’s Hallé Youth Choir.

There’s always been a plaintive quality to Elbow’s music, but here it seems more pronounced, with songs such as "Jesus is a Rochdale Girl" (exquisite electric piano) evoking a powerful sense of nostalgia, a bittersweet yearning for the simplicity of youth. But there’s glory, too, in the form of “Open Arms”, a classic piece of singalong Elbow in the same vein as “One Day Like This” (from The Seldom Seen Kid) or “Grace Under Pressure” (from Cast of Thousands), and a song that will surely be swirling around the rafters of arenas on their forthcoming tour. Elbow: more power to them.

Poor Charlie Fink. First losing Laura Marling to Marcus Mumford, and then, last month, suffering the indignity of having to watch Mumford & Sons win Album of the Year at the Brits. Still, on recent evidence he’s the one with the real talent, and the confidence with which he changes style implies he knows it too. On 2009’s The First Days of Spring Fink had morphed from naive nu-folk into sophisticated Bill Callahan-style acoustica, and now he’s gone all Eighties pop-rock. Unsurprisingly for such a radical change of sound, Last Night on Earth has divided opinion, with the way people feel about it seemingly echoing their wider feelings about artists like Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty and The Psychedelic Furs.