It is unfortunate that those who hate Deap Vally find it way easier to articulate why than those who love them. There’s little new in the bluesy, garage-rock riffs that pose and swagger their way through debut album Sistronix, and it’s not as if - on the evidence of the hidden a cappella track that closes off the album - they have the greatest voices. Even the two-piece, guitar and drums setup has been done before, with the White Stripes so obvious a reference point it would be negligent not to mention it.

Blue Öyster Cult: The Columbia Albums Collection

Hawkwind: Space Ritual

Leonard Cohen has been the king of melancholy ever since he set out on his slow journey through the dark side. Befriending the black dog means being aware of the finite nature of life at every moment. It’s also about relishing slowness. As he enjoys mature old age, Cohen now inhabits, with almost joyful resignation, the blue mood he has made his own – to the irritation of those who have dismissed him as a purveyor of self-indulgent bedsit blues.

Sometimes as a critic one cannot help pre-judging an album however hard one tries not to. I expected the worst of this all-star jamboree bag from TV's most haphazard interviewer, which mixes some Hootenanny turns with new recordings of old favourites by some of music's blandest and/or most irritating personalities. Yet apart from a few excruciating exceptions this is not a bad something-for-all album to stick on when the in-laws pitch up on Boxing Day.

The last time we reviewed Krystle Warren on theartsdesk one reader responded by suggesting that it couldn’t be long before this Missouri-born singer-songwriter was as big as Beyonce (although he didn’t use that exact phrase). Yet even a 2009 performance on Later with Jools Holland didn’t have the effect it sometimes has in being the first big step up for both an artist’s sales and credibility.

B B King: Ladies & Gentlemen…Mr B.B. King

Kieron Tyler

It’s been a fallow few years in the long recording life of Van Morrison. The last release was his highest charting release in the US, but that was four years ago. His 34^th studio album finds him back on the Blue Note label, where he last recorded What’s Wrong With This Picture in 2003. Can you tell? The albums may come, the labels go, but in the end Van is Van and this set of a dozen songs confirms mostly to the sound Morrison has been turning out since the mysticism first got plush on the likes of Beautiful Vision and Poetic Champions Compose.

Like Orpheus, Bob Dylan is familiar with the underworld. As he gets closer to meeting his maker, the tone of his work has become less baroque, increasingly stripped down and almost naïve in its simplicity. His latest album marks another episode, perhaps the darkest, in a series of sung chronicles, blues-soaked dirges and timeless ballads that draw from the poet’s seemingly unstoppable stream of memories, dreams and reflections.

Lee “Scratch” Perry and Friends: Disco Devil - The Jamaican Discomixes

Thomas H Green