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

If the name is both banal and irritating – seemingly you are expected to spell it kNIFE and fORK – this album is a triumph on its own terms. Despite it being at times overly self-conscious, there are occasional flashes of dark genius.

Green Day: The Studio Albums 1990-2009

Various Artists: Trojan Presents Freedom Sounds, a Celebration of Jamaican Music

Kieron Tyler

It seems almost a lifetime since Tom Jones was a man in very tight clothes who did well in the clubs of Las Vegas. After the fallow years, his 1988 cover of Prince’s “Kiss” kick-started a tongue-in-cheek rehabilitation period that lasted a decade, right up to the unforgettable “whoowauh!” of “Sex Bomb”. But what happened next surprised everyone. Jones started to relearn his craft. And now, after the last two decidedly post-ironic albums, the question remains, has “Jones the Voice” really become a genuinely credible artist?

The suspicion that Jack White is a humourless plank-spanker, harboured by certain members of the media at least, has been thrown into deeper conjecture this past month, with the news that he’s entered into a war of words with the compilers of The Guinness Book Of Records.

Sandy Denny: Sandy (Deluxe Edition), Like An Old Fashioned Waltz (Deluxe Edition), Rendezvous (Deluxe Edition)

Graham Fuller