Readers familiar with Nick Coleman’s 2012 memoir The Train in the Night will know before embarking on this book that the author suffered the worst possible fate for a music journalist: deafness, a problem (Sudden Sensorineural Hearing Loss) which began in 2007, had improved somewhat by 2010, declined catastrophically, then partially returned in his “good ear” before a severe sinus infection in 2015 wreaked further havoc.

The Go! Team have been unrivalled in the world of euphoric hip-pop after their samplerific debut, Thunder, Lightning, Strike, blasted its way onto the 2005 Mercury Prize shortlist. Since then, founding member Ian Parton has utilised everything from typewriters to gospel choirs to songs about milk in his quest to be a “cheerleader for a better world”. Their new album, Semicircle, takes this tradition of innovation and fun to new heights.

All things considered, there aren’t many criteria by which this album, however cosmopolitan its influences, sensitive and precise its vocals and supple its rhythms, is really the best of the year. I’ve had a few sleepless nights recently over the growing suspicion that, for example, Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN, and several contemporary jazz recordings – to mention only what I’ve been following closely – do more that’s landmark-constructingly novel.

It’s easy to be cynical about Christmas pop albums. This is, of course, because so many of them are awful, hastily cobbled together collections of nothing, and about as much fun as munching your way through a kilo of sixpences hoping to find a tiny nugget of Christmas pudding.

When Irish rock band U2 marked the release of 2014’s Songs of Innocence by loading it into everyone’s iTunes for free, it was an attempt to find a new angle on the "event release". While it was certainly that, it wasn’t, shall we say… universally well received. Thankfully, for its companion piece, Songs of Experience, the band has opted for an altogether more traditional delivery system.

For a band as big as Depeche Mode, in a venue as big the 21,000-capacity Manchester Arena, on a tour as big as their current Spirit tour, it almost doesn’t need saying that the pre-gig atmosphere is buzzing.

Over the last few months Paloma Faith has been talking up her fourth album, The Architect. There were self-perpetuated rumours of her rockin’ out, going off at a completely fresh musical angle, with lyrical content that sidestepped pop's usual concerns in favour of tackling societal issues and the state of things in our fucked-up world. Sounded good. However, a couple of clips of chatting about our duty to the welfare state and such, one featuring the writer Owen Jones, does not a political album make. In fact The Architect is business as usual, a continuation of the last album and not really very different from it at all.

Since she first appeared eight years ago, Paloma Faith has been the freaky-deaky theatrical alternative for girl-pop lovers, neither as raw as Adele or as plastic (and sex-obsessed) as Rihanna. She’s a very British sort of pop star, a colourful eccentric, deeply dipped in art and cabaret traditions, also inclined towards old-fashioned pre-rock’n’roll ideals of popular music. The Architect is lathered in orchestral bombast, assisted by David Arnold, with other contributors including ultra-mainstream super-producers/songwriters such as Sia, Starsmith and Jesse Shatkin. Apart from opening with a Samuel L Jackson monologue, the album’s first half is, then, rather predictable, with Seventies-LA-Motown opulence on cuts such “I’ll Be Gentle” and “Crybaby” (the former featuring John Legend), and Amy Winhouse-meets-Shirley Bassey epics like “Guilty”, alongside the giganto-pop monster “Warrior”.

However, during the album’s second half Faith hits a gold run of tunes, notably the funkin’ furious – and possibly even loosely political! – “WW3”, the chugging and vast “Still Around”, and the beatsy, solid Memphis-style soul-pop of “Lost and Lonely”. The Architect, then, is not exactly a departure from anything Paloma Faith has done in the past, which is a shame as she clearly has the creative potential to push boundaries, but for those who already count themselves as fans, there’s enough to here please.

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Overleaf: watch the video for "Crybaby" by Paloma Faith

Morrissey inspires some pretty fierce adulation, but there surely can’t be a fan on the planet who loves Morrissey quite as much as Morrissey does. This is the man who was reported, lest we forget, to have insisted that his memoirs be published as a Penguin Classic. This move put him alongside Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Graham Greene and, of course, Oscar Wilde.

There are more clothes flying Kesha’s way than onto the stage at a Las Vegas Tom Jones concert in the mid-Seventies. She started it. As she introduced her 2010 single “Take It Off”, she announced that since things were so hot she’d be discarding a few items. Duly, she removes the heavy, dark velveteen jacket, decorated with embroidered red roses, that she’s been wearing so far, and undoes her shiny gold shirt down to her sternum, revealing her bra. The song kicks in and the capacity crowd go nuts as she attacks her ballsy ode to a party hole “where they go hardcore and there's glitter on the floor”. A hail of tops bounces about the venue. Behind me a young woman, naked from the waist up, boogies like a headbanger.

Kesha’s freed-up party persona is contagious, the more so because her five-piece band, similarly clad in velveteen suits, with glittery cowboy ties, transform her older, electro-pop material into a Memphis-style rhythm'n'blues rock-out. They’re assisted by two male dancers/backing singers, one shaven-headed in glasses, the other a long-haired Adonis. This pair deliberately subvert the usual pop imagery by playing the coquette-ish role usually taken by female dancers, notably on opening number “Woman”, a horn-boosted feminist anthem on which the whole crowd shouts out the, “I’m a motherfucking woman!” chorus.

The bastards and assholes clearly haven’t broken Kesha

Of course, this sole British Kesha concert of 2017, amid a PR-announced “Kesha Takes Over the UK” campaign, is the European culmination of a comeback. Kesha has been through years of misery, resulting from a bitter, convoluted and well-documented legal conflict with the man who discovered her, Dr Luke. The songs on her recent album, Rainbow, deal with the subject, with her alleged abuse, exorcising it and finding empowerment in song. Perhaps more interestingly, in terms of her music, Rainbow is also about Kesha exploring new ways to express herself. Her work with The Flaming Lips, her country-rockin’ Yeast Infection outfit, and last year’s Kesha and the Creepies rock’n’roll tour all showed an artist keen to break free of the chart-pop straitjacket. Now she almost has, and the way the audience knows her new material seems to thrill her.

Indeed, when she brings her mum, the songwriter Pebe Sebert, on to help sing the strummed, Jonathan Richman-esque ballad “Godzilla”, one of Rainbow’s finest songs, and one her mother wrote, Kesha is so overcome with emotion she has to stop singing for a moment. Mostly, though, there are no such hiccups, as she shakes her waist-length pink hair extensions gleefully around, spits water – and later beer – over the audience, and hurls out towels she’s mopped her face with (“This is a big one – you can tear it into little pieces and share it”).

She’s given to very American emotional pleas, and proclamations of love for her fans. During “We R Who We R” she gives a speech about gender rights, saying there’s “no more room for hate and discrimination”. The crowd love her, very vocally. They’re mostly in their twenties and lathered in glitter, assisted by the handfuls of it Kesha and her band throw over them during the gig. They all yodel along with her jolly cowgirl stalker number “Hunt You Down” and sway, eyes closed during the new, kitsch-psychedelia number “Spaceship”, during which Kesha changes from her suit into a white, short-sleeved crochet-style dress and backwoods cowboy hat. On the final pre-encore song the whole Electric Brixton sings the self-empowerment anthem “Praying”, as if it were a hymn.

To finish the show, it’s time to go bananas as Kesha pulls her mega-hit “Tik Tok” out of the bag and the two dancers fire confetti over us. It’s one of the 21st century’s monster pop songs, a hedonist ultra-blast, and Kesha is sometimes almost inaudible beneath the crowd chorusing. She then ends with Rainbow album-opener “Bastards”, a big country-flavoured “fuck you” tune which explodes into a “Hey Jude” style “nah nah nah” vocal, accompanied by a tickertape cannon filling the air with flutter. “Don’t let the bastards get you down/Oh no, don’t let the assholes wear you out,” we all yell along. An apt close, to roaring applause. The bastards and assholes clearly haven’t broken Kesha. She seems like a woman who’s only just blooming into the artist she wants to be.

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Overleaf: watch a caped Kesha perform "Learn to Let Go" at the MTV Europe Music Awards 2017

Evanescence have been away for a while, and fans looking for a whole album of new material will be disappointed. There are only two proper new songs on Synthesis (plus a couple of instrumental interludes). Instead, it’s an album of operatically-inclined orchestral interpretations of music from the band’s previous three albums, tinted with a light touch of Gary Numan-esque gothic electronica. If you like the idea of Finnish symphonic metallers Nightwish having it out with Canadian mezzo-soprano balladeer Sarah McLachlan, then, hey, Synthesis is for you. Everyone else should stay well away.

Evanescence has long been the vehicle for lead singer Amy Lee, but she’s been off doing solo stuff, TV and film soundtracks, etc, since the band’s last tour finished five years ago. She does not, after all, need to work if she doesn’t want to. Evanescence’s 2003 debut sold enough to provide for her over the course of four or five lifetimes (or more!). So Synthesis is a labour of love, it’s Lee finally embracing her middle-of-the-road aspirations, assisted by Hollywood composer/arranger David Campbell. The tone has more in common with Celine Dion than her stated heroes such as Björk and the like. It’s the bombast of Sarah Brightman attached to the template of goth-pop hits such as Evanescence's globe-dominating chart-topper “Bring Me to Life”.

There’s something stentorian about it, headache-inducing, and not in that good ol’ heavy metal way, just in the sense that it’s teeth-jarringly histrionic. Take “The End of the Dream”, originally on their last eponymous album: it starts out moody and intriguing, Lee’s plaintive vocal emoting over a grumbling electronic tone and some bells but, about two minutes in it explodes into a dirge that then, in turn, blows up into truly preposterous Wagnerian pomp. Of the new tracks “Hi-Lo” and “Imperfection”, the former is forgettable but the latter has a certain gothic electro-pop bounce before it goes completely OTT like all the rest.

There’s a market for this kind of music, a big one, which is great news for Evanescence, but not for music lovers the world over.

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Overleaf: watch the video for "Imperfection" by Evanescence