The trouble with boasting a number of singer-songwriters within the same band is one of identity: a problem that didn't hinder Rhode Island's the Low Anthem on their breakthrough album Oh My God, Charlie Darwin in 2009 but does here.

This dream-team amalgam of Brazilian singer-songwriter Cantuaria with genius-guitarist Frisell makes music that's as close to Ry Cooder as it is to jazz.

It is almost certainly for the best that, although longlisted for the BBC's Sound of 2011 confection, 28-year-old Londoner Anna Calvi did not make the top-five cut.

Azure Ray is the some-time project of singer-songwriters Maria Taylor and Orenda Fink.

Co-written and produced with veteran songsmith Albert Hammond, Endlessly does exactly what is required by ratcheting up Duffy's sophistication without sacrificing the immediacy of "Mercy".

The advance buzz on Stevens' sixth album proper was that the banjo-toter had gone digital.

This year's Mercury Prize nominee and singer-songwriter Conor J O'Brien is an expert storyteller. From the minute he appears on stage, the packed Scala crowd are hushed in charmed fascination and stand rigidly, as though they daren't move in case they break their trance.

More cultural curio than lost classic, this is the 40th- anniversary edition of an album that, though often mentioned in the same breath as Forever Changes, was not available to buy until 2005.

This life-enhancing harvest of 34 poems reveals Duffy as a poet who covers the stormy waterfront of desire, devotion and despair. From early collections such as Mean Time to a preview of the forthcoming The Bees, the Poet Laureate runs passion's gamut from wild infatuation through absence and infidelity, break-ups, grief and solitude. .

Busy, heartfelt, garrulous English pop-rock like an overheard rant in a provincial pub: compelling, because it appears to reveal so much; frustrating, because the sheer volume of words drowns the valley.

Drummers' solo albums. Hmmm.

The grandmother at the centre of Gordon Brown's "bigotgate" election disaster made another foray into politics - in support of his party.