Late Night Alumni’s sound is influential is best served late at night, pun intended. Their sound soothes you when you need to take that extended breather (or time out), but much of Of Birds, Bees, Butterflies, Etc. easily serves to keep you grooving and moving to their familiar melodies and hooks.

Along with many of their club-friendly songs on the album, there are also some light, effervescent songs, too, yet none of these songs are overly complex. Overall, the music is wonderfully-textured and features a really nice accompaniment of layers of keyboards, guitars, and drum machine beats that, while predominately generous throughout, the moods within each song don’t overlap one another, and thus don’t run the risk of losing your interest.

Like a welcoming wagon, What’s in a Name opens the door to this album with Becky Jean’s amazing voice beckoning you to come inside a sound garden. And as the flow of this record picks up, come You Could Be The One which is an impressively fun dance song that has a sweet bass line beat underneath the rich vocal, and Light Reading which has a danceable beat that is something only LNA could come up with. The album closed swiftly with What If I Say Please, a Lounge-esque song that oozes sex appeal without having to disrobe right away. Simply chic.

Those with a taste for restraint are advised to look away now: The Temper Trap is not a band with the slightest concept of asceticism. Their debut album, Conditions shuns the intimate for the epic - a spot of U2-styled delay on the guitars of Sweet Disposition; the crunching rock of Fader; the huge repeated chorus of Down River - but so would yours if you had Dougy Mandagi singing. Mandagi is going to be hearing a great many comparisons to Jeff Buckley in the coming months, and given a voice like his - capable of effortlessly swooping and climbing around a pure falsetto - it's hard to blame the band for throwing the kitchen sink into the mix. With a more conventional singer, they might sound a little prosaic, but for now this is music with a thrilling otherness. It doesn't even matter that much of the time Mandagi appears to be singing tripe: with his voice, and a band this dynamic, he could get away with singing the racing cards.

Produced by Jim Abbiss (of Whatever People Say I Am… fame), the likes of Love Lost and single Sweet Disposition employ the same echoing histrionics as The Joshua Tree, but with a charming, cooed falsetto taking the place of Bono’s odious bellow. Soldier On and Resurrection continue along this vein, pitching them as a more sussed Coldplay that it’s definitely okay to like.

Sugababes 4.0, as we might term them since Keisha Buchanan was replaced by Jade Ewen in the most recent reshuffle, delayed the release of Sweet 7 by four months for reasons that haven't quite been explained. In the interim, Buchanan's vocals were rerecorded by Ewen – not that you can tell the difference – and a third single squeezed out. If that doesn't attest to the group's staunchly businesslike attitude toward their career, the music does: it was recorded in the US, and hotshot producers RedOne and Ryan Tedder have done their damnedest to make it as shiny and Auto-Tuned as possible. A couple of tracks – Wear My Kiss, About a Girl – have escaped with some quirky British-ness intact, but most are in either in thrall to Lady Gaga's robotronic sound or, as with the oozing lust of Get Sexy, just wrong for this particular band. Simply said, Sugababes have lost their touch.

It’s hard to be ambivalent about Zooey Deschanel. She’s a polarizing personality, one whose deadpan movie roles and big Bambi eyes are either charming or too cute for their own good. The same can be said for She & Him, a soft rock duo that features Deschanel doing what she does best as a film star: acting utterly adorable alongside a quiet, talented male character. Her co-star in this case is M. Ward, who produces the band's second album and frames Deschanel’s voice with a Spector-sized pile of instruments.

While Volume Two lingers in the same pop nostalgia as their sophomore album, 2008’s Volume One, Deschanel vocalizes with a more natural confidence, and Ward's production feels fuller and slightly more adventurous. Infectiously upbeat numbers In the Sun and Don't Look Back bounce from the speakers, but the more subdued sway of Me and You, Sing, and gentle closing lullaby If You Can't Sleep serve the unconcerned, charming ease of Deschanel's voice best. As before, Ward largely avoids the mic, though his rasp, rising in harmony on Lingering Still and dueting NRBQ cover Ridin' in My Car, provides highlights, as does the coy shuffle of Skeeter Davis' Gonna Get Along Without You Now. Although too sugary in places, She & Him's second time around spins wonderfully bittersweet.

What does Wonderland sound like? Any pop station on the dial, more or less, if Almost Alice, this companion to Tim Burton's latest film is any indication. Like many various-artists soundtrack sets, this features songs inspired by the motion picture – or, rather, the stories upon which Burton’s movie is based. As such one doesn’t need to hear them beside on-screen imagery for any critical context; they can be treated as separate entities, with no narrative to bind them. So it’s disappointing that so many songs bleed into those either side of them, artists unable to leave a significant, singular mark.

The tunes come in various flavors — shrill and self-important (Avril Lavigne), plodding and grungy (Shinedown), grating and synth — based (3OH!3) — yet with a few exceptions, none are original enough to hold your attention past the first chorus. For music ostensibly inspired by a trippy fantasy, far too much here is depressingly ordinary.