Ray LaMontagne, Till the Sun Turns Black

In truth, the most interesting thing about Ray LaMontagne's music is how it got so popular: his pleasant but unremarkable songs proved to have enough admirers to fill the Royal Albert Hall twice earlier this year, and his debut album, Trouble, reached No 5 with little fanfare. Its successor - available for nearly a year, but only now getting an official release, in keeping with LaMontagne's no-promotion-is-good-promotion ethos - offers more tasteful, minor-key Americana for lovers of that sort of thing. Perhaps it's LaMontagne's perceived "authenticity" that excites his fans: his life has been the stuff of Raymond Carver stories, and his music is suffused with due melancholy. But there's little clue in Till the Sun Turns Black as to why he, rather than any number of other contenders, should have become the dinner party accompaniment of the past few years.