It's the end of something, alright, and Johansen and Sylvain – as great as they once were as the backbone of the Dolls -- should get the message and move on.

A cash-in thin on new songs that confirms Winehouse was still a long way from finishing up the five-years-in-the-making follow-up to "Back to Black."

The soundtrack strives for a quirky, melancholy resonance befitting its tragic subject, but too often it comes off as gimmicky and ponderous.

Duffy's pinched voice warbles into Lulu land pretty frequently, and that squeakiness isn't helped much by the music: five ballads swathed in strings and heartache, five uptempo tracks with a bit more bounce but not much attitude.

Most of it might fascinate for a listen or two, but presenting this as new work at top-end retail prices is the type of barrel-scraping exploitation that would've made the ever-wary Cobain retch.

It would've been fascinating to see how far a full-blown collaboration might've taken her, but Aguilera spreads out the songwriting and production credits in search of more hits, most of which come off as flimsy gimmicks.

It's hardly ground-breaking, but when Tyler brays, Perry blooze-ifies on guitar, the cow-bells ring and the back-up singers wail, Aerosmith approximates a cartoony version of its glory days. But the album's second half nosedives.

With music as rigidly formulaic as this, no wonder the teens in her songs want to party until they blank out.

The vocals are slathered in Auto-Tune (didn't Jay Z proclaim Auto Tune dead once already?). The rhymes are simplistic ("You're the gas in my car, you're my petrol/You and I go way back, retro") or silly ("This is the original, this has no identical"–-really?). And the music's reliance on rhythmic and lyrical repetition (as opposed to progression and surprise) becomes wearying.

LuLu is a work that invites derision, an album that wallows in a tarpit of ugliness.

'Famous Girl' throws the album off balance, and makes every note feel exploitive and self-serving. In trying to restore his reputation, Brown ends up damaging it even more.