His 12th album is so girly it should be wearing pink tights and a tiara.

Eliza Doolittle is an album of potential but, for the moment, that's all it is.

Hooks hit their fleshy mark here and there--'Dead End' is a compulsive, '80s-flavoured high and 'High On The Heels'' clipped acid house proves endearingly gauche--but it's cold comfort on a record that fleshes out a promising template to only diminishing returns.

Much of this album fails to engage.... There are lengthy attempts at covering too many bases, when fewer distractions would have allowed Cook to create music with direction, not just location and motion.

So smooth nothing sticks, there's no guts, no depth and no matter how much he protests to the contrary, nothing to believe.

Much of the album bathes radio-friendly funk-rock in a kind of Balearic after-glow--it conjures that feeling of bittersweet triumph many will have felt as last night becomes this morning, the conquering of a dark that is now needed if sleep and recovery from such an act is to be possible.

For the most part, "The Understanding" saunters along without a trace of urgency, which is unfortunate as Royksopp were always at their best when electronic ingenuity rather than pastel-shaded synth washes were holding things up.

'Celebrity' does have it's moments. Sadly both of them are at the beginning.

Mostly this is U2 trying too hard, caring too much, being too insufferably genuine without having anything to be particularly genuine about.

Occassionally, the songwriting does contain flashes of thoughtfulness.

Throughout most of Untitled, Kelly seems to have taken the worst aspects of "Trapped In The Closet"--it's over-the-head relentless melodies and lyrics--and decided that they'll work in a song until the repetition instead relegates it to wallpaper.

Very much Tricky business as usual, the sound of a staggering talent laid-up with the longest case of musical flu in history.

The paucity of innovative ideas, reliance on old recipes and directionless experimenting make for a fairly tasteless repaste.

Unfortunately, over a third of the songs on this album are ballads, and most of them are fillers at that.

So safe and sanitised it makes The Fugees sound like NWA.

A 93 minute-long nervous breakdown that offers few concessions to the needs of the listener to be entertained.

Though he falls short of wholly convincing, the heart is almost always in the right place: a refreshing change from 99 per cent of those more interested in the image, not the message.

Charmingly forgettable.

The first half of the album as a whole is easy to forget....Cardinology takes a turn for the best around the midway point.

It’s not that "Welcome To The North" is a bad listen, but when you get to track six and you still seem to be stuck on track one, you get the feeling there must be more to ‘the music’ than this.

He still sounds temperamentally incapable of making a bad album, but he's made his first boring one.

"Jacket Full Of Danger" thinks it's funny but isn't - it's often pathetic.

"Crazy Itch Radio"... is the sound of an act running out of steam as it settles for the lowest common denominator with a nonchalant shrug of the shoulders.

They seem afraid to risk a good old-fashioned jungle break-out, the likes of which would be genuinely invigorating.

There's a good, possibly even a great, album in here somewhere, but Kid Cudi doesn't get very close to finding it.

Had the production been toned down a bit, to just Young and some lo-fi synths, these songs would have worked much better. But then that would have invited even more comparisons to The Postal Service. A noble, but ultimately uninspiring, effort.

The follow-up to 'Play' is, essentially, 'Re-Play', a cynical rehash of the melancholic-yet-strangely-uplifting schtick which sold ten million albums and soundtracked every single advert of the last three years.

'Night Train' has been pitched as somewhere between an EP and a mini album, with the impending fifth to be the "proper" follow up to 'Perfect Symmetry'. For their sake, but mostly for our own, this gifted band need to try a lot harder when it comes to that one.