Why the hell is Ronson being applauded as a wunderkind for basically recycling big beat and hiring some horns?

For the lovers, this patchy album offering moderate advance on its immediate predecessors will probably suffice. But in truth it's an unmitigated failure to reconcile the sound of their past with a cohesive vision of their future.

Bloated, culturally inconsequential and decidedly average, the net result is a band getting far too high on an over-inflated sense of self-importance to the deafening chimes of cash registers the world over.

Perhaps the only interesting thing about Manson's latest record is the couple of anomalies hidden within.

Collaborations with Helicopter Girl on 'Don't Come Around Here', with Macy Gray on 'Smitten' and the loving if overproduced take on of Curtis Mayfield's 'It Was Love That We Needed' stand out as highlights but only because the rest of this collection comes with the words 'will this do' burned deeply into its flabby, bovine arse.

Overlong and oversexed, Futuristically Speaking... stumbles where you will it to stride; something surprisingly staid and mediocre from extraordinary circumstances.

The production, however, is first rate, Dre proving that he really is on fire at the moment. Eminem's microphone skills are similarly beyond question ' though a little too shouty on occasion. It's just that his self-indulgent and irritatingly stupid rants will prove too much for any audience that recognises irony in Beavis and Butthead.

These songs don't sound anxious, or troubled, just lacklustre.

Her bland-o-meter appears to be well and truly busted.

When you don't have the fun of playing spot-the-steal, all you're left with are wishy washy pastiches and a sense of growing fatigue.

There's none of the ABBA or Cardigans influence she claimed, nor any of the fun she seems to have in real life. For now she just sounds like another of pop's Stepford Wives.

Rarely lifting itself above mere mediocrity the album is no doubt destined to provide background music at thirty-something dinner parties and sedate wine bars.

While eight years ago Primal Scream embraced a hard edge that blew our faces off, this limp electro-pop doesn't stand up against the likes of The Knife, who infuse their work with both an inventiveness and emotion that's sorely lacking here.

The album, taken as a whole, is remarkably disjointed, because eight of the 13 songs on it have been written with the intention of dominating a different corner of music land.

The feeling remains though that their broad emotional strokes will have to concede something to intimacy and solitude to ever really win hearts.

A refreshingly old-fashioned orchestral score intercut with rather less appealing jaunts through an atonal avant-garde.

An aptly-named collection that will have even foul-weather fans scratching their heads as to where the pop has gone.

A skull-numbingly dull record, utterly bereft of the anti-establishment rhetoric these boring fakers aspire to.

The melodies feel functional at best, surprisingly charmless affairs that push all the right buttons with little passion or joy, while the lyrics are that depressing rock cliche: woe-is-me deliberations on the pressures of fame.

R.O.O.T.S. is so crushingly flat that it should waft between the cracks unnoticed.

Curtis doesn't sound like it was much fun to make, and it isn't much fun to listen to.

Encapsulating just how far Sean has come (if you're a Cash Money CEO, that is) Lil' Jon pops up to do his incomprehensible shouty thing, so ruining, for no reason at all, the only remotely catchy thing here.

'Invincible' is an album almost unbearably mired in schmaltz.

There's so little substance here, it's difficult to engage with the record or its creator.

Ultimately, D12 have made the fatal mistake of reducing themselves to the pitch that probably won them their deal: "think horrorcore rap, Gravediggaz-style, mixed up with middle-everything baiting lyrics even more extreme than Eminem." And that's not enough.

A drab and depressingly familiar proposition.

An average album over produced, Love? has Lopez throwing everything she's got at relaunching her pop career and coming up shorter than anyone could ever have thought possible.

His tenuous grasp on reality and good taste slips and he plummets into a tawdry, gratuitous and self-congratulatory flurry of misogyny, expletives and reggae.