One crucial difference is The Pierces' music has changed from something that sounded like awkward whimsy a few years ago into something middle-aged people will like; and that's basically the key to selling loads of records these days.

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.

If you can manage to put such quibbles aside--and it will be a struggle--Light After Dark has some redeeming features.

Jennifer Hudson would do well in stepping outside her comfort zone.

Worst of all, it turns out that commercially-minded dubstep is--perhaps inevitably--a much weaker prospect than its club counterpart.

Like on James Blake's album, every swoon is accentuated with the help of a computer and at times just sounds like someone crying and using Auto-Tune at the same time.

Could 'Blood Pressure' restore The Kills fortunes to their early glory days? It would seem that Hince's luck might be running out.

Who You Are doesn't entirely deliver, but even when its songs fall short of the promised hype, their potential is obvious.

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.

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

Collapse Into Now isn't a bad album but crucially it isn't a classic.

An effective, but ultimately generic, pop album.

Perhaps it's no surprise that eighth album Let England Shake is the first for which Harvey does not appear on the sleeve.

Aside from the odd pervy foray however, Doo-Wops & Hooligans is a fairly impressive pop record; packed full of guaranteed arena fillers, it's an album that's literally born to be big.

There are moments where the mini-pops Joy Division approach hits paydirt, notably on the relentless, single-minded surge of the single, 'Bigger Than Us'. But mostly the trio are at their best when they wriggle free from the colossal shadows they're hiding under.

The mixed messages are infuriating, and the complete lack of soul or identity perplexing.

Daft Punk have done their homework, and there's enough here to suggest that, with a bit of debugging, they'll have no problem hitting all the right buttons next time.

The rest is a lacklustre recast of her debut that displays about as much personality as Duffy's sweetly banal interviews, all of which suggests her production team are a weakened bunch. Like we said, a remarkable return.

Living up to expectations is tough, especially ones as high as those that have been hovering over Minaj throughout 2010. But it's hard to see who actually wanted to hear a record like this, stripped of curiosities and bombast, that leaves the biggest talent in hip hop with more to prove than ever.

There are a couple of songs so overfamiliar that Boyle can do little to revitalise them, including a predictable trudge through 'Auld Lang Syne' and the saccharine overdose of 'Away In A Manger', but Boyle herself once again emerges from trashy circumstances with class intact.

Kanye's ...Dark Twisted Fantasy is also the densely-produced work of a clearly erratic soul.

Swift's thoughtful honesty and surprisingly articulate take on life should be commended.

It's all a show with Kings Of Leon, and there's nothing they yearn for more than the chance to exercise their sexual prowess.

You certainly don't reject it outright though, not immediately, as almost every song at least knows the function of a chorus and everything has a glittery and palatable radiance, but such anodyne, airbrushed electro-pop leaves you searching for the magic ingredients.

Evidently it's his source material that defines him, and this time it's disappointingly weak.

It's hard to imagine how Hands All Over could have been any more underwhelming. In truth the only exceptional thing about it is just how average it is.

The Welsh agit-poppers' tenth album isn't terrible--certainly not as listless or confused as Lifeblood--but it does sound lazy, lyrically and sonically.

Like the three Killers albums, Flamingo is patchy, the sound of a vivid talent not living up to its initial promise.

Instead of ending tensely and dramatically they are the final whimper and sigh of an album named after a band that have lost their way and aren't sure which direction they should be heading.

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.

A likeable fusion though it is, there's none of the innovation of the much groovier The XX, nor are there the soaring peaks and chilly troughs, bonkers FX or even the gauche emotion that propels most dance music.

Night Work, the Sisters third studio album, is both their filthiest and most musically downbeat effort to date.

There's nothing raunchy or attitudinal here, just blustering dance-pop numbers and mushy ballads that owe a debt to Lady Gaga, minus all the flesh, spunk and bonkers stilettos.

A long 14 tracks, it's fairly unfocused and though the pair have done enough to prove that they're not just out to annoy, there is still something fundamentally unsatisfying going on here.

It's a horribly overlong, confused creation and Aguilera's brash personality and lioness voice are often sacrificed in pursuit of its many different styles. But when its experiments work, she's never sounded so interesting.

Underneath the goop, the recycled riffs wear thin and there is such lack of songwriting that, though they might get heavy, tracks also get dull quickly. But here's the rub: some of it's catchy and ridiculous enough to be enjoyable.

'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.

There are some fiendishly catchy hooks and very occasionally a real quality to some of the songwriting, enough to suggest that there are better things to come from the young trio once simply aping the already done-to-death genre du jour has finally lost its appeal.

A dismal and insipid collection of retrogressive mid-tempo ballads and textbook alt.rock moves.

Whacking on the slap and going electro needn't have felt so dysfunctional--the songs do hold up--but a complete disjunction in styles sounds confusing and ultimately robs the album, and perhaps her comeback, of an identity.

There are moments where Usher's old charm and vocal velvetiness briefly resurface and remind the listener of what a bright talent he once seemed....But these highlights are rare, and Raymond vs Raymond mostly sounds as shallow and unappealing as its singer.

Derulo's desperation to cover all commercial bases is only matched by an inability to stamp his own personality on them.

While one could be forgiven for dismissing American VI as the scrapings of a barrel, the truth is that five of its ten tracks are worthy additions to the Cash canon; no more, no less.

So despite the new outlook and lofty declarations, why does 'Falcon' fail to take off? The fault lies partly in Fray's parochial outlook.

However much electro trickery he has at his fingertips, he needs some songs first.

They seem keen to hold a mirror up to familiar pop tropes, but in doing so only reveal themselves for what they are - a gang of weirdoes carrying guitars. Perversely, their eagerness to engage the mainstream attention span often seems obnoxious in itself.

With personnel changes and a series of guest artists the names of which ever-increasingly overshadow whatever actual sounds they're making, Massive Attack have fought a continual struggle to surpass 1994's 'Protection'.

Drum and Bass dons Noisia have been roped in on production duties and they've put a fair deal of weight into tracks that might otherwise have sounded flat.

Their dedication to refined, pretty songs means there's a very narrow scope here that didn't afflict Grizzly Bear's "Veckatimest" and which makes proceedings here sound a little wan and wishy-washy after a while.

In This Light And On This Evening is a weak, ill conceived and uninspiring effort.

In the long, twisted canon of break-up albums, Everett doesn't only miss the mark, but makes arguably the first serious misstep of his career.

It's effective, not good. More tellingly, it's catchy in spite of Ke$ha, not because of her.

These pop-centric cuts are, however, where Snoop seems most comfortable, if not most talented.

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.

Ultimately, the list of collaborators on She Wolf may be an impressive roll call, but perhaps Shakira would do better in listening to her own instincts than that of others.

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.

If the hardcore fanbase feel a blanch coming on, this isn't all wilful eclecticism gone mad. King's work is The Fall's unifying factor that keeps it cohesive.

Before I Self Destruct needs as many bells and whistles as it can muster, because the music isn't going to cut it on its own.

There's little doubting Wale's potential but 'Attention Deficit' is so much like a lot of other rap fare out there that it will very likely suffer to be heard above the cynicism directed at hip hop in 2010.

If it were anyone else, this record would be fine. Solid. Entertaining. But it's not anyone else--Julian Casablancas, lead singer of The Strokes. As such, you look for more and expect to tune in to find Julian doing the same.

Over 11 tracks she fails to pull in a single noteworthy vocal, that's if you can even locate it beneath the waves of effects designed to disguise how very little is actually there.

You suspect Fits would fit better live, where the audience have no choice but to go with it, but here the trio sound slightly too pre-occupied with pleasing themselves rather than the listener, greedily ripping through riffs with a tenacity that, while impressive, is often ultimately self-defeating.

Despite the hilarious wordplay though, it's hard to imagine anyone returning over and over to the actual tunes, you're far better off with a DVD and its accompanying visual gags.

It wasn't disco-pop and it wasn't chart-fodder, and sadly for them--and their label--attempts to make them so with the help of Rick Rubin has resulted in a record that sounds similar to the last but with the heart ripped out.

Perhaps the less successful tracks here might have been novel and fresh 15 years ago, but interest in library music and analogue synths was piqued long ago and some of Love 2 sounds like one example of many these days.

While A Place To Bury Strangers are obviously still in awe of the original shoegaze crowd, Exploding Head is a step towards sounding unique.

The problem is, Go Hard's constantly unsure if it wants to top the charts of its own accord, dominate Radio 1 with big-name collaborations or avoid getting friendly with the mainstream at all, and so flits between the three hoping no one will notice.

What potentially made Album exciting was that it seemed to understand that pop itself doesn't make sense, and that it can still work just as well with all the wrong notes in all the wrong order.

Its ambitions far exceed its ideas, and the record is sunk by the kind of sonic bloat normally reserved for self-regarding sophomore releases.

It's all good sauce, one supposes, but as Mills wheels out of earshot, tongue and balls dangling in the warm night air, it's hard not to wonder where the thoughtful, sullen kid whose eyes cut like lasers through sink estate bull**it has got to these days.

What we are given this time round is a rather boring queue of unmemorable songs.

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

Can she master the bustle and colour of Latin pop as easily as she mastered sweaty electro? Tristemente, no. While never less than agreeable, Mi Plan is rarely more than that.

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

For all that she's miraculously clawed back here, the one thing that eludes her is the one thing that made her exceptional: her voice. Without it she's just another R&B singer, and, good as it is in places, I Look To You is just another R&B album.

The Time Of Our Lives is a great pop EP drowning in a sea of bilge.

Their strength lies in Turner's lyrical precision, his way of taking a scalpel to the minutiae of real life to make his heckling of fluorescent adolescents, weekend rock stars and scumbags seem like more than just booze-maddened ranting. Here, Turner's words aren't as direct.

The Bachelor has more than a whiff of a histrionic West End musical confined to a primary school assembly hall which means it's 10 out of 10 for effort, but for execution...

There exists a plodding, phoned-in emotional evenness here which, for a band trading on matters of the soul, is a big problem and one that will stop them entering the arenas those strings were employed for.

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.

Britney Spears, Rihanna, Kelly Clarkson, Beyonce and Leanne Rimes are all artists Sparks' music evokes, but very little of it could be said to be distinctly hers.

Perhaps with a bit more effort converting the jams into actual songs this would have been a worthy jump off as opposed to the album's incandescent highlight. Your forecast then, occasional flashes of brilliance but largely dreary.

But all too often there's the feeling that, in trying so hard to match the melodrama Ronson and Pallet have draped around him, Waller loses sight of the smaller picture and sounds confused, out of place.

Like a slightly under-serving best of, though, we get glimpses of what they've done before, but nothing substantial enough to set a new high-water mark.

It helps to pick the right tune and Dando has good taste, judging Gram Parsons ('I Just Can't Take It Anymore'), Wire ('Fragile') and Townes Van Zandt ('Waiting Around To Die') to be worthy of homage. But that's all this album is, really. Homage.

Frankly it makes our blood run cold with images of Sunday supplement purgatory, Spektor trading soft-focus licks with Katie Meluah from out of suburban glove compartments for decades to come. Thankfully the reality is nowhere near as bad as that.

In a number of 'mature' developments to their sound they've laid down impeccably produced horns (see bombastic opener 'World War III'), come within millimetres of salacious classic rock in the excellent "Poison Ivy" (watch out for the implied "bitch" in the chorus!) and, on lead single 'Paranoid,' dispensed a chilled-out post-baggy number.

It's well-built, yes, but almost too well built, many parts sounding like they've been lifted directly from SY's vast back catalogue and slotted into place, like a jigsaw that needed completing, rather than the sprawling documents of noise and confusion this band's name is built upon.

What pulls this album back from being anything but revelatory, however, is not only the typical lazy rock the band are purveyors of, especially 'Fire' and 'Fast Fuse,' but also the diabolical lyrical content that's employed throughout West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum.

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

It's a well-made, well-polished piece of material. But she ruins it by painting a wacky overcoat over something that was probably fine in the first place.

While Relapse is a slightly more energised record than the listless "Encore" (despite a Dr Dre production that is, for the most part, tired and dated), it's hardly the comeback many hoped for.

Back On My B.S. is 50 minutes of largely no-nonsense Busta, fist firmly planted in the mid-'90s. Of course, with that we get the expected ups and downs, but what Busta lacks in album length longevity, he makes up for in force.

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.

It's not just that 'Love Sex Magic' is the highlight, it's Fantasy Ride's only saving grace.

With their abilities to self-censure and decide at what's fundamentally good gone seriously awry, the results are more likely to induce a rolling of eyeballs and suppressed sniggers rather than gasps of admiration.

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.

Robbed of any arch qualities they might previously have hinted at, Art Brut are shown up as cuddly pop-comedians happy to tell the same joke over and over, devoid of any real insight and normal to the extent that you half-expect Argos to launch into a diatribe against aeroplane food.