Feeder are in danger of being a schizophrenic band, unrecognisable from their once “trademark” sound and prone to style swings on a whim.

The overriding impression is that “The Documentary” could be the biggest fanboy album of all time... and that The Game, as much as he thinks he’s a player, is being played by others far more powerful than himself.

Ethical incontinence notwithstanding, Xzibit is an undeniably charismatic vocalist, with a gift for pure, jolting, testosterone-packed aggression that leads to some rather magnificent moments.

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

The thing is, charisma and human warmth – or at least a plausible facsimile of them – are vital to the success of a ballad. And the bald fact is that Beyoncé and her handmaidens are utterly incapable of faking sentimentality.

What niggles is that many of the songs aren’t whole enough or, if we’re honest (and it’s hard because he’s just so darn loveable and charming), good enough for an album. Even superior compositions like “Art Teacher” suffer under this record’s careless construction.

You’d believe this was a “Weird Al” Jankovic record had you tuned in halfway through.

An often mediocre record, with a few peaks and an awful lot of troughs.

It’s not Razorlight’s reflected experience that’s the problem, though, nor their clichéd rock‘n’roll romanticism - it’s the bewildering narrowness of their sonic vision.

It's just not ambitious enough, lacking the impact to draw new fans in while just about satisfying those already captivated by the band’s admirable class.

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.

Awesomely anodyne, breathtakingly boring and crushingly clichéd, â??Astronautâ? singularly fails to take flight.

Troublingly short on tunes.

Crucially, if you stick with a formula, the least you can do is improve it. Unfortunately "Chuck" doesn’t and there’s nothing that’s even remotely equal to "Fat Lip" or "All Messed Up".

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

By third song, "Faded Beauty Queens", the recipe is already stalling, and the harmonies begin to sound flimsy.

Mainly, though, this is a terribly weary album, tedious when it strives to be seditionary, trading on utterly devalued notions of attitude and aggression.

Should you own the band’s magnificent first three singles (collected on the “Three EPs” mini-album), it’s hard to imagine you’ll ever really need another record by this conceptually brilliant, artistic dead-end of a band.

While the sound is distinctly Crowded House, it’s darker than previous offerings.

At its best “The Silent Hours” is a robust, reasonably straight ahead rock record and at its worst, a lumpen, forgettable distraction.

"Afrodisiac" is Brandy’s most personally revealing album to date and her least lyrically fluffy, but its intimacy is hamstrung by the MTV-flavoured, formulaic gloop with which most contemporary, American R&B now seems to be contaminated.

It's probably safer to view "Gettin In..." as the sound of an old man lying back in the ocean with well-deserved drink. A straight-up collection of rock n roll songs that he probably enjoyed playing on as much as anything else in his bizarre life.

Imagine "Hello Nasty" if it had entirely consisted of "Three MCs And One DJ" and you're close to understanding exactly how "To The 5 Boroughs" sounds.

Brandon Flowers has a horrible, honking seal bark of a voice.... Faced with this significant disadvantage, The Killers have cannily crafted a wall-of-sound songwriting style so bombastic it almost suits Flowers' sledgehammer vocals.

They ‘sound’ well-written without actually being so – the ultimate in pop sophistry.

It's not, in the final reckoning, a terribly important and wildly impressive record.

So, we have a maturing Ms Lavigne, distancing herself from the teen antics of her "Let Go" debut, but struggling to find any stories worth telling save for boyfriend trouble and dead grandparents.

OK, so it’s not Norah Jones dinner party territory and there’s enough torturous mayhem to gratify their faithful ‘maggots’ but there’s equally a contrived nature underlying the habitual havoc.

Frequently, it sounds like the band have spent most of that time labouring to make their fifth album as monumental as possible. Where once they swung, however ironically, now they plod. Slowly. Ponderously. In expensive lead boots.

It's, well, a thoroughly professional record. And therein lies the problem. Method Man, perhaps more than any other Wu-Tang member bar ODB, has personality to burn, and trying to force it into a box fit for any other hit rapper is an impossible task.

One meandering ballad follows another, each one overlong and labouring under the illusion that emotional profundity is more important than a decent tune.

For a handful of decent Morrissey songs – and, it must be said, some of his best ever vocal performances – we should be grateful. Ultimately though, for all these tantalising reminders of greatness, "You Are The Quarry" still feels like a man unnecessarily trapped by the limitations of his band and the extent of his loathing.

Appallingly tasteful.

That it'll be her most scrutinised release is a problem, because its stilted, wearying, obsessive concentration on an uncomfortably forced notion of it's creator's sexuality means it's the only album she's made in the last dozen years that doesn't merit such focussed attention.

With lead single "Yeah!" being a genuine cyber funk masterpiece, and a lot of other perfectly respectable tunes backing it up, "Confessions" isn’t hard to like. But with the overall impression being of nice Usher making another nice album, it’s impossible to get excited about.

Musically, it's a mess.

Mainstream, bleeding-heart balladry, tempered by slightly outre arrangements.

Ultimately it makes you feel the loss of Pavement all the more.

There is, however, nothing that remotely touches the pop genius of 'Can't Get You Out Of My Head' and, by the halfway mark, the album's sagging badly.

There’s conceivably a great record still lurking inside this band but you’re going to have to wait just a bit longer to hear it.

He can't seem to decide whether he wants to make a straightforward hip-hop remix of Jay-Z's tunes, quirky sampladelia like DJ Steinski or Coldcut, or an avant-garde project in the vein of plunderphonic composers John Oswald and Negativland. A lot of the time, he falls awkwardly between the three camps.

Mostly though this is bland Hollywood fodder masquerading as something more.

All fine in principle, except we've heard it all a million times before.

In a nutshell this is The Beatles most average album with some of the fluff removed.

Ultimately there's something very 80s about Pink. Something very kitsch and plastic; something very 'Breakfast Club'.

Adams can undoubtedly pen this classic rawk stuff with his ears closed and, as a result, the 15 tracks here lack heart.

This may be the point at which even those well-disposed to the nice and the quirky start to note diminishing returns.

A bitterly disappointing, lacklustre album that is sadly short of distinct memories of any kind.

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

Essentially if you like the bands that have so clearly influenced Stellastarr* you'll like this record. But it's difficult to really love a band that haven't yet found a voice they can truly call their own.

Much of 'Amazing Grace' is the tired evidence of a man rehashing the same ideas - rather than sounds and movements - like a robotic, assembly line Andy Warhol.

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

We should laud Young for taking such risks at this stage of his career but 'Greendale' sounds like the sort of small town you spend your whole life running from. Or the place you go to retire.

It's certainly very cleverly composed and constructed but ultimately sounds aloof and impenetrable and, as a result, somewhat devoid of emotion.

Taken in three-minute doses, 'D-D-Don't Stop The Beat' sounds fantastic. Taken all at once, it's proof that too much fun can be hard to bear.

New frontiers for rock aren't exactly broached, but then that was hardly the point.

Unfortunately, none of it's even remotely memorable.

Sadly for such weighty themes of trust, betrayal, loneliness, living out of a suitcase and long distance relationships, the lack of true darkness amongst the sweetness and light is a little frustrating.

Before descending without hope of return into the treacle swamp of R&B ballad hell that beckons at the halfway point, 'Dangerously In Love' offers a few passable moments.

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

Had they imploded in some bizarre gardening accident following the release of 'Danger! High Voltage' all would be forgiven. That single still sounds classic and retains the power to get Aunt Peggy off her seat at the wedding reception..... However, the rest appears to be have been cobbled together in a matter of hours.

It's an inferior re-run of the Marilyn Manson hammer horror panto that's been showing since '96.

The best songs on this cunning, efficient, frequently daft and fractionally disappointing album are the ones which sound most like the misty reveries of [their] debut.

If you're a fan, there's enough of what you expect from the Mac here not to disappoint.

For now at least this is the sound of a band trying to do too much at once and sinking under the weight of their heroes.

An album of patchy brilliance but with far too many freewheeling moments.

Probably makes more sense in a theatre than on your CD player.

The fact that experimental, abstract beats have become so popular is partly down to him, but now that everybody's doing it, he has to do it more, or better, or different.

Little more than comic book soundbites, wilting in the jagged, feverish shadow of their illustrious forefathers.

'Up!' is not without its little oddities and delights.

'Under Construction' isn't a retro album, so much as it's informed by both new and old. But it also isn't beyond question whether this return to roots doesn't conceal a lack of inspiration.

There's a good album in here crying to be let out.

There are few absolute duffers here: '3D' makes for a perfectly pleasant 50 minutes of slick and homogenised R&B. It's just that, from such a reputable firm - and at such an emotional and auspicious point in their career - it's impossible not to expect more.

Where once the bark was of Beck, we have - and this hurts - Wings.

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

This CD will sell solely on Eminem's four contributions, which include the uncommonly restrained current single 'Lose Yourself'.

While 'Shaman' is less than the sum of its parts and strays into AOR territory too much to ever truly be cutting edge, despite its R&B and Latin infusions, it will, at least in America, sell by the truckload.

Hot Hot Heat's religious devotion to early eighties new wave is simply embarrassing.

It's a dubious album whose chief innovation is a guest appearance by Nelly Furtado.

A fractional disappointment after 'Emergency Rations', perhaps. But still, Def Jux's reputation as the most consistent hip-hop label in the world circa now remains unsullied.

He still fires the occasional lyrical blank and his guitar playing has less of the sparks of the past, instead settling into a role complementing the songs rather than dominating them.

Bloated over-produced soft rock.

It's blatant commercial product, something for everyone.

It's just hard to find much of Jeff himself in these amiable, head-nod-friendly, immaculately crafted but ever so slightly sterile tracks.

Some of the songs here are forgettable in the extreme.

It's a cruel world in which a Nelly sells more records than the Blastmaster KRS but what 'Nellyville' makes abundantly clear is that its creator won't be leaving a fraction of his foe's proud mark on hip-hop once the dust settles on the frantic promotion of this record.

It's hard to deny Papa Roach have a certain knack of crafting big, glossy, annoyingly catchy anthems for the Kerrang TV generation.

Only lunatics would rank 'Heathen' alongside Bowie's '70s masterpieces. But for a 55-year-old who's spent such a surreally long time floundering, desperately searching for a) the zeitgeist and b) a tune, it's actually rather respectable.

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.

A drab and depressingly familiar proposition.

It's by no means a bad album, just not his best by a long way, or the triumphant return it should have been.

Overall, 'Don't Be Afraid...' is a tad frustrating. Everything ticks along funkily and proficiently, but nothing really wants to stick out.

But for all its feel-good factor and predominantly strong songwriting, 'Sha Sha' does have its forgettable filler tracks and near-misses and generally needs a stronger, more individual voice to help it stand out from an already heaving crowd of young American singer/songwriters.

'Love Is Here' - expansively, expensively produced, lavish yet aspiring to understatement (if such a contradiction can be accepted) and containing some affecting songs - is a pretty good record.

It is hard to tell where No Doubt starts and the producers end.

'Bionix' has definitely been released at the wrong time of year: it's got chilled summer vibes written all over it.

Anyone looking for some spicy R'n'B to follow up Pink's fantastic breakthrough hit, 'Most Girls', will be sorely disappointed.

A curious and confusing follow-up.