What it all adds up to is an effective commercial album, littered with potential singles, taking few risks and adding little to hip hop culture.

Fans of Aerosmith, and fans of good old Rock Music will love it.

It's an album for well-mannered emotional crises in front of log fires, a soundtrack for quivering bottom lips.

If you didnt get 'U.F.Orb' or 'Orblivion', this ain't going to change your mind. If youve never heard The Orb before, though, this is as good an introduction as any.

Really, this isn't really a Run DMC album, they're just guests on it.

The formula here is for Frusciante to carve tunes out of loose, cyclical riffs, a few basic samples and drum programmes and his own parched voice. Sometimes, as on 'Remain', the effect is slightly uncomfortable... Tough that out, and get used to the demo quality throughout, and there are some decent songs on 'To Record Only Water,' endearing for their rawness and honesty.

For fans, a job well done, and surely appreciated. For the rest, digestion of any of Luna's five studio albums may be advisable first.

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.

Lopez mostly sticks to a successful formula - R&B lite with a Latin touch.

This collection of shimmering-smooth, synthesiser-led beats and lazy gangsta rap posturing isn't worthy of the once great Snoop.

Beginning with the juddering monstrosity that is the live version of 'Third Eye', there is no doubt that the band want to be judged as an epic attraction. It's unfortunate that they've chosen to lengthen some of the tracks to the point of monotony.

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

The production is lame, and the album as a whole is unconvincing in it's pretences as hi-energy, bouncy and above all youthful punk. And Dexter Holland's vocals simply grate after a while. Die-hard Offspring fans will find nothing which deviates from the original plot, so they won't lose any long-term believers from this offering.

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.

Despite the almost universal hyperbole that has greeted 'All That You Can't Leave Behind', this is no masterpiece. Certainly not by U2's stratospheric standards.

The change is clear from the outset with 'In The Mode' sounding like an album made by an act that no longer feels the need to pamper its audience. Gone are the gently loping double bass grooves and feathery vocals, replaced by a feverishly paced percussive assault that challenges both vocalists and live instruments alike to keep up.

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

And fortunately, Rickie also goes beyond the cliched songbook, choosing songs which the soaring yet contemplative voice lends itself perfectly to, and makes her own...

This is bound to be praised to the hilt as the Next Big Thing, but rock outfit At The Drive In have only one thing going in their favour - the absence of competition. It's so close to being something beautiful, something to cling on to in these aurally barren times, but it's just so not quite.

The Ecleftic' just tries to please too many people, open up too many markets, and simply ends up diluting the sound in which it purports to be rooted.

G.O.A.T.' is depressingly bereft of considered content. There's nothing outrageous or offensive, just plenty of the unthinking and inarticulate sex talk that L's been spouting between the brags for years.

It's New Order-lite.

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.

Music that is designed to smother, to sedate, to lull the listener into a soporific state of boredom.

Kid Rock's sound rarely deviates from the explosive metal guitar rap synthesis he has made his trade mark...It is when Kid Rock strays from these familiar musical pastures that he gets into trouble, as in the case of 'Abortion', a rather pathetic attempt at soul...

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.

So there it is, bizarre, world-weary, beautiful, touching, self-indulgent but never, never dull ? at least not until at least nine minutes into 'Like A Possum'.

Sometimes it works - notably with Gorecki's and Ravel's work - but it frequently misses the mark, with his reinterpretation of Handel's 'Xerxes' sounding something like incidental muzak from a low-budget US soap.