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.