Next time, she needs to dump the tired wild-girl shtick, unleash her lung-power and the world will fall at her feet. For now, this is just another album of production-line US pop.

A knack for woozy melodies is one weapon at Nicholls' disposal; but here they're fatally undermined both by his petulant vocal style and by the rickety, paper-thin production.

To be fair, "The Loon" stops short of pastiche, but it is too transparently a paean to Tape 'n Tapes' heroes.

Live, there's little doubt, these tracks will find their own groove and grow, but here they're like show dogs, primped and primed and hard to love.

Thematically, "Born Again In The USA" is a bold album that tries hard - perhaps too hard - to bind together the inter-related twines of culture, politics, history and entertainment.

It makes for a cool sound that might be too inoffensive at times but which grabs all the right places most of the time.

Many of The Libertines' finer qualities are made all too apparent in their absence on "Down In Albion", none quite so painfully as Carl Barat's Django Reinhardt via Johnny Marr charm with a guitar.

There are some truly great moments on "Senor Smoke".

It just sounds like she cannot be roused to feel very passionate about anything.

What's that sound? That's the sound of a barrel scraping and a career being flushed down a toilet.

Hit and miss, then, but certainly brave and bold.

Leaping from the speakers in a fury of jarring axe steel, clocking rhythmic beats and clinical vocal swagger, ultimately this LP gives itself - at some 60 minutes length - an awful lot of time to say very little.

It's not that Foxx can't sing.... It's not even really the lack of stunning songs. It's the fact that his super slick, super smooth R&B hasn't been either cool or fashionable for more than a decade.

By letting inferior guests share his stage, Beck only reminds us what a unique and gifted individual he is.

Stripped of novelty and goodwill, The Darkness are just a resolutely ordinary band after all.

Much more of this and Shakira will surely take over the whole world with her mix of unthreatening pop / rock, lovingly naïve lyrics and cute tummy.

An average effort with hints of greatness.

If this fluffy, punk-lite petulance, devoid of any real personality is to your taste, lap it up.

There's something about the determinedly primal recording techniques and clunky, 'we-just-learnt-this-today!' instrumentation that doesn't ring true.

Given their youth, it does indeed promise much, but please, hold off on that honours listing for a while yet.

It is not a terrible album by any means; just an unfocussed and sprawling one.

Ms Dynamite's irate sloganeering may look effective on paper, but until she relearns how to connect with the everyday world, this is little more than ranting in the mirror.

It sounds as if the band's batteries are steadily running out. Confidence ebbs, emotions run flat, the songs become more and more inconsequential.

There are precious moments on here and hints that something truly magnificent could emerge in time, but first Broadcast need to work out exactly where they're going and why.

There is far too much irritating hippywaffle amongst these gems.

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

They've got one song, basically. It's a fairly good song, comprising driving, rama-lama rhythms and pitch-dark lyrical content; but repeated 10 times in fairly mild variations, it inevitably loses its appeal.

For the most part, "The Understanding" saunters along without a trace of urgency, which is unfortunate as Royksopp were always at their best when electronic ingenuity rather than pastel-shaded synth washes were holding things up.