"Christ Illusion" for the most part consists of leaden, grinding sludge devoid of any urgency or malevolence.

Either they've been taking too much heroin or not enough, but 'Black Rebel Motorcycle Club' is as limp as a soggy spliff the ragged morning after.

People will tell you Ladyhawke is fresh and exciting. They're wrong. It's horrendous.

A stunningly bad record.

Quite the most lifeless and unloved record to be released by an artist of Spears' global stature.

This is pretty fluffy stuff.

Track after track in an aimless blur of humming amps, pointless mucking about with effects, dreary jams propelled by meandering guitar interplay, and bleak, endless droning.

This is a genuinely dreadful album.

Despite this album's production credits reading like a PhD thesis, Korn's commercial masterplan is fatally undermined by certain glaring weaknesses, the main one being that their singer is a dunderheaded, sexist, self-pitying fool.

The Spirit Of Apollo, a record boasting some of the most pioneering musical talent of the last three decades, does not sound "timeless" but nor does it seem an appropriate tonic, voices passing unheralded in a confusion of mediocre, glossy production, guests from the stratosphere reduced to faces in the crowd.

Therein lies the danger of building an iconic persona on your current obsessions and an unerring belief in everyone else's interest in your thoughts. When it hits gold, it's magnetic; when judgement lapses, the convictions seem tired.

A cold and unengaging collection.

You can forgive Cruz for wondering who he's meant to be for his second album, but we're less indulgent of such wishy-washy nonsense that "Rokstarr" puts across in the name of heartfelt R&B.

A product so meticulously calculated, so shamelessly designed for the widest possible demographic, so wholeheartedly shallow, you suspect Simon Fuller and Simon Cowell must be dumbstruck in admiration.

This album is nowhere near as imaginative or as interesting as its maker thinks it is.

If the "Energy Never Dies", as Black Eyed Peas' acronymically-titled fifth album has us believe, why do they continually sound like the most tired, idea-less group on the block?

The dominant sound is of flickering sequencers and heavy-handed synth-pomp which showcases Linkin Park's keen interest in the work of Depeche Mode, but also often leaves them sounding about as cutting-edge and dangerous as Jesus Jones.

If this is what we get - because this is what enough of us apparently want - the end of the music business cannot come soon enough.

Most of 'Dead Media' resembles a third rate Pulp, Denim or Babybird - steeped in tales of sexual disappointment in bedsit land but without the considerable charm, warmth and wit of the aforementioned bands.

Represents an ill-advised body swerve from the duo’s idiosyncratic home territory and plunges them deep into the thoroughly becalmed waters of MOR ambient pop, offering up languid, beats-driven, down-tempo tunes that aren’t so much radio-friendly as downright sycophantic.

Songs that used to bounce and strut with foolhardy glee now amble, lamenting, the stench of booze and self-pity turning Romance At Short Notice into a wake.

Far from a behind-the-scenes veil-lifting, though, 'Doggumentary' largely ensures that the worst preconceptions of self-indulgent hip-hop remain in place.

To live in their world is like being trapped at an idiot's convention and almost – but only almost - as bad as Limp Bizkit.

Relentlessly bland and bourgeois, "Twelve Stops And Home" sounds like the product of focus-group analysis.

The big-beated momentum of yore is bogged down in McClure's new graceless Gallagher sneer and left to stagnate by a band more interested in re-heating anaemic Kasabian-esque psychedelia than building a plinth from which to preach.

He preens, poses and struts like a self-proclaimed and extremely delusional love god.

Everything about this album smacks of contrivance and careful planning.

Driving yet jaunty guitars abound and backing chants fill the required spaces, yet it all comes across too much like a sub-par parody of their former selves.

Repeated plays just refuse to reveal hidden depths. There aren‘t any. “Around The Sun” is just a really poor album, probably the first one that this band has ever put out.

The Golden D' is Coxon's second stab at recording the most pointless album of all time and rest assured he's getting there.

The suspicion that Mika might have major talent under the plagiarism and cynicism is what makes "Life In Cartoon Motion" so remarkably unlovely.

The truth is most of this new record is karaoke, too--it's just that, like their fans, the band are so desperate to mean something that they have the gall to call it 'new'.

This lumpen, bloated, boring album is as much of a let-down as any of Timbaland's other "solo" works.

With so much of the joyous, uplifting and just plain life-affirming Motown back catalogue freely available (not to mention the any number of soul all-nighters dotted across the country), Going Back is a redundant exercise into one man's nostalgia.

This is a pompous, blandly histrionic album, faintly monumental in its drabness.

An album that's desperately hard to listen to, let alone care about.

His voice still sounds like it could curdle milk, an anaemic whine with no substance. Song-wise, this is mass-production fodder about which there's very little one can say.

How the mighty have truly fallen.

The record has some horrific moments, nearly all of them Borrell's.

Beyond the artificiality of this album's every attempt to be loved, what's most surprising is Pharrell's failure to program so much as a decent beat.

It's the state of the great man himself that's truly depressing. If the slurring on 'Murder' (pronounced muurrrerrr) is an attempt to sound like a stroke victim, it's worryingly convincing.

The lack of creativity on display here is palpable.

Unforgivably bad.

For people awaiting that second Jet album, this should prove a welcome distraction from their crayons. For the rest of us it's a look of bemusement and a scratched head.

Because beneath the clownishly self-effacing exterior, there's an artless ambition at work here that's terrible to behold.

Earth To The Dandy Warhols is just vacuous mid-tempo babble and clatter.

The rest of the tracks bop along with various degrees of offensiveness or inoffensiveness, troubling and achieving nothing.

There's no gentle way of saying this, so let's cut to the chase. This record is, quite simply, useless.

On the evidence of 'Democrazy', the wrong self-indulgent flake got fired from Blur.

Unfortunately for the oh-so-cleverly named Mongrel are nothing more than a patronising exercise in telling the poor listener what they already know: that governments can be corrupt, war on the whole is not pleasant and we all have a right to freedom.

A plodding collection of ballads carefully designed to show-off her jaw-dropping vocal range to the fullest.

'14 Shades of Grey' features no standout moments or highlights, just a formulaic, plodding, sixty plus moribund minutes that make this album about an hour too long. Avoid at all costs, even if you're a member of Staind's family.

Stripped of the rough guitars and eclectic production of the original, two things are exposed - those words and that voice. Neither fare well.

He, like Ashcroft before RPA & The United Nations Of Sound, has absolutely no idea how rubbish he's capable of being. Take note Liam, and be careful.

Herein lays Wayne's problem: he clearly has no understanding of rock.