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.

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

This is a genuinely dreadful album.

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

Everything about this album smacks of contrivance and careful planning.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

The lack of creativity on display here is palpable.

How the mighty have truly fallen.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

A stunningly bad record.

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.

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

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

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