MGMT is by some margin the New Yorker’s most intuitive, sincere and naturalistic record. The bad news is that it’s not at all musically interesting.

In The Lonely Hour is an album made by an artist who spent years waiting to be famous, but when he got there, found that he didn’t actually have that much to say.

It’s a record that masks its lack of content under swathes of super-hip production tics.

James never really follows it through.

Ultimately, the overall feeling of Mature Themes is of a band and songwriter that don't really care. So why should we?

EX is not awful, but it’s certainly not good either.

Play this album from start to finish and it’s hard not to feel that at the core of its cheaply gratifying genealogy is nothing but misery.

Despite her undoubted vocal talents, she doesn't possess the authority to sell the bluster of her lyrics.

Generally though, The Fifth‘s “dance” tracks--‘Bassline Junkie’, ‘Something Really Bad’, et al--just seem too limp to succeed as radio hits, and they’re certainly not good or interesting songs in any other capacity.

Everything that is missing from [Lady Gaga's Artpop] is here, but everything that is good about it is spectacularly absent from Prism.

This is a Chinese whispers record, one that has been passed through enough cultural and aesthetic filters as to make it utterly meaningless.

A tedious album from an otherwise great talent.

The pacing is tentative, the tone one of suppressed pain, and the FX custom-designed to denote ‘meaningfulness’ or emotional sensitivity--all rustic organ sounds and tinkling guitar notes.

It all comes across as fairly overwrought, working very hard to sound effortless and losing its sense of self in the process.

The production on Dirty Gold--generic, consistently uninspired, gauche--bears absolutely no relation to the album’s subject matter, and jars horribly with Haze’s dark forceful flow.

Produced by arena rock specialists Flood and Alan Moulder, Holy Fire sounds pop sound insofar as it’s smoothed off, big and accessible.

Seabed is the worst of all worlds, all fluff without substance and repetition without meaning.

The result is an album of experimental electronic pop that, sadly, doesn’t do much of any consequence, sounding both big-studio glossy and curiously cheap, busy but largely flailing around in the hope of finding an interesting direction.

Words and Music by St Etienne really brings it on itself, and the result is totally vapid.

Too True amounts to little more than a succession of cliches and wall-to-wall empty stylisation, with the femme four-piece seemingly unaware that mimicry is not art, and nor is seriousness the same as being a serious artist.

Ultimately, it’s a failure of imagination--reflecting either a deficiency of talent and/or invention on Derulo’s part or his complete contempt for the listener.

Magna Carta’s a mess, and not even an entertaining one--it’s simply a dull record by someone who’s in deep danger of going down as a dull human being.

From the orchestral string intro of ‘Marilyn Monroe’ to the funk-rock jam session that ends ‘It Girl’, G I R L is 45 minutes of warmed-over retro-pop pastiche, cribbing from Michael Jackson and Chic, from disco and yacht rock.

What strikes you first about Album Title Goes Here, apart from the moronic postmodernism-for-tweens title, is how resolutely un-danceable it is.