Surprisingly enjoyable party rock.

Steady as she goes on AOR eighth outing.

Though it doesn't exactly live up to its name, Legend manages to capture the optimistic sprit of Barack Obama in

Patchy covers album from alt.rock veterans.

Devon’s finest makes a Motown-laced return.

The Thrills meets The Polyphonic Spree--in a good way!

It’s too early to write Maxïmo Park off, or to turf them into the ever-growing pile of indie also-rans. But they’ll need to pull out all the stops to recover their poise after this worrying misstep.

You get the feeling that, in the long run, Diamond Hoo Ha is destined to be remembered as one of the lesser works in their canon.

Anastacia’s voice--once described by a critic as a ‘human air-raid siren’--is still hard to love: when she reaches for the trembling high notes your first instinct is to duck under the table and lock your head between your knees.

Houston, We’ve got problems

The potency of the admirable sentiments is undermined by the lacklustre execution.

A rackety, sing-along sound from a band on a largely undefined mission.

Twelve is a solid enough collection, but one can’t help wondering if it would’ve been better had she made like Fellini and called it 8 1/2.

Whatever personality Lewis has is smothered by an oppressive pre-ordained sense of direction: she sounds simply like another cog in an impressive, but, soulless machine.

Starry-eyed debut hits more often than misses.

Such inconsistency is forgivable on an overreaching debut, less so on a sixth album just 35 minutes in length.

Quietly bucking the trend are The Shortwave Set, whose follow-up to 2005’s The Debt Collection confounds convention by actually being pretty good.

Four years in the making second album from Oz hard rockers.

A Guide To Love, Loss & Desperation is by no means a bad album, but at the same time it’s hard to see just what all the fuss is about.

Hard Candy sounds bloody expensive, but has precious little to declare except an infatuation with its own reflection in a nightclub mirror.

Suddenly sullen Kooks produce a limp effort.

Bad-boy rapper fails to raise his, er, game. There is something peculiarly insecure about The Game (AKA Jayceon Terrell Taylor).

R’n’B lothario sings the praises of monogamy on patchy fifth album.

We’re treated to less-interesting takes on the work of Bloc Party and The Libertines, low on hooks and utterly devoid of interesting production quirks.

The album fifteen years in the making that sounds like a slick but robotic imitation of what it might have been long ago.

Cynical vocodered mediocrity.

Millennial ‘It’ Boy gets the horn on eighth album.

The fact that Hammond can’t actually sing that well is rendered practically obsolete on this album; his hazy drawl may not be the strongest in the world, but it suits these songs just fine.