It's not all bad, but there's no getting away from the fact the main problem with this lifeless debut is Elkington's voice.

Pay The Devil is for Van Morrison completists only.

They're not completely terrible. Their music won't damage your ears or insult you, it's just quite spectacularly dull.

The Open Door is an exercise in how not to make a sophomore album (or any album for that matter).

This album is only worthy of more than one star for provoking a reaction. That, at least, is better than being merely another dull shade of musical grey. But only marginally.

Fixin' The Charts comes with a lofty goal: to grind down the blemishes that mar the rock face of the popular music mythos. But to attempt to "fix" history, to paint over its wrongs with a broad, sneerish stroke, is a gross mis-step in the career of one of anti-pop's savviest purveyors.

If The Black Eyed Peas want to sing, dance and rap about having good nights and getting laid, that's fine; but expecting a discerning audience to buy this bottle-rocket crap as an album is pure delusion. If they're truly trying to achieve more, The Beginning is a pretty awful start.

With half of rEVOLVEr emulating his older tracks and the other half making strained attempts to branch out into rap and dance, it appears that the rappa ternt sanga simply hasn't found anywhere else to turn.

Replete with tacky production and recycled ideas, its few merits are stretched to near breaking point.

Papa Roach have the tools to be a damn good rock band, but they'll never be one unless they change the bloody record.

After a while, it grates badly on the nerves.

The whole thing simply flat lines into mediocrity.

It's downright bad.

The bits which 'aren't bad' are the bits which don't involve Ms Hilton.

Switzerland lacks any track with even a tenth of the standout potential of Danger! High Voltage. And it's a critical absence for Switzerland, because there's nothing on this record that makes you want to hear it a second time.

I'm not going to pretend I know anything about dance, and the experts out there might be thinking this album features the 'tune' of the summer, but for a former Simian fan, this is nothing but a huge disappointment.

Unless a couple more of these tracks manage to repeat the success of 'When I Grow Up' and stick on commercial radio, this is an album heading straight for the bargain bins.

You'll find more wit and invention on a solitary track by Ethan Kath and Alice Glass than you will on this depressingly retro and lumpen homage to a scene that wasn't even all that back in the day.

Unfortunately, all this really means is an extra emphasis on weirdly pitched keyboard riffs and slightly dated sounding beats.

Rather than offering reinterpretation, Malin sounds like an annoying guest at a house party, who despite all efforts to hide the guitar has found it and insists on playing a disparate bunch of songs much to the annoyance of everyone else, none of whom quite have the heart to tell him to stop.

All in, it suffers from a lack of focus and direction.

To Lose My Life is an album made to a predefined plan with skill and no heart.

Petits Fours just has too many annoying bits about it to be good.

Clarke is a genuinely talented songwriter, if rather earnest in his intentions, but in Music for The People he and his mates seem to have lost the plot.

Most of the album's remaining tracks are utterly vacuous interpretations of songs that few are likely to care much about. They offer nothing new to anyone or anything.

Verve tracks such as Northern Soul and This Time were surprisingly successful attempts at funk. But the similar fusions attempted on United Nations Of Sound are so poorly executed that the album has to go down as a pompous, self-indulgent rock folly.

Hi-Tek's construction of techno beats and rave stabs on the quirky I Fink U Freeky and heavy brostep on opener Never Le Nkemise just add to the nauseating concoction of trash that comprises Ten$ion.