It’s decent in places but it’s just… you know that feeling you get when someone you love is so wracked with pointless worry that you just want to shake them and shake them until they snap out of it?

They swiftly slump back into portentous jams made for mourning failed crops, made worse by the ye olde farmhand Yoda-isms of Eric Pulido.

It works for the red-raw confessional 'Family Portrait', but everything else is so bad Natalie Imbruglia would be proud.

If Skinner is coasting on production duties, then Harvey is overcompensating on the vocals.

Reek[s] of overt smugness and wilful obliqueness. [16 Apr 2005, p.51]

It's not quite pop enough to dance to, and almost shlock-country enough to make you give up listening to music altogether.

For a pair of wannabe pop classicists, Cardinal's cardinal sin is the failure to provide anything approaching a whistleable melody.

Like a modern empowered woman, Keane are obsessed with ‘having it all’. Juggling a career, great hair and kids equates for them to making safe, dowdy AOR while giving the finger to those who call them safe, dowdy AOR.

The artist's 3rd album constitutes the h-pop formula at its most unremarkable.

Volume 2' is a suite of profoundly unhurried, directionless and pointless noodling, passed off only half-heartedly as some exercise in musical exploration.

Mine Is Yours? You can keep it, thanks.

Their songs are either shitty soft-rock or worse, wink-nudge pastiches like the new-wavey 'Someone To Love'.

Unrelentingly maudlin and hell-bent on ramming every potential silence with soporific guitars and proverbially pathetic fallacy, ‘AM’ only perks up on its two covers.

This is music for message-board moderators and the greasy-haired sycophants who hang around too long after gigs, and precisely no-one else.

Beyond the sonics, the lyrics are embarrassingly piss-poor as well.

Even a run of solid guest stars--Solange, Toro Y Moi and Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig--can’t pump any passion into this flaccid cringe-fest.

What Paul Weller uniquely manages to do to the 12 songs... is to make every one sound exactly like a Paul Weller song. [11 Sep 2004, p.55]

For now, though, she's no better than one of Cowell's ventriloquist dummies.

Soppy nostalgia that bares little else.

This one was originally an art piece performed live at the Borscht Film Festival in Miami, with attendees absorbing the sound and images simultaneously. Divorced of that context, it belongs only in the sea.

It’s not an issue that this is a pop album. The issue is that it’s weak and is a contrived commercial move.

Thieves Like Us look and sound like three yuppies trying out the music lark after being laid off by an investment banking firm.

But wait - is that the ghost of a melody on 'Lover's Leap'? Alas, no: it's merely the desultory whoosh of a once-promising career as it plummets, irretrievably, down the art-pop pan.

'Pocket Symphony' sure does drift over you like a duvet of mood-stabilising drugs.

Is this the best we can do? Desperate-to-be-authentic, carbohydrate-stodgy white blues, played by an elderly man pretending to be a tramp? Really, you deserve better.

Basically, it's the curse of Jewel: Yank bird with acoustic guitar, homespun philosophy and twee poeticism, where the songs ramble on and on to deliver some platitudinal twaddle...

This is a slew of hackneyed teenage poetry, trowelled onto a bed of sift-rock cliché.

Why are you half-arseing your way through such a thick slurry of clod-hopping ska-by-numbers? Or wallowing in pits of cliché?

It’s not Hudson’s foghorn bellowings that are the real enemy on this record, it’s that motherfucking computer program [Auto-Tune].

So listener-unfriendly that it's almost amusing. [16 Apr 2005, p.51]

About as funny as pouring weedkiller on your genitals and then setting fire to them. [7 May 2005, p.66]

[They] not only resemble hoity-toity Fields Of The Nephilim lookalikes but are just as godawful to listen to.

'The Boy With No Name' is everything you'd expect from a new Travis album and less.

'Break The Cycle' is nu-metal as envisaged by Tipper Gore - 14 tracks of parent-friendly grunge-flavoured soft rock that make Creed sound like GG Allin.

The only person this record would ever appeal to is the man who made it--Jack Black. [11 Nov 2006, p.43]

Like a scented Lush bath-bomb of mediocrity. [27 May 2006, p.31]

What follows is the sound of a band trying and failing to forge a new identity - boy-band balladry, U2-style stadium rock and Metallica-esque melodic crunch are all attempted with predictably patchy results.

The title track sounds like it is vocalised by the female speech function on a Mac's TextEdit facility and is roughly the worst thing ever made, yet it's still only the third-worst track on the album

Radric Davis is deeply flawed, and ultimately Gucci has committed the worst crime in rap: he’s boring.

The beats are from the worst Ice Cube album ever made and the rhymes are sub-Coolio. [18 Dec 2004, p.51]

Yeah, it’s his shtick, and you could laugh with him if the music was in any way exciting. Unfortunately, however, Dark Touches filth-funk fury is made impotent by sheer lack of hooks.

Who needs anti-depressants when you have Jesus and schmaltz?

She has talent to burn, but rather than challenge herself, Stone has chosen to throw herself on a multi-million dollar bullet train to the centre of mediocrity.

Things limp from bad to tedious with 'White Noise', a song so passé it just bought its first shares in ITV Digital.

Ensconced in the current UK hip-hop trend of being both depressing and cheesy, 23-year-old James Devlin raps about weapons, swine flu and diabetes.

Sounds like helium-voiced rockers Rush discovering a social conscience. [30 Oct 2004, p.65]

James' big thing was anthems, and here they do every single anthem they ever thought of. The crowd think it's brilliant, and they cheer when Tim Booth talks about God. The crowd are plainly mad.

You can’t help but feel that Gary Go’s biggest ambition is to be on the soundtrack for "The Hills."

'Mimi' manages the unique trick of being self-indulgent without actually ever sounding much like Mariah. [16 Apr 2005, p.51]

Dummy Boy is one of the most unlistenable rap records of this year. ... He’s delivered a bland project. Often, it’s as though he took what was in his drafts folder and released it as a “studio album.”

The Loudest Engine punches for psychedelia and falls flat in a puddle of MOR.

So, you're a founding member of the legendary hip-hip combo Wu Tang Clan. And your fans are extremely pissed because you went and done a track with that Justin Bieber.

And what illuminating revelation do we learn from the half conceived, cottonmouthed rubbish that constitutes ‘Democrazy’? In full: ‘thank Christ Blur usually finish writing their songs before they sell them, otherwise they’d be shit’.

Musically, they’ve ripped off swathes of things contemporary and popular to make them ‘hip’, but it just feels like some dodgy old guy at a bus stop telling you he digs Klaxons.

Needless to say, it's totally fucking rubbish.

Talk about a fall from grace. [4 Jun 2005, p.58]

Margins though, is mawkish and self-indulgent to the last, a wet weekend of a record, drably trudging through inelegant, wannabe-Mike Leigh vignettes into Smith's failed relationship.

And Then Boom is the moment the ironic ’80s electro revival finally manages to jump the shark.

Stultifying moroseness and a constant furrowing of the brow permeate from start to finish. [21 Aug 2004, p.49]

Ineffectual hippy grumblings that will make you want to sleep. [4 Jun 2005, p.58]

Cardiology is monstrously offensive – the latest shit-streak by music's laziest sons.

The Christmas album can risk being a sonic Round Robin, of interest to few but its creators, dispossessed of all perspective as they've mired themselves deep in their icky, cosy world.

Toe-curlingly unlistenable. [4 Sep 2004, p.73]

[He] returns with exactly the same sound he's been torturing us with for years. [9 Jul 2005, p.58]

It's just nothing. Complete plastic nothingness from the outset.

They need to retire. NOW.

It’s actually Dire Straits gone trip-hop and everyone involved... should be brutally beaten to death with a tray of Ferrero Rocher.

You'll find nothing more despicable this year. [17 Sep 2005, p.58]

The album itself consists of 11 tracks of unimaginative pub rock that, at best, rips off The Darkness, and at worst comes across like a bunch of teenagers in their first band.

It's difficult to believe Limp Bizkit could return after all this time somehow even more hateful than before.

'Lions' is widdle-smothered great-grandadrock shite that Hendrix could whack off in ten minutes today, despite being dead. Pumped full of funk-rawk formaldehyde to stop the choruses dropping off, it boasts all the originality of a cloned baked bean and about as many tunes as a tractor makes trying to get out of a ditch.

Ireton’s voice has an unschooled grace which elevates ‘Hiding Neath My Umbrella’ to the status of an interesting, if flimsy, curio in Murdoch’s canon. It’s just a shame the rest of the record, and the new recruits, are so fucking woeful.

Despite Cee Lo's vocal guidance (Brixton Briefcase), you almost black out from the terribleness before coming to and realising you're too good for this soulless nonsense.

This album is a tribute to enduring a profoundly underwhelming pop star existence. The banality could be forgiven if it included even one decent hook but alas, no.

[A] perplexing and risible album.

Suit represents Nelly going smooth and seductive for an entire LP, and it is about 9,000 times as bad as that sounds. [2 Oct 2004, p.63]

At its best, this is the sound of Captain Tofuheart; at worst -- on 'Elegy' -- it is literally an out-of-tune dirge. [29 Apr 2006, p.39]

3OH!3 are electro-hip-pop white bread American scum.

The Hacker is still a dab hand at dark electro, his rich, chewy tracks bubbling like molasses in a cauldron; Miss Kittin still veers close to self-parody.

They peddle clichés about ugly ducklings and shagging that are so offensive they make a donkey braying into a bin sound like the ripe observations of a Charlie Brooker column.

Half the time, Good Charlotte sound like Blink-182 after the snip, the other half they sound like the Backstreet Boys without the songs. [16 Oct 2004, p.48]

In the end, this can't even make you feel angry; just desperately sad. [16 Jul 2005, p.50]