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

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

Doomed to lurk unplayed at the back of your collection. [2 Oct 2004, p.64]

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]

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]

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]

It seems Shaddix still writes most of his songs in purple ink in diaries with little locks on. [28 Aug 2004, p.56]

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

Kittie are rubbish, with a permanent lyrical setting of "Feel A Bit Miserable, Parents Don't Understand Me" and no original ideas whatsoever. [21 Aug 2004, p.49]

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

More of the same from an act who have been ploughing the same furrow for so long they'll be reaching the Earth's core soon. [5 Jun 2004, p.57]

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’.

‘Take A Look In The Mirror’ doesn’t just sound like a bad album, it sounds like a broken record.

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

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

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.

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.

This record moves way beyond armchair psychology - in fact, there are armchairs that have a cannier grasp of the mind.

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

Too often, the follow-up to their 600,000-selling debut 'Spit', is plain overbearing, a violent marriage of melody and brutality that makes for a highly uneasy listen.

The sad fact is that Blink-182 are now indistinguishable from the increasingly tedious 'teenage dirtbag' genre they helped spawn.

'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.

Unfortunately, this is not only their weakest album, it's their most confused.

'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.

Semisonic are the lambswool jumper pulled over the eyes of people who have an irresistible soft spot for 'classic' songwriting. Fail to give their songs full attention - and God knows, that's easy enough - you could almost believe this is literate radio-friendly pop; just the thing for those blustery rides through an imaginary Santa Monica freeway.

Cydonia is a stillborn relic, flawed throughout by chronically stunted ambitions.

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

OK, here's some track titles - 'Too Little Too Late', 'Never Do Anything', 'Pinch Me' - and, guess what, THEY ALL FUCKING SUCK! Not just Weller, Ashcroft or Belle & Sebastian sucky but Mike & The Mechanics, Tin Machine and, yes, Hootie And The Blowfish sucky.