The title track is 11 minutes of painfully celestial balladeering self-indulgence, a mess of standard-Sufjan jittering flutes mixed with the most offensive noise from his best-avoided early electronic period.

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

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.

Unless you’re hyped up on a cocktail of Sunny D and Haribo yourself, you’ll find most of this album very annoying indeed.

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.

Just when you think they’ve already smithereened the silly barrier, what the world needs most swiftly turns up: Hadouken! go Auto-Tune.

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

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

You could argue Wolfmother’s ballsy and carefree hi-octane music is all just innocent fun, ideally washed down with a six pack of tinnies. Yet it’s utterly devoid of soul and intelligence.

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.

An exercise in taking a joke way too far.

This time the Mickie Most-omatic (phasers set to Winehouse) has dredged up someone so inauthentic she makes Duffy look like Johnny Cash.

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

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

The message is simple: the joke isn’t funny any more, last orders rang long ago and the game is well and truly up.

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.

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?

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.

If soukous and Congolese rumba sound exotic, the reality is as bland as yam quiche.

All that seems to have been lost over the years of caning from the likes of ‘We Are Electric’ and ‘Danse En France’ are the tunes.

Though there’s a lot to dislike, there’s also the bones of something interesting here. If only they’d stuck with making more numbers like the enticing Adam Green-ish gypsy pop of ‘Neal’, they might just have won us over.

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

The effect this record has, with its remedial drumming, crappy store-bought synth presets and faux-sensitive, third-form lyrics, is as pleasant as unnecessary eye surgery.

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.

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.

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.

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

At best, his words are boring, silly or totally forgettable.