How anyone outside the walls of a mental asylum could genuinely enjoy the annoyingly repetitive industrial drum-throbs, aimless experimento-guitar crunches and lyrics about "reeking gonads" that characterise songs called things like 'Epizootics!' is beyond me.

Undersexed and over here, let's send them back to where they, indeed, belong.

Their latest album You is very much an acquired taste, a wonky clatter that eight fellas with wayward Warren Ellis beards and DIY instrument workshops in their sheds will surely jizz themselves silly over.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Rolling Blackouts sees them doing what The Go! Team do: flailing and yelping like meth-addicted Energiser bunnies, which, as you may have figured, is not a compliment.

It's certainly a messy record, made by half of a broken legend.

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

Too often their over-earnest delivery is unbearable.

Avoid this tosh at all costs.

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 tries to capture the essence of 1973 without having any big hairy old prog hits on it. Which is a bit like trying to capture the essence of the Star Wars films by cutting out all the bits in space.

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

This latest effort sees her turn indistinguishable. [1 Apr 2006, p.43]

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]

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

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

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.

Just as you're starting to see light at the end of the tunnel, you realise that there's another five-track EP by these self-absorbed, boring, aesthetically bankrupt bellends still to go. Double bummer.

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

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.

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

Four years on, his fifth album just feels stodgily generic.

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.

Only the Bond-esque 'Confide In Me' is worthwhile in an otherwise sorry array of pop bangers left soggy on the barbecue.