It can indeed be shunted into the drawer marked "I can't believe I used to like this band." [17 Jun 2006, p.39]

This stinks of trying too hard.

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

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

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.

Insipid marshmallow post-rock that occasionally sniffs in the direction of Yuck or Mogwai, but mostly glowers in a dismally cloying, precious nostalgia.

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

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

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.

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.

Just when you think Audio Secrecy can get no more infuriating, you find the most overwrought of the ballads lodging their tunes inside the melodic part of your cranium.

There's now something a bit crumbly, a bit rattly about E&TB. [17 Sep 2005, p.58]

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

It’s business as usual with the release of their spaghetti-mess fourth.

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

Sparse, directionless and half-formed, Trans AM's eighth LP is nowhere near the radical transformation its title suggests.

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.

Focus-grouped, paranoid and please-all.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

After two albums treading water in the tricky oceans of landfill indie, the tides are turning.

It’s about as exotic as a cocktail umbrella.