Angels & Airwaves labour under the illusion that "mature" equals "worthwhile;" and that means long, directionless songs swathed in echo pedals and factory-set keyboards.

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

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.

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

The debut album from half-Scottish, half-Swedish songwriter Nina Nesbitt is pop so sugary it’ll rot your teeth.

It's an album full of the sort of drippy ballads and droopy soft rock that should induce an involuntary gag reflex in anyone under the age of 45.

'Ultra Payloaded' is largely sub-U2.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

A lacklustre collection of what sounds like pallid versions of previous hits.

Musically this is the sound of middle America at its most ugly and nauseating...

Anodyne dance music for people who don't go to clubs, comedown music for people who don't do drugs.

Vile, goth-jock pop with all the wit and nuance of a urine-soaked sock.

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.

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

Allen’s old sharp eye feels watery on Sheezus, squinting at the discourse around feminism, race and privilege unfolding online in 2014, and riding them as a bandwagon back to the middle of the very space the Myspace-spawned pop star once owned, but not having the conviction to do much with them once she’s arrived.

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.

The music is as grotesquely over-produced as its lyrics are undercooked, with glossy drum rolls and naff scratching segments fighting for attention on the gruesome battlefield.

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

Too much of Not Your Kind Of People is pedestrian, anodyne and utterly unremarkable.

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

More problematic than the bad lyrics or air of disengagement is Higgins' involvement. Too much of the album sounds washed out and painfully clean.

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

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.

Focus-grouped, paranoid and please-all.

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.

Madonna and Perez Hilton may be fans, then, but if you’ve got even a passing interest in actually enjoying a record, don’t buy this one.

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

Overall, it misses Hot Chip’s outsider appeal completely, coming off as whingey and middle aged. Don’t bother.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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]

Avoid this tosh at all costs.

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.

For a genre that once sounded astonishingly futuristic, it is quite remarkable how tired and old house sounds now.

Too often their over-earnest delivery is unbearable.

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

Shocker! The long-awaited (it says here) follow-up to a sublimely average debut is another half-arsed muppet show executed with the charisma of a terminally ill sloth.

Wayne's 10th studio album sees memory of his charisma and sparkle during that mid '00s era fade further.

Mostly, what their reliance on groove rather than tune adds up to is dirge.

Four albums later and it's more of the same, minus the big hooks.

More over-produced introspection. [6 Aug 2005, p.56]

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

Richard Paul Ashcroft has assembled that most ruggedly authentic of musical backings, a team of LA session players, and walked them through all of his most anodyne default settings, at a deadeningly flat pace.

An exercise in taking a joke way too far.

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.

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.

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]

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

Excruciating fret wankery... appalling metal funk... and Chris Cornell 'singing' like a castrated gibbon throughout. [2 Sep 2006, p.21]

Mary J Blige, Ella bloody Fitzgerald and the odious Cee Lo (see above) all phone in a hand, but… look, just get the book [his autobiography], OK? It's brilliant, and this isn't.

While Happy Families’ snappy sludge hints at a slight reprieve, the jingle-jangle whimsy of Larry Lizard is a tired reminder that there’s only one crime worse than being outright bad--and that’s being as mind-numbingly banal as this.

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

It’s about as exotic as a cocktail umbrella.

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

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

'Worlds Apart' reads like a suicide note of a band that's tried to intellectualise its place in the canon of Western music and, in doing so, recognised its own irrelevance. [22 Jan 2005, p.51]

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].