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.