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.

Their songs are either shitty soft-rock or worse, wink-nudge pastiches like the new-wavey 'Someone To Love'.

'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 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.

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

'Pocket Symphony' sure does drift over you like a duvet of mood-stabilising drugs.

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

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

Suit represents Nelly going smooth and seductive for an entire LP, and it is about 9,000 times as bad as that sounds. [2 Oct 2004, p.63]

Sounds like helium-voiced rockers Rush discovering a social conscience. [30 Oct 2004, p.65]

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.

Talk about a fall from grace. [4 Jun 2005, p.58]

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.

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

It’s actually Dire Straits gone trip-hop and everyone involved... should be brutally beaten to death with a tray of Ferrero Rocher.

[He] returns with exactly the same sound he's been torturing us with for years. [9 Jul 2005, p.58]

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.

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]

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The Loudest Engine punches for psychedelia and falls flat in a puddle of MOR.

The artist's 3rd album constitutes the h-pop formula at its most unremarkable.

'Ultra Payloaded' is largely sub-U2.

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?

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.

You'll find nothing more despicable this year. [17 Sep 2005, p.58]

Things limp from bad to tedious with 'White Noise', a song so passé it just bought its first shares in ITV Digital.

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.

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

OK, here's some track titles - 'Too Little Too Late', 'Never Do Anything', 'Pinch Me' - and, guess what, THEY ALL FUCKING SUCK! Not just Weller, Ashcroft or Belle & Sebastian sucky but Mike & The Mechanics, Tin Machine and, yes, Hootie And The Blowfish sucky.

[They] not only resemble hoity-toity Fields Of The Nephilim lookalikes but are just as godawful to listen to.

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

This album is a tribute to enduring a profoundly underwhelming pop star existence. The banality could be forgiven if it included even one decent hook but alas, no.

[A] perplexing and risible album.

'The Boy With No Name' is everything you'd expect from a new Travis album and less.

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

The beats are from the worst Ice Cube album ever made and the rhymes are sub-Coolio. [18 Dec 2004, p.51]

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]

What follows is the sound of a band trying and failing to forge a new identity - boy-band balladry, U2-style stadium rock and Metallica-esque melodic crunch are all attempted with predictably patchy results.