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]