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.

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.

Beyond the sonics, the lyrics are embarrassingly piss-poor as well.

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

'Break The Cycle' is nu-metal as envisaged by Tipper Gore - 14 tracks of parent-friendly grunge-flavoured soft rock that make Creed sound like GG Allin.

An exercise in taking a joke way too far.

Mine Is Yours? You can keep it, thanks.

They need to retire. NOW.

This is a slew of hackneyed teenage poetry, trowelled onto a bed of sift-rock cliché.

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

The title track sounds like it is vocalised by the female speech function on a Mac's TextEdit facility and is roughly the worst thing ever made, yet it's still only the third-worst track on the album

James' big thing was anthems, and here they do every single anthem they ever thought of. The crowd think it's brilliant, and they cheer when Tim Booth talks about God. The crowd are plainly mad.

If Skinner is coasting on production duties, then Harvey is overcompensating on the vocals.

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.

Half the time, Good Charlotte sound like Blink-182 after the snip, the other half they sound like the Backstreet Boys without the songs. [16 Oct 2004, p.48]

It's difficult to believe Limp Bizkit could return after all this time somehow even more hateful than before.

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

Needless to say, it's totally fucking rubbish.

The only person this record would ever appeal to is the man who made it--Jack Black. [11 Nov 2006, p.43]

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...

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.