I'll admit, the songs on Babel wouldn't be so painful if it weren't for the god-awful "deep" lyricism of Marcus Mumford.

From referencing Harold Shipman in a song title to taking a moral high ground to the view of secluding yourself with drugs, Songs for Our Mothers presents an insignificant manifesto.

This record is half as clever as it thinks it is, and utterly inessential.

Aside from a few crunching riffs and a smattering of neat melodies, there’s very little to recommend within Drones.

Mostly everything is contrived and cliché, lifted from a stock collection of guitar rock and electro rock of the past ten years.

Vices & Virtues bucks that somewhat healthy trend in entirely the wrong manner, and represents exactly the kind of the uninspired drudgery of Americana indie rock that has emerged in the wake of the likes of My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy.

The girls are solid musicians, and they’ve structured their little songs well enough. The record is pretty short too, clocking in at 24 minutes, which is good, because I was bored already at the 15 minute mark.

Save for a few tracks, you get exactly what you'd expect from a band like Dead Confederate: middle of the road alternative rock music with seemingly little depth and a whole lot of cliches.

While not everything here is awful, the good is often streaked throughout each song like marbled fat in a rubber steak.

Bricolage is as a sometimes fun but mostly ambitionless and unnecessary project.

We get a record that is surprisingly dull, which alternates between syrupy, unremarkable ballads and uptempo tracks that sound like they’ve been assembled by a committee of consultants.

Sleep Mountain isn’t entirely unenjoyable; its two main crimes are that it’s too safe with its simple chord patterns and unimaginative riffs, and that it’s too in thrall to the records that have inspired it.

Their style fits in between Chvrches and Taylor Swift’s 1989, though not up to that level of craft. Interesting moments, like the echoing guitar of There’s A Honey or the finger-snap rhythm of Loveless Girl, are drowned out by overstuffed songs with unmemorable melodies.

It is, quite frankly, tedious and utterly un-inspiring, lacking any serious ability to convey the emotive forces which I would hope drove the song writing processes. [Review of UK release The Future Is Medieval]

In the end it's hard to fathom just who is going to really love this album.

Awful.

Every solid moment on American Standard is outmatched by a one to ten ratio of awry choices for songs that shouldn’t be hard to ruin. It’s almost impressive to see James Taylor screw up songs that are fundamentally easy to cover.

Every song on here comes from a collaboration from a different source, or a different trend that Legend is hopping on. There’s nothing personal here. ... Bigger Love’s second half has painful trap pop (Don’t Walk Away), plastic soul (Remember Us, Always), and a piano ballad closer with no defining traits or features (Never Break), all in classic John Legend fashion.

Synths take a higher precedence this time round: it’s an indie-pop record, far from their post-hardcore roots; indeed Living in Song sounds like an Architecture in Helsinki knockoff. But even when you can hear the band trying out new things, it simply sounds turgid.

Apparently The Wombats only managed to write the one song for the album and so have decided to just repeat it ten times, offering little-to-no variation in tone or tempo--although to be fair to them, they do stick a different synth preset on for each song so you can tell them apart.

A 55-minute mess called Curtis, undoubtedly one of this year’s worst releases.

There's no debating in my mind that Digitalism have the potential to produce an album even better than Idealism. But sadly, I Love You, Dude is not it.

It is samey, ugly and spectacularly stupid at the same time.

Fresh Air and Midnight Snack. Sagar sounds lethargic and detached, which may be the mood that he's going for; but when he sticks to the same tired motifs, it's hard to feel any more excited than him.

Lyrically it’s weak, and the over-polished studio buffing does nothing to emancipate the blueprint that is, essentially, the same as it was 17 years ago.

Wet feel disconnected from the album's overarching theme, and though they do put some feeling into their maudlin ballads, you'll come off it without remembering a single note.

The band begins to slog through the session--each song sounds like the sonic embodiment of utter indifference, only this time it’s accompanied by electric instruments.