How anyone can describe Leeds' The Music as a "best new band" is beyond me. Unless they're over fifty, sport a footballer's perm and weep at Almost Famous.

Though loquacious, 'Boys and Girls in America' is a record full of maddening stream of consciousness lyrics that amble without direction, and narratives with no real stories or purpose.

For the uninitiated, they churn out a joyless mess of badly tuned indie guitar, spasmodic jazz drumming and cutesy vocalisations, and on 'O'Malley, Former Underdog' they overlay this with irritating electronica that is reminiscent of the noise your discman makes when your mobile phone is in the same pocket.

With each track they descend further into the mire.

It's sexless twaddle pure and simple, delivered by an over-contented and conceited artist with nothing left to offer the world than refried lyrics and quasi-profound meaningless phrases.

There's little of the pop sparkle that shone through the likes of 'The Modern Age' and 'Last Nite' even when - as with 'You Talk Way Too Much' - they're rewriting old material, and Julian's vocals are, to be blunt, awful, sounding uncomfortable to record and rather complacently nasal.

But this album isn't just really gratingly saccharine, yet simultaneously bland, it's wilfully so.

Hidden amongst the bilge, there are six proper songs here, with words and everything. But they only serve to prove how erratic Belle And Sebastian have become.

Like most of the cities Doves sing about, these songs are grey, drizzly, often unpleasant, and more often than not... very, very dull.

The vast bulk of this album is the sort of stuff you'd expect from an averagely talented bunch of first year music students. Who smoke way, way, way too much dope.

The ham-fisted attempt to modernise Stereophonics' sound... falls flat at every attempt as samples, effects and the odd electronic buzz avoid the underlying mulch like gas-gun fired dried peas off titanium.

Yes, 'Don't Believe The Truth' is an improvement on the trilogy of folly that is 'Be Here Now', 'Heathen Chemistry' and 'Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants'. But so what? Can't polish a turd, you know.

'Down in Albion' is a truly abhorrent and occasionally upsetting record.

As concept albums go, this one wears very thin very quickly.

It must take a fair amount of skill and a peculiar single-mindedness to create something this consistently bland and tiresome.

You can feel how dreadful this record is from the very first bar.

Excruciating, toe-curling Pain, the sort that makes you want to leap through windows or run over children.

There are already too many Bloodhound Gang albums in the world. This one should be recalled and recycled. Into something that's not a Bloodhound Gang album, obviously.

This record is about as bad it is possible for a record to be. It is offensive on every level - the music is bad, the rapping is bad, the sleeve is bad.

Listen to this record and you realise that by comparison, Robbie Williams does actually have some soul. And if that's not a damning indictment of one of the most execrable records you're likely to hear this decade, I don't know what is.

What we're offered here is pretty much a second take on the discordant beeps, Mani-ripped basslines and lazy hip hop breaks of their first album, with the addition of some hideously nipped and tucked string samples padding out their attempted lyrical bravado.

[An] irritating abomination.

This bears the same relationship to pop music that wallpaper paste does to food.

This is so so crap.