There are too few ideas here to really make 'Keep On Your Mean Side' worth our devotion.

An unholy brew of overreaching ambition and soul-destroying complacency.

Many of the choruses are great, but by about track eight you begin to realise this isn't about songs, this is about mathematics, and if you've actually paid for the album with your own money, you've been well and truly had.

There's definitely something horrid, hairy and horrendously hippyish hobbling these lovely boys.

A third of this record sounds like the Cocteau Twins covering Enya, and another third sounds like a trip-hop Blind Melon... But the other third is pure Muggs.

This is no whimsical, fey take on folk music, rather a bold, buoyant frug with the skeletons of The Doors, Teardrop Explodes and other likeminded explorers of the stoned side.

For those who looked forward to the new genre-leading direction in downbeat dance that would come with the next Massive Attack album... well, let's just say the major challenge you'll face with '100th Window' is deciding whether there is a hidden track or that 'Antistar' is really a 22-minute song with an excessively long silent bit in the middle.

There is much to get teeth-grindingly irritated about with this album.

'Lovebox' doesn't quite scale Vertigo's dizzy heights, but it'll be perfectly at home both in clubs and in your lounge.

As an album, the thing seems to suffer from a lack of texture, variation, and (dare we suggest) innovation.

In their quest for paper, The Roots have lost their way.

The trouble is that Jay is stuck in an artistic straitjacket of his own making.

It's slinky, suave chill-out music, gently exotic, best listened to lounging on throws amongst cushions.

This hack-job (bish-bash-boshed out by uberproducer Stephen Street) takes all the bland, tawdry, white-bread bits from the past two Suede albums, butters them up with a smear of Bon Jovi balladeering, chews them into gloop with nicotine-stained, plastic dentures and... well, ends up flushing a once-great career straight down the in-at-number-16-out-the-next-week toilet.

Much of 'Trust' dallies down the dark end of the street, where graceful Velvet Undergroundisms lounge around sharing tabs with gentle folk implosions.

Only problem is, though, Ladytron still sound too self-consciously detached and robotic for us to view this as a great leap forward.

Most of this album, basically, doesn't work.

this is pretty much all good stuff. So why does it feel like there's something missing? Haven's problem is their chosen genre - epic, ball busting indie, guitars that jangle, then jangle harder, vocals that ride melody like diseases might pterodactyls.

It's painstakingly layered and often lush, but sometimes scrubby and miserably sparse.

The lyrics, insincere as they are, grate somewhat, but the spastic grove cannot be denied they're a bit like a pervy, conservative Devo, with more earwax.

Interpol prove themselves to be men on a mission to take us back to a time when long faces and even longer overcoats were de rigeur for alpha males the musical world over.

Far too often, 'Wiretap Scars' feels limp, lifeless, bereft of dynamics.

OK, so it tails off towards the end, and there's something rather dishonest about a band so young releasing a track like '1969', but even then it's quite endearing to see them trying to build such an immediate mythology around themselves.

That the band that churned out some of the best records ever made in a phenomenal two-year creative splurge should be reduced to anything as pubby as this is nothing short of tragic.

The problem is, whilst the debut had more hooks than a fishing rod sandwich, this just doo-wop-yawn, the sort of nursery rhymes kids never remember.

When they're good, they're alright, but when they're bad, they're unstoppable and Dirty Vegas' biggest mistake so far is that, sometimes, they're not nearly filthy enough.

It feels too clinical, icy cold, almost sterile.

An attempted retread that feels more driven by commerce than conviction and suffers as a result.