All too often the guitar-led tracks expose their limitations.

More often than not displays a penchant for melody and tension which would shame many of the new millennium's pop pups.

They still sound as spunky and powerful as they were nearly two decades ago when they kicked off this long-term assault on American culture.

It doesn't strictly feel like a No Doubt album at all.

It's crude, certainly, but Ludacris has enough wit and chutzpah to elevate this above the dross.

There's way too much power balladry, rawk guitar, Steven Tyler and MTV-by-numbers to make a genuinely stand-out record.

It does at least manage to include several of the things we hold dearest about Michael Jackson the singer, and it also steers clear of anything as laugh-out-loud as 'Earth Song'.

Sandoval has a voice quite unlike almost any other and perfectly suited to stark, narcoleptic laments, which is what this, with a couple of curious-if-brief instrumental diversions, delivers on a regular basis.

Offers the sound of Stereolab doing what they do best. Love it or hate it, it won't alter the world, it just is.

Think Pavement with a shake of Grandaddy and a little dash of something else low-key and lackadaisical and that's Quasi.

However essential it was to make, it just doesn't feel essential enough to keep on hearing.

Iggy's own production fails to lift it out of the nu-metal quagmire - sometimes the perfectly executed power chords and unimaginative guitar licks feel every bit as raw and dangerous as Bowie's Tin Machine farrago.

A totally modern album that manages to nearly ignore his wilful, malicious past and embrace the California smog/sun with a polished fervour that is almost nauseating to witness.

Repeated listens draw out its infinite flaws, its awful smugness, and remind you that were this not A Radiohead Album it would have been consigned to the pile marked 'Not A Patch On Aphex Twin' last week.

This album is bollocks. Not the bollocks, mind, just plain old fashioned middle-American bollocks, the sort of 70s, vaguely psychedelic-tinted, vaguely funkdefied bollocks that Lenny Kravitz and old school MTV made their own.

'Exciter' stakes a hell of a claim on bringing Depeche Mode into the 21st century.