J. Cole’s raps, but KOD sounds like someone who is either unfamiliar with drug abuse, or is completely unsympathetic to the dynamics of drug abuse in America.

Graduation is consistent, yes, but it's consistently boring.

In the end, Fucked Up aren't nearly as good as Refused were thought to be, but hey, Refused aren't even as good as they were supposed to be, so Fucked Up may yet be remembered as revolutionary.

As a lyricist he’s dull and unimaginative and as a singer he’s extremely limited: both facts detract considerably from the obvious passion he exhibits elsewhere for his music and his politics.

The band sounds like they're simply trying too hard to keep up with their more contemporaries, and it shows; the song writing is poorly executed, the syrupy hooks are, for the most part, dull and unimaginative, and the band fails to cover any ground it already hasn't before.

Despite its long gestation period and pristine production, it sounds as though no one believes in What Matters Most less than Folds himself, and this bleeds through every single vocal performance and instrumental arrangement on the record.

It does nothing to distinguish itself from other BR releases and some of the premier punk albums released in the past few years, but it also can immediately trump most of the stuff being put out these days on the virtue of BR's tight and likable style.

Ultra Beatdown features the same guitar riffing, theatric singing and the rest of that stuff that doesn’t matter in regards to Dragonforce.

Almost every song is terribly alike--each featuring the same hallmarks Nadja’s become known for, besides their most important aspect, being their relentless creativity--and this bland similarity becomes taxing.

To summarise, Man of the Woods is an astoundingly poor, inconsistent, and sloppily constructed outing from an artist whose defining feature has been his ability to cleanly reinvent his image.

I can forgive a couple of transgressions if Teenage Dream redeemed itself with songs that were more than trashy, one-dimensional pop, but, alas, the rest of the album is just as predictable as the VMAs and only marginally more entertaining.

Too often, the melodies are listless, the song structures are underdeveloped, and the album’s weaknesses are masked by waves of synths and ambience that add nothing to the experience other than time – and that, unfortunately, is time that we’ll never get back.

Unfortunately, he forgot he cannot sing or write coherent lyrics.

Del sways wildly between hit and miss. And Eleventh Hour, for all its boisterous and awkward handling, fails with a resounding thud.

Much like the average modern-day Playmate, Dirty Work is essentially a manufacturer's dummy: air-brushed; soulless; custom-built to exacting specifications; aesthetically-pleasing but ultimately empty and devoid of any real distinctive character. At the risk of butchering a metaphor, All Time Low are New Found Glory with grotesque, misaligned implants.

As it stands for now though, Red is a mixed bag, and it's up to you to sort through the majority-holding bad in order to find the good.

The massive dip in quality towards the end, including the progressive worsening through closing, bonus and hidden tracks, is disappointing, considering how well the album begins.

Like Radiohead and Panda Bear before Bon Iver this year, it's not a problem that Vernon hasn't created music in the same style of the last successful album: the problem is that he isn't able to make that creative jump to a new aesthetic, or direction, successfully at all.

Vaxis II: A Window of The Waking Mind takes everything questionable about Vaxis I’s overall charming forays into stadium rock, castrates it of any semblance of grit, urgency or personality, and subjugates its once formidable trove of catchiness to an almost impressively bland slew of commercialised hard rock templates that, in conjunction with the record’s militantly pop production, render it a gormless caricature of everything once endearing about the band.

Although the guitar sounds are very pretty and sublime it’s tough to listen to an album where the songs follow the same exact boring formula.

Magnetic generally lacks the catchiness and vitality of past efforts, as the band tries in vein to reinvent the wheel but fails to accomplish anything as impressive as ‘Iris’, ‘Here is Gone’, ‘Black Balloon’, ‘Let Love In’, [insert hit single here].

Although the album barely brings its head above the water-line marked "passable", it's still too slick, too unified and too perfectly structured to convince you that apart from the vocals of Stanley and Simmons, the rest of the album is nothing more than a hodge-podge of contributions from various pony-tailed musos from somewhere sunny.

These songs all sound like Gaga, but they're more abrasive, less focused, and that's not a good thing.

Sadly, ‘Coloratura’ is not enough to save the LP from being a mess. In the end, you can’t even say you are disappointed anymore. This is who Coldplay are now, producing the most casual music for the most casual listeners possible.

Aside from its opening track, which I’ll get to, this album is essentially a blank space.

The cheesiness, loads of filler, and overly glossy production are still present and hinder much of what the album had the potential to accomplish.

Midnight Memories takes the slight progression of Take Me Home and demolishes it.

The result is an album that is being asphyxiated by an extremely strong hand, and that proves to be the death of it all.