Kele has instead chosen a route that doesn't challenge the listener or, it seems, himself.

Moroder's attempts at creating a 21st century version of his prior success results in painfully artificial, sterile, boring music.

“Haters gonna say it's fake,” Timberlake frankly asserts on, 'Filthy'. They needn't even bother. Genuine or not, it simply doesn't work.

These songs don’t live nicely in any genre, and suffer under the weight of attempting cross-pollination.

The result is a chaos of sound that leaves little direction for the listener.

Ultimately, The Spark presents a baffling listening experience. Almost every song on the album poses as an unremarkable backdrop onto which the band fiddles with elements of everything from grime to orchestral arrangements with virtually no successful results.

Mostly unlistenable. ... What has previously been a steady but inoffensive deterioration in Lennox’s music has now slid to (what one can only hope is) the bottom of the trough. No track here could be accused of attempting to engage with either the audience or work with recent exciting stylistic developments in alternative music.

You’d hope that Lupe would trust himself enough to deliver the kind of music he’s capable of making. Instead, we get a terrible album--a new low in a career that already has too many down moments.

The band rarely have anything interesting to say.

I really wish that Pixies still had their magic, but they don't, and it's a terrible shame for all of the parties concerned. For us as the listener, and for them as the band that are running on empty.

The problem with A Perfect Circle now is that Keenan and Howerdel basically follow whatever creative whims that grab them. After a particularly soporific instrumental track, the album enters its most experimental phase, with unsurprisingly scattershot and lacklustre results.

In her grand tradition of coining absurd descriptive phrases, Del Rey and Auerbach have christened all this "narco swing", an apt characterisation if only one assumes it's short for narcoleptic; it takes some doing to make sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll sound boring, but in her hands, the vices of hedonism scan as crushingly monotonous.

An album filled with songs that seem unable to grab attention.

Every inflection, every word, even nearly every concept feels lifted from rap’s reigning King’s playbook. It’s a haphazard mixture of TDE’s figurehead circa Section.80, with a big heap of Good Kid and a smattering of To Pimp a Butterfly, just for good measure. ... DiCaprio 2 is a heavy helping of technicality, signifying absolutely nothing.

Though side A is a mess, it at least sounds like a mostly-original mess. On the latter half, they seem to say “fuck it” and just go for plagiarism, in whole or in part.

The resulting effort is a complete mess of an already insipid project yelling to be accepted as otherwise.

At its core, Death Race for Love feels less like music and more like a cynical attempt to bring out the worst in both emo and rap.

Each and every track on this album is so jam-packed with garbage pop flourishes that it can get exhausting.

Dummy Boy would be better if it was worse. 6ix9ine doesn’t show any sign of knowing how to write a complete song, let alone curate a whole album. But he’s also too unimaginative to write anything so jaw-droppingly awful that it needs to be heard to be believed.

There is no insight into what brought him here, or how he feels in this place on a spiritual or even human level. Instead, it offers a shallow rush of, essentially, “WHOO GOD!” complete with an admittedly fantastic choir, but little else.

Everything Now isn’t so much a misstep as a faceplant, hitting every wrong note with the same precision they hit every right one on Funeral. It’s a compositional mess, somehow both gratuitously moralising and morally repugnant, duller than watching already-dry paint.

Revival is so uninspired and lost that picking it apart is a hopeless affair.