It's easy to excoriate this band for producing another corporate-rock album, dominated as ever by Jon Bon Jovi's increasingly leathery bark and Richie Sambora's relentlessly uplifting guitar lines, but it's hard to slate them for still feeling kinship with their own blue-collar backgrounds.

Like a neglectful party host, [Eminem] keeps disappearing, leaving you to have your ear bent by some crashing dullard.

Sentiments are rendered as blandly as lazy graffiti tags, with the music accompanying them as bold and portentous as a light shower.

The songs featuring him alone may be full of undeniably funny arrogance, but they're also laden with recycled beats and Auto-Tune.

[The album] fails to deviate from the X Factor formula of dousing festive standards (When You Wish Upon a Star; The First Noel) with slushy strings and choirs.

The hilarious, parodic single 'Rockstar' excepted, Nickelback's music reaffirms every sex-and-stupidity cliche hard rock can offer.

Derulo's clubby hooks are infernally catchy, and he adds a touch of freshness with buoyant forays into rock and salsa.

Like its predecessor, Ocean Eyes – an unexpectedly big US hit thanks to its flyweight lead single, Fireflies – this album suffers from a lack of substance.

His sparse, sweet acoustic songs charm more than they shock, and make you think rather than irritate.

Borrell 1 sounds like the inner workings of a brain as it descends into total madness.

It never manages to rouse itself from a miasma of mid-tempo sameiness. Also, at 15 songs and 57 minutes, it is preposterously long, and your attention is likely to have wandered long before the insipid new age chords of final track People at War begin chiming away.

Listening to them outside that ideal environment, they're decent enough songs, even if Shooting the Moon was formerly U2's Bullet the Blue Sky. But the gravel-voiced Nick Brown's quest to become "bigger than Bono" has left him sounding overwrought and a dreadful ham.

This latest compilation unearths three tracks that Queen recorded with the late frontman.

I can confidently report that there are no good lyrics on this album. ... Bad lyrics don’t necessarily matter in pop-rap, and his intermittent facility for hooks means that some of the tracks succeed nonetheless.

Some albums grow with repeated listens; this isn't one of them.

A brutal barrage of staccato beats, club-footed riffs and panzer-division stomps.

Reefer madness perhaps sets in when they start quoting Lewis Carroll and, on Crooked Tree, act out a ghastly courtroom drama with Sting in the role of a drug dealer and human trafficker being sent down by Shaggy’s stern judge. But these two have enough innate songwriting ability to come up with a couple of gems nonetheless.

His fourth album is Blunt at his Bluntest.

The best efforts are Dynamite, featuring Snoop Dogg, with its low-slung Cali feel, and Three Strikes, which bangs--and features the vocals of Martine McCutcheon's husband, Jack McManus ("one, two, three, get the fuck up"). The worst is everything else.

It's hard to escape the feeling that, in seeking to establish a more individual identity, Cyrus has become more generic. This is compounded by the fact that the songs just aren't strong enough to overcome the customary production.

Although the words to the song Afraid might suggest the Neighbourhood's singer and main lyricist, Jesse Rutherford, can't be older than 14, this LA outfit are actually in their 20s. And there's more in the same pubescent vein as their debut album progresses.

However tiresome the slogans, worse is the fact that the beats are lazy.

With vocals smoother than a vat of cocoa butter, Evans moves from poignant duet (Legacy, One in the Same) to Juicy-style sexathon (A Little Romance) alongside him, although--naturally--it lacks a certain improvisation and cohesion.

The lyrical inspiration has evaporated.

There are decent Ed Bangery beats and samples dotted about but for an artist whose talents seem designed around her rhymes, it's hard to be too enthused when they include nuggets like: "These are the best crackers I've tasted for a long time – can you put some cheese on it for me?"

This collection is all too similarly paced, with the speedier Freakbeat Phantom mounting a lone crusade to appeal to fans of very early Inspiral Carpets.

As you listen to Beyond the Neighbourhood, you find yourself spending an awful lot of time asking yourself whether you're feeling anything yet.

This is a competent, professional and occasionally brilliant effort--the brooding MO Part II in particular--but is difficult to detect the same unmistakeable heart and character that Walters displays on screen.

Tracks as sugar-coated and high-pitched as Won't Stop and Dream Girl are capable of producing gastric fireworks. And that's without mentioning the secondary cliches, the choral "eh ohs", the plaintive choruses, and, naturally, the Auto-Tune.

It occasionally feels demo-like, half-finished: the corroded electronics on Louie Bags are intriguing, but the song features what sounds like a placeholder vocal. Great lines are few and far between.

How can this dork-metal silliness still be going on in 2005?

Elects to stay in its lane: a plethora of well-worn 21st-century pop tropes – tropical house sounds, post-Tame Impala floaty synths – but nothing you would describe as novel in the music or lyrics.

Evolve sounds, almost impressively so, as though it’s been created with telly music coordinators in mind--and few others besides.

18 is a peculiar and hugely uneven record.

It's modish to disparage the Peas, but consistently coming up with stuff that's this infectious is harder than it looks.

Elsewhere, the Welsh four-piece are merely witless. Utterly awful.

Stretched out over an hour, their solitary idea wears unbearably thin: pretty quickly, your reaction is less LMFAO than WTF? and, ultimately, FFS.

Much of the time they sound like a 1973 youth club rock band.

Singing in a light, yearning voice (and, you imagine, clasping his aching heart as he does so), he achieves a sound nearly as grand and polished as theirs on a 10th of the budget (so imagine what he could do with the orchestral backing his songs demand).

40 minutes' worth of observations such as, "I'm a little bit lost without you/ I'm a bloody big mess inside" and "Posh girls have good manners/ But they go like the clappers" (ye gods), accompanied by roustabout guitar, drums and keyboards.

Automatic and Let You Get Away are naggingly catchy, but soulless, and if Don Broco’s original fans edge nervously away, Automatic will presumably make or break them.

Her producers furnish the punchy soft-rock that has become the default signifier of pop "attitude" and Perry obliges with self-congratulatory sass that never rings true.

Those old enough to remember "Connected" as something more than a Carphone Warehouse jingle might feel a tremor of nostalgic affection, but little else.

A lack of originality and too much filler mark Ashanti more as a pedestrian than the princess she purports to be.

All told, there's a lot of bodice-ripping emotion to take in, and it's this, rather than the lack of original ideas, that makes In a Perfect World hard to take in large doses.

Hotel is aptly titled: it's ultimately a clinical, generic experience.

Astonishingly hackneyed, aggressively chameleonic LP.

If it's possible to imagine a gutted Coldplay or an even more comatose Snow Patrol, Athlete is it.

It's business as usual for Britain's most hamfisted rock band.

To the rest of the western world, they are the arrogant stars of rock documentaries and Vodafone adverts, and their achingly dull eighth album does little to alter that assessment.

Remi Nicole is so self-conscious, so now, she feels like she's already hit her own self-destruct button.

There's an insurmountable disjunction between the sound of Metallica doing their nut in the background and Reed's papery old voice rambling away upfront.

Now he seems happy to occupy that space and fulfil a role as a slightly edgy pop bloke.

Shallow, soulless and strangely cynical, Some Kind of Trouble is a thoroughly depressing listen.

A rough, back-to-basics rap album.

Santana proves that even endless high-sustain soloing cannot heal the generically lame.

Brandon Boyd and boys’ eighth album continues a progression away from the breakdowns and record-scratches of their early years and towards something closer to stadium-baiting modern rock in the mould of, say, Train. Indeed, there’s even the faint whiff of the Sheeran on a few of the big ballads here.

It is occasionally brilliant and frequently irritating beyond belief.

A fourth album of stunning fatuousness.

Everything's as big, ludicrous and bombastic as ever, but with a vulnerability that is strangely touching.

He can't work out whether to explore the moral darkness or just go for cheap laughs, so he does both - neither very well.

Staring at the Sky is awful, like a snarky parody of a self-pitying grunge track that’s evidently meant in deadly earnest. There are really chilling moments, not least Train Food, with its ominous piano chords and feedback-laden guitar backing given a creepy intimacy. ... And there is stuff that just seems slight, as if its disjointed brevity isn’t always just an aesthetic decision, but occasionally also a way of covering up a scarcity of ideas, a lack of material.

Lazy attempts at grime and rapcore are consigned to the doghouse courtesy of some well-meant but terrible political raps.

Pop's lyrics about his penis and ATMs are beyond self-parody.

LP1 is a terrible pop album, but very effective contraception.

Generation betrays Audio Bullys' aspirations to say Something Important, undeterred by the absence of either insight or eloquence.

Using top folk musicians means everything is expertly crafted, but Sting's Christmas pudding is over-egged.

Her sense of self-importance [is] so prevalent on her second album that it negates the mild pleasure you might otherwise get from it.

Timbaland, who has sprinkled his hip-hop fairy dust on weaker voices, rinses away Cornell's inherent dirt and power, and compresses the godfather of grunge until he squawks.

Occasionally, Etheridge's romantic fumblings have a certain awkward charm--notably on the bittersweet Encouraging Signs, which finds him "quickstepping" over rooftops to get to a lover's house--but it will be a miracle if they make it to album number three.

The lesson of iSouljaBoyTellem is that simply being indefensible on most rational levels does not stop an album being enjoyable.

As with a lot of The Cosmos Rocks, you listen to Warboys boggling that Queen--famously intelligent men--didn't at any point notice that the lyrics were stupid, trite, a bit offensive and bound to have an undermining effect on whatever musical efforts they put behind it.

Their debut is crisp electro-rock with a big hook in every tune, and lyrics that present them as a bunch of civic-minded young fellows.

Where she used to be smart and provocative, Phair has become crass and bloated, her lyrics crude and her image apparently a grotesque exercise in self-parody.

Like Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells II and Meat Loaf's Back Into Hell, it doesn't so much play as fall out of the speakers with a flump: the sound of a towel being thrown in.

Too much of United Nations of Sound feels like a vanity project gone horribly awry.

A couple of tracks--"Wear My Kiss, About a Girl"--have escaped with some quirky Britishness intact, but most are in either in thrall to Lady Gaga's robotronic sound or, as with the oozing lust of Get Sexy, just wrong for this particular band. Disappointing.

While his traditionalism can feel staid (even Ed Sheeran, Puth’s UK equivalent when it comes to lovelorn beta-male balladeers, takes a risk once in a while), the standard of his songwriting is consistently high, and his central theme--romantic obsession that verges on the masochistic--makes for a record that softly burns.

For the most part, though, Rebirth underlines what he can't: the problem of rap-metal remains unsolvable, even by him.

As Famous First Words plays, it's impossible to stop craving something, anything, a bit more original, up to and including a fusion of the deep pulse of the digeridoo with the soaring heights of the bagpipes. That's certainly an achievement, but not, you suspect, the one Viva Brother were aiming for.

Durst's problems are ever-present - and does anybody still care?

Fireworks is the clubbiest thing here, but its sumptuous electronic flow is still--like the rest of this pleasing album--dance-pop at its most enjoyably commercial.

His musical voice is not unique, but his way with a hook--and a cocked snook--is terrific, and for such an exhaustive set, the "too much of a good thing" effect takes a remarkably long while to kick in.