A crashing disappointment.

Lifeless, as if the air had been sucked from the band's lungs.

Throughout Rock N Roll, Adams is too busy winking, smirking and showing off to convey anything approaching an emotion.

The beats are intricate but ineffectual, the songwriting is thin and every song is enveloped in a suffocating orchestral shroud.

Perhaps spurred by the ease with which the Boring Solo has been grafted on to their chosen template, When It Falls finds Zero 7 expanding their horizons and going on to be boring in other areas.

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

Everyone wants Brian Wilson's story to have a happy ending. The worst thing about Gettin' In Over My Head - far worse than the mediocre songs and the MOR guest appearances - is that it doesn't sound terribly happy.

The music is so anodyne that you don't pay much attention to Lavigne's lyrics. This proves to be a small mercy: examination of the CD booklet reveals that prolonged exposure to her words could leave a previously healthy adult rocking backwards and forwards in a foetal ball.

Hackneyed songs grind drearily.

The album's drawback lies not with the producers or the material, but with Lopez herself.

Apparently knocked off in just six weeks, Daft Punk's third album sounds like it took six days. Six short days. With long lunches.

The trouble is, they've... stopped writing songs. Instead, there are collages of sound devoid of subtlety; colliding rhythms that make noise rather than sense.

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.

While their first album had a stirring anthem or two, their songwriting here is both flimsy and overblown, like an empty carrier bag temporarily inflated by a gust of wind.

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

An hour of boredom.

Half the 12 tracks are risible throwaway genre and covers. The other half are, at best, extremely mellifluous Big Star tribute band songs.

It's all too dull to make anyone care but Crow.

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

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

As he points out in the sleeve notes, these were "works in progress", but that doesn't excuse using stagnant rock riffs to obscure his lack of inspiration.

What 20/20 does best is portentousness and the empty brag - essentially male traits that make listening rather like being hectored by the pub bore.

She sings like a woman who has heard of something called singing, can't be sure of exactly what it might entail, but is fairly certain you do something a bit like this. She sounds both distracted and bored stiff, as if making an album is keeping her from the more serious business of standing around a nightclub in a pair of really enormous sunglasses.

A scant handful of highlights aside, it is packed with half-baked ideas, bad jokes, music that any other star of Williams' stature would be terrified of the general public hearing.

Secret Wars is a sobering demonstration of what repetition can do in the wrong hands, as the Brooklyn trio funnel the most endurance-testing excesses of Suicide, Can, Sonic Youth and stoner rock into a joyless, oppressive piece of work.

Feels Like Home is so inoffensive you have trouble remembering whether you put it on.

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.

Every now and again they hit on a promising musical idea, then ruin it.