Save Rock and Roll features unexpected excursions into rave-pop, and numerous celebrity cameos, but enough airbrushed pop-punk to prove they haven't forgotten which side their bread's buttered.

Just when the world is no longer particularly bothered about a new Arctic Monkeys record, they've finally released one worth being bothered about – at least in parts.

Songs typically travel from the spindly to the epic, and extol the virtues of living life to the full.

It's about time he delivered something of substance. YCTAODNT fits the bill, kinda. It's long on heartbreak and short on yee-haw affectations.

Their festival-friendly rap-rave-metal goes "the-generation-that-are-going-to-change-the-world" political.

[In French] it's beguiling and sexy. When she crosses the Channel and sings in English, she's a ten-a-penny kook-merchant.

It's pleasant enough, but on the whole feels like Hynes' sketches towards an album, rather than the finished item.

Set your sights high, by all means, but when each track sounds like an attempt to emulate a specific great (Bruce, Bob, Leonard, the Band etc) the confused listener can't help but be left thinking "Will the real Low Anthem please stand up?"

Her voice hangs inertly among racks of lustrous guitars like a worn shirt.

It's an album you can hear without ever really noticing. Radox for the ears.

In place of politics, or any kind of point, all this album offers is a parade of premium brands, from Grey Goose to Louboutin. The overriding sensation is akin to reading one of those luxury-shopping magazines you get on planes while a mediocre hip-hop station plays over the headphones.

Any good songs sound like demos awaiting their final form.

It plays like a very conventional, early-90s pop record.

They've brought touches of ska and Latin into the mix, but KD&L still don't do anything Imelda May can do better.

The duo often leave any sense of taste with their gumboots outside on the doorstep.

His 12th album is certainly magnum: 59 often leaden, mostly hubristic minutes to make that 1215 Grand Charter seem like light relief.

Through the Night aims for Dusty in Memphis, but it lands closer to Petula Clark.

This comeback album suggests a hiatus spent in a cryogenic freezer. Which is to say that they sound the same ... only rather less vital.

His breathless, this-really-matters delivery is ill-served by lines such as "Ain't a fan of vegetables/ It ain't about the peas".

CYHSY now sound more or less exactly like The Killers.

Unless you have a natural predisposition towards the enjoyment of self-consciously nerdy vocals and jangling harmonic songs taking a 'sideways looks' at life, Sky Full Of Holes will leave you completely unmoved.

Each to their own. For me, there's nothing here not to like, but even less to love.

Marcus Mumford leaves his Irish-folk years behind and adopts a transatlantic burr for “The Wolf”, whose chugging riff and sappy lyrics (“You are all I’ve ever longed for”) pinpoint the album’s core failings: absences of both lateral intrigue and the elemental oomph its track-titles (“Broad-Shouldered Beasts”, indeed) hint at.

Presumably not this unremittingly OK collection of hazy pop-rock singalongs paying anodyne homage to the Ramones, Jesus and Mary Chain and, er, Interpol.

It's often barely there, notably the final minutes of "Lux 4". This is musical homeopathy.

The main duty of pop is to be catchy, and it's a duty which DNA mostly shirks miserably.

It’s what The Feeling might sound like if they were American; endlessly “nice”, but with nothing to stir the soul.

It is cursory, lumpen and dull.