Tuneful enough, his debut is an MOR bricolage of prevailing musical styles.

"Lioness" reinforces what we already knew: Winehouse was, in every sense, wasted.

Madonna may have done this stuff first, but nowadays Lady Gaga does it better. MDNA? Meh-DNA.

It's the sound of a deeply dim man backed by competent-but-conventional musicians.

Coming from a band who blatantly don't want to be a band any more, Angles is inevitably disjointed. But it's not disastrous.

It’s depressing to find more of the disco-tooled super-producer [will.i.am] same here, allied to faintly atypical ballads that, nonetheless, add little to Spears’s synthetic sex-doll sheen.

The wan vocals and listless melodies conspire to render such eclecticism [on this album] as flavourless as a Cup-a-Soup variety pack.

Yes, it sounds like you imagine: slightly artificial, pop-inflected chunk-rock, with dustbin-lid drums, loads of guitars and even a hint of voice box/Auto Tune.

It takes no chances. This is a record that browbeats and bullies you into submission with its sheer massiveness, courtesy of producer Brian Eno.

This feels like a wearisome exercise in reasserting his market appeal.

What’s inside? Nothing. Which is, coincidentally, what this album adds to the treasury of human art.

It's a Gary Barlow idea of what indie music sounds like.

[A] bog-standard shamateur indie rock, with riffs borrowed from The Smiths and Velvets, lyrics borrowed from Dylan and Iggy.

So Long’s strenuously busy patchwork leaves you wondering how something so superficially impressive ends up making so little impact. The answer lies in the way the Bicycle Clubbers rarely deliver these gap-year reports with decisive force enough to thrill, or dwell on an idea for long enough to fulfill its promise.

Mostly it's clichéd Pelion heaped on cheesy Ossa in a mountain range of sickly gestures.

Self-help and sauce remain the remit, which might have been less tiring if “Roar”, “Walking on Air” and “This Moment” offered forms fresher than, respectively, the robo-stutter of Rihanna’s “Umbrella”, weary Italo-house pianos and strenuous stadium bluster to enliven their empowerment-speak.

Charmless kiss-offs (“Don’t”) and sappy sentiments (“People Fall in Love in Mysterious Ways”) dominate otherwise, landing with the thud of the authentically uninspiring.

As off-the-peg as Primark, the Rihan-droid returns with more dancefloor fodder which has all the right bleeps in all the right places, but nothing to make you go "wow".

Boyle's versions are professionally executed but phenomenally dreary.

Every intro twinkles and every chorus swells effectively enough. But if indie carries on like this, we're gonna need a bigger landfill.

Ditto & co ... appear to have disastrously lost their fire. Only "Love in a Foreign Place" shows the sort of strutting disco beast they are capable of. It's too little. But not, one still hopes, too late.

Sadly for the listener, this is mostly a collection of one-paced songs more heartbroken than heartbreaking.

An album which merely proves that the Cranberries haven't lost their knack of saying nothing in a grating way.

When he shuts up, and lets the shambling jangle and daydreamy exotica take over, it's great. When he sings, it's murder.

This is a production in search of an album, a massive empty shell, a big expensive nothing.

This quickly becomes the stuff of a thousand, middling US soft-rockers and when they're not whining like Maroon 5, they're whining like Blink-182.

Like most pop albums, it's front-loaded. The banging club tunes, like the chart-topping "Young" are at the start, then it slumps into a series of obligatory ballads on which her unremarkable voice is somewhat stretched.

Strangeland is drenched in reverb-heavy piano, Chicken Soup for the Soul maxims and moderately maudlin musings about not being young any more.