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

It is mainly charming.

This is Green Day doing what Green Day have always done.

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".

This critic cannot in all honesty say, with a clear conscience, that their second album is absolutely terrible. Because it plain isn't.

A patchy affair which too often fails to transcend its blatant P-funk influences.

The rest of Kiss is like opening a tweenager's diary (titles include "Tonight I'm Getting Over You") and setting it to synthy, house beats, but nothing has the crossover appeal of that debut single.

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

Very few of them add anything much at all to the original versions, which may be out of reverence or it may be a testament to the fierce identities of the songs themselves.

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

In place of the suavité we associate with Songbook Rod, we get a whooping, sequenced modernisation of 1970s Guitar-Rock Rod.

It sometimes meanders like a wasted hipster at an Animal Collective after-show. Yet it preserves enough presence of mind to yield gems such as the sing-song "Alien Days" or the deliquescent "Mystery Disease."

Here, the North-east new-wave revivalists refresh their default angular moves with nervy propulsion (“Give, Get, Take”), elegant synth-pop (“Brain Cells”) and electro-glide reflections (“Is it True?”).

Balminess, after all, is the chief asset of this second album's slow-rolling, harmonic country-gospel jams.

Smart, thoughtful lyrics about everything from iPods to the Arab Spring.

Reconvening after a four-year hiatus, the duo have carried on where they left off--meaning the Frankmusik-produced TW is gentle, blissful and devoid of the exuberant electro romps of yesteryear.

The caprine warble of solo Steve Nicks has broken its silence after 10 years to explore the idea that nothing lasts forever, especially in affairs of the heart.

There's such a belt-and-braces approach that the array of sounds (strings, choirs, tubular bells, beats and synths, dubby blurbs and squeaks) can come across as overbearing.

Not easy. Not pleasant. But touching in parts, if only because of Martyn's honest gaze.

All elegantly arranged and written in self-consciously prosy style. He'd say wry. I'd say borderline sententious.

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.

Like most of Unapologetic, it's ["Nobody's Business" is] instantly forgettable.

There's an excess of bog-standard radio-friendly pop-rock, and a couple of wet weepies à la "Don't Speak".

Throwaways (“Jewels n’ Drugs”) and power-ballad (“DOPE”) digressions weigh heavy on the pacing, but the arch “Mary Jane Holland” and “Swine” occupy livelier turf.

Nothing you wouldn't expect.

It adds up to a shallowly appealing, summery package; glossily produced and personality free.

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.

Well, these things are relative, and this record is still jam-packed with purest filth and unrepentant excess.

Overlong at 19 tracks, it has its moments.

What Corazon certainly contains is a brightly recorded, punchy collection of “Latin” beats and melodies, plus some rock, featuring a handful of distinguished guests and the familiar overflying drone of Carlos’s own guitar obbligati.

Gimmicks aside, any version of TFIM with a core of "Little Shocks", "Start with Nothing", "When all is Quiet", "Man on Mars" and "Heard it Break" won't go far wrong. [Review of UK release The Future Is Medieval]

It's high-class karaoke, covering the Chi-Lites, Dorothy Moore, The Dells, Womack & Womack.

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.

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.

This long-delayed third album sets out to make the Hackney diva "current" again.

Each song sounds much like the last but with hooks like this, who needs prizes for subtlety?

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

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

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

It all hangs together quite nicely if, as ever, rather uninvolvingly.

The writing is generic, the studio-craft impressive. Enjoyment will depend on how you get on with the voice and its hooting cannonade of mannerisms.

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

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

It won’t frighten the horses, but it might encourage you to buy an overpriced T-shirt.

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

He wins you over, eventually.

Collections constitutes a fairly sharp decline.

From dancehall/nu-metal hybrids to dubstep-meets-Bond theme balladry, its bombastic stuff, but also finely tuned in its balance of sincerity and showmanship.

A strange end to a strange album, whose mood, to invoke one of their earlier songs, is not so much "Fuck You, It's Over" as "fuck yeah, it's over!"

It's an hour of radio-friendly pop-rock in a Deacon Blue meets pre-ironic U2 vein, all over-reverbed vocals and mildly modish electronics.

It's bright and brash, sometimes almost life-affirming, but leaves you wondering two things (the influence of Graceland and singing in a comedy "foreign" accent).

Those who endured Williams’s recent X Factor performance need not fear: this brassy sequel to 2001’s big-band LP Swing When You’re Winning, is actually rather listenable.

It's much more fun than the Brandon Flowers album. Which, admittedly, isn't very big talk at all.

It's difficult to tell, though, how much is sock and how much darn.

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.

Given its sudden sharp downward turn, it’s hard to unreservedly recommend Another Country. But there are enough decent moments to justify a bit of iTunes cherry-picking, at least.

A charming companion piece to The Best of...

A rapid sugar rush, followed by a gradual crash.

Electra Heart is too professional to be truly terrible, but it's never clever enough to be more than merely toytown.

Boyle's versions are professionally executed but phenomenally dreary.

Its best moments are its electro-pop numbers.

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

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

[Since I Saw You Last] falls below Barlow’s best--“Patience”, “Rule the World”--at just the point when he needed to up his game.

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.

Evolution is a perfect Frankenstorm of over-produced American R&B.

Planta feels lightweight; not much really catches the ear or imagination.

MFAD! finds them sounding like exactly what they are, namely an airbrushed, Massachusetts version of the Stones.

Humbugness aside, though, it's a serviceable collection of jazzy covers and duets.

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".

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

Her Lennox-meets-Tyler, or Welch-meets-Tunstall lungs boom out across a Heart FM-friendly pop-rock sound which sometimes attains a sweeping Stevie Nicks drama but often merely reaches Dido level.

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.

Even without the unpleasant association of the Chris Brown guest slot here, #willpower (we're letting people hashtag their album titles now?) is a charmless listen.

Mostly No End sounds like pretty much anyone noodling about in their shed.

Taken in individual portions, they're a refreshing jolt to the system, but a whole album's worth feels like being force-fed a gallon of Sunny Delight.

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