Fun while it lasts, but swiftly forgettable.

For all their stadium uplift and notionally anthemic choruses, they never deliver a hook or melodic sucker punch that really floors you.

Some of these tunes are passable party pabulum but Thicke is such a total tool that it gets in the way of any fun.

A few more like the angry Little Bigot (“Take that hatred and throw it on the fire,” it goes, over a three-legged rhythm) or the minor-key plucked swing of So Naive and Darling Arithmetic would add up to more than just another record in which devastation is mourned too mellifluously.

Rome Wasn’t Burnt in a Day, a stripped-down reworking of a recent Chain and the Gang song, is a call to arms that is, improbably, equal parts the Stooges’ I Wanna Be Your Dog and Mary Beard history lesson (too few songwriters today give the Ostrogoths their due), but there is precious little that sticks elsewhere.

This latest brand extension is a two-hour-plus hip-hop gospel confection that’s briefly charmingly pleasant, then heartbreakingly boring. It has less edge than a child’s balloon.

This is Trump-pop: shallow, always betraying its influences, with a third-grade vocabulary and ambition that runs no further than emptying the nearest wallet.

Sport sounds lost, neither serious enough for IDM connoisseurs, nor crass enough for the EDM mob, and lacks the otherworldly melodies of pioneers like Gold Panda or Nicolas Jaar.

Ceremonials never comes down off the high precipice.

Not much here is new: a few alternative takes (including a great one of "ABC") and some previously unheard studio banter.

There's no lack of tunes here but precious little spark.

Reaching is commendable, but ultimately this feels like a throat-clearing before better things to come.

Faith's vocals are too theatrically overdone to be moving, and the songs too generic to reach any level of grandeur.

This fifth studio album is a gaudy chunk of over-produced electro-pop-rock.

It's not a successful union: the songs are too close to aimless, unfinished jams, Reed sounds as if he's trying too hard to be controversial and at 95 minutes it's far too long.

Fun to make, clearly; less so to listen to.

But stretched across 15 tracks and almost 70 minutes, the highlights are spread too thinly, the likes of Show Me the Sun and Cornflakes mired in mediocrity. There’s unevenness within these overlong songs too.

Unfocused, yes, but it's never dull.

The factory default is for disposable, cheesy, trance-influenced pop with Auto-Tuned vocals.

An Abba fan will hear that Fältskog is in strong voice; the uninitiated will wonder what 90s obscurity is being played for bar trivia night.

Frontwoman Tina Halladay’s voice appears to have only one setting: overblown, lung-bursting holler.

There’s precious little to pique the listener’s interest.

Her second album tries to don the weeds of gothic Americana for a darker tone than the pale folk of her eponymous debut, yet remains washed out, like an overexposed negative: oddly beautiful but wilfully wan.

This second album is characterised by cheesy, soul-flavoured pop.

Even with Frankmusik included among the production credits, these one-time synth-pop pioneers sound lifeless compared with all the 80s-raiding whippersnappers so indebted to them.

Old Poisons raises some of the 90s indie furies the band seems to have outgrown, but elsewhere music that’s supposedly sparse ends up feeling hollow.

It's the marginal elements--the filtered fade-outs, the incongruous sci-fi bleeping between tracks--that suggest a more interesting band struggling to emerge.

Staying at Tamara’s defining mood is one of unchallenging, and unflinching, politeness.