With the exception of Romeo, inspired by Greek mythology and possessing an irresistible chorus, too much of the album’s hinterland sounds slick but uninspired.

The songwriting isn't sturdy enough to hold it all up.

Good Sad Happy Bad--born out of a heavily edited jam session--feels more shapeless and, as a result, more frustrating.

Too much of this music is just hip, well-connected (you can Google their amorous partners, current and former) aural wallpaper, gossamer and murky by turns, undoubtedly very pleasant in an altered state but frustratingly unmemorable.

A strangely flat album.

An album that ultimately sounds curiously disengaged.

Full marks for devotion to "authenticity", but, sadly, authentic doesn't necessarily mean interesting.

It's not dissimilar to Jean Michel Jarre's Oxygene stripped of its most memorable passages, and might well do what it suggests on the cover. But those hypnotic washes of sound go beyond their remit and could have us all dozing off.

Listen still delivers the familiar crowd-pleasing builds and drops, the formulaic song structures.

The music--lots of nondescript ballads, a splash of contemporary disco--is no less banal [as headlines from the Daily Mail].

There is little drama here, just plenty of shorthand (sad pianos), a total absence of risk and, perhaps worst of all, no evidence of the deranged hedonism that catapulted Smith into a funk.

Fifteen tracks stretches them too far, though, and on the likes of Fog, their woahs sound tired, and it becomes apparent that these are pretty empty musical calories.

As ever, the messages are mixed, on many levels.

The stadium punks' ninth album, though, is largely throwaway.

At its least appealing, the music follows suit, dealing in boilerplate pop of varying hues: ponderous-verse-into-epic-chorus balladry; sugary indie guitars on 305 and Teach Me How to Love, dance pop so unmemorable it’s a wonder Mendes didn’t forget he was singing it and wander off midway through. But, just occasionally, something from outside the standard palette of current pop grabs your attention.

Sadly, the album doesn’t sound half as much fun as the journey.

It's filled with meat-and-potatoes beats, which, despite their dangerous titles (Machine Gun, Wickedest Man) are more likely to make you check your watch than lose your head.

He [Biggie] was never boring, unlike this compilation of tired productions and mawkish interludes.

On this sequel, Gibbs mostly sounds bored, aggressively bored or boringly aggressive. The ever creative Madlib chucks in everything he can find to dazzle the listener. When this coheres--in the vicious swamp-beat of Massage Seats, for example--it’s sensational. Often his work sounds too dense to compete with mass-market trap, and struggles to support Gibbs’s gruff rhymes.

For all the mash-ups, Bangerz feels stitched together in the dark, and the attention-seeking begins to grate.

Producer Ed Harcourt has met her mannered delivery and plummy English vowels with string-soaked arrangements but they're more saccharine than stirring.

All most of the candle-held-to-the-sun versions here reveal--from the hushed, sad, fingerpicky take on Blank Space to the hushed, sad, strummy take on Out of the Woods--is a strong urge to listen to Swift herself.

More boring and pointless than Brexit.

Too much of the material sounds formulaic, most noticeably a Strokes pastiche, Darkness in Our Hearts, and the Verve-by-numbers Out of Control.

The usually redoubtable Beth Ditto sounds less like the spirit of riot grrrl and more like a wannabe material girl.

Other than the sultry Stars Dance, much of this sounds like songs Rihanna rejected.

A victory for self-indulgence over quality control.

Best avoided if you're not a Guns N' Roses completist.