When it’s good, it’s usually something that sounds like the luscious, clinical opener 4ware, or cow-brained stomper Three Pound Chicken Wing. Otherwise there are too many generic pompous 70s-prog synths grafted on to basic beats.

Bellamy’s lyrics can be trite (“Yeah I’m free/From society,” declares The Defector) and the longer the album goes on, the more confusing the plotline becomes.

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

Their fifth album is a disappointment, however, with the 12 tracks here smoothed of any interesting rough edges and aimed squarely at stadium crowds.

Sun aside, Beacon is prosaic and frenetic, its tireless synths and fidgety guitars unable to camouflage the group's dearth of ideas.

These standards have a lot still to say--if only they sang a little more potently here.

Kamikaze finds Marshall Mathers revelling in his Slim Shady rabid underdog role, fulminating at critics, boggling at Lil Yachty, and sneering at the Migos flow on Not Alike. How riveting all this finger-wagging is probably depends upon your birth date.

They may have plenty of heart but their heads are lost in the clouds.

All the elements of solid indie pop are here, but too often it amounts to a familiar and underwhelming sound.

This, then, is a big, expansive, commercial album, its hair shorn and occasionally gelled into directional styles, but one keen to bare its soul.

At 14 songs, however, the album soon starts to sag, with Graham’s approach to emoting – ie sing louder – eventually overwhelming the weaker songs. ... It’s in the smaller moments that Graham seems most comfortable.

It's distressing, elementary and samey yet utterly unignorable.

The skies overhead on his debut album are dark and menacing for the most part: this is music to depopulate dancefloors, not fill them.

Lana Del Rey's partying is fuelled by a knowing sadness, and sung in that laconic, hypnotic voice, which ultimately saves this thoroughly dissolute, feminist nightmare of a record for the romantics among us.

Quietly dramatic and, at best, lyrical.

The anti-gun Run Through the Jungle gets a shimmering treatment from Spain’s Bunbury, Texas’s Los Lonely Boys raise dust on Born on the Bayou, and Oakland’s Bang Data give the anti-war Fortunate Son a bilingual hip-hop makeover.

Although they mix styles enough to semi‑redeem themselves, they're still some way short of living up to their influences.

A victory for self-indulgence over quality control.

It would all be so much anodyne chart mulch, but Anne-Marie has something of a plain-speaking everywoman image too. Some tracks here connect a little deeper, offering common-sense snapshots of unglamorous lives.

The moves here run the gamut from belligerently derivative to deft confidence.

Overall, it does the job, but no more than that.

If Derek Zoolander made a record it would sound like Thirty Seconds to Mars: stadium rock so vapid and bombastic that if frontman Jared Leto were pulling off some kind of long-duration joke it would be genius.

A little more courage would not have gone amiss.

It starts very promisingly: the self-doubt expressed on the stripped-back opener My Own Worst Enemy is genuinely affecting, while Love Is Your Name boasts an irrepressibly upbeat chorus. I Make My Own Sunshine, meanwhile, might resemble a backwoods take on Catatonia’s Road Rage, yet it still possesses a certain charm. But the quality control suffers elsewhere.

Yes, the chords [on First World Problems] recall the Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil, but fans looking for a Roses-adjacent tune packed with slouch and King Monkey life advice are well served here. Not everything else lives up to it--Barrington Levy’s Black Roses is a dull, rockist trudge of a cover--but overall, Ripples is studded with little surprises.

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.

Overall, the swagger and sonic brawn get a bit wearying and it’s a shame they don’t show more of the pop nous that glimmers intermittently here.

Wayne’s unheralded 13th studio album proves that the 37-year-old’s flow can still be fearsome, even if his edit function remains iffy.