It's not really until tremolo laden third track, 'Love High' that the band starts to feel familiar. But once we've gotten into familiar territory, it's clear that what's at fault is not the songs, but the recording and mixing.

One play is enough to confirm that defining moments refuse to peak through the murk.

Much of Glow is tasteful to the point of bland inoffensiveness, the sort of thing that'd suit a branch of All Bar One at half nine on a Friday night.

His vocals never really gel with the music--he mutters and spouts over the top, as ever sounding like he’s having some difficulty keeping jaw attached to his skull while sucking on a gobstopper.

If only perhaps, the allusions were more developed: the sound doesn’t quite manage to create or replicate the enveloping atmosphere of its influences, perhaps because the mood shifts between melancholia and languidly upbeat between tracks, and is overall driven by melodies that feel ordinary and familiar. It makes for nice listening, but by no stretch is it challenging itself, the genre or the audience.

Despite the many hugely talented performers involved, Dr Dee is less philosopher's stone, and more curate's egg: a handful of fine songs where Albarn plays to his existing strengths, but mired in a sea of over-reaching folly. And ultimately, both Dee and Albarn deserve better.

On the album's first half, everything sounds correct but lacks any intoxicating, addictive spark.... [Yet] when its mood alters, somewhere around the metal wasteland of 'Lagoon Leisure', and things start getting sinister, then Regional Surrealism becomes (finally) exciting. The record transforms into a deeply disconcerting experience, all eerie shadows and claustrophobic spaces.

Continuing Hard Candy's pattern of awful try-hard title and 'show the young uns you've still got it' bangers, it's disappointing in its lack of ambition.

The Saga Continues is lacklustre. At times it ventures into sellout territory. It’s not a terrible album (maybe I’ll add a few tracks to my ‘Chill’ playlist) but it never breaks new ground and it never touches the magic of 36 Chambers. Instead, it settles in a slightly anaemic midpoint between nostalgia and commercial compromise.

The Big Dream is vaguely interesting, but not very interesting.

Pixies have played it straight and stayed in their lane, their once vital weirdness cast into the laundry basket like a vampire costume post Halloween. Head Carrier is 80% classic Pixies. But it turns out the missing 20% is as fundamental as oxygen is to air.

By compartmentalising Emika as it does, DVA leaves a nagging sense that she's still selling herself a little short.

Honey, when it works at least, is the sound of piecing together the night before: a love letter to not making it home, to the Tequila salt still stuck to your hand, to hands brushing under the cover of the smoke machine. Unfortunately, half of the time, it says precisely nothing and if that unquestionable potential is to be realised, Kathleen Brien has to make a choice.

Grinderman 2 RMX provides an enjoyable enough distraction but ultimately this is a collection of material that would have worked better as an EP rather than an album.

Yuck aren't actually terrible, but their second album--and first since the departure of frontman Daniel Blumberg--is just eminently forgettable.

So, this is not an incredible album. But in the context TLC’s legacy- as a goodbye tour to end one of the biggest girl groups of our time--there is still something touching here.

One of the first things that jumps out at the listener, and it's something which persists throughout, is the disconnectedness between Smith and Elena Poulou in the control room, arsing about with daft voices and keyboard squiggles respectively, and the big lads at the back.

The demand for our awe at an accomplished--yet unfinished--triumph is confusing. The feeling each song inspires is indeed that of a religious service, one in which the endless standing up and sitting down leaves one a little exasperated. And fatigued.

On its own merits, it's a decent enough record with some interesting tracks on it, even if they sometimes sound like nicely turned B-sides rather than top drawer material.

No amount of street cred can make up for this mostly middling, only intermittently marvellous record.

Good intentions, interesting sounds, and a handful of great songs; compromised by an inflexible house style. It makes listening to the album from start to finish an experience that is occasionally rewarding – especially with a decent set of headphones – but ultimately, well … trying.

There are moments when Soft Hills' sound slight; even middle-of-the-road bland. But there's a beguiling soulfulness and a darkness to this record that will seep into your heart if you give it a chance.

Meteorites is still, on initial blush, like all those other albums from Evergreen onward, "the new album from," a reliable entry but not a jawdropper.

Is Walking On A Dream the sound of things to come then? Clearly not. Empire Of The Sun's grand ambitions are certainly worth applauding, but unfortunately they amount to nothing more than a cold and pale facsimile of the superior conquests of others who have trod these lands before.

There are moments where she reminds us that she can still do wonderful things, but for the most part, Artpop shows us an artist who is trying to do too much all at once.

With occasional flashes of their previous excellence, Spine Hits has too many drab moments to make this anything other than their weakest work yet by far.

Nicki Minaj's second album is pop postmodernity in an advanced state of hollow, banal meaningless, and the first causality is Minaj herself.

What really makes Sheezus so frustrating, though, is that among the dross there are some genuinely interesting tracks here.