Each featured artist at the top of their games, masterfully dominating their segments, leagues above Tha Carter IV's comparatively tired host.

It's not all bad, and sometimes the reverse is true, with the strings the best thing about the track; the opening figure from 'A+E' is very pretty and the violin rising up in 'Cologne' is melodious and elegant, but they both give way to more of the electro-flotsam.

The fact that BE is patchy, and solid rather than surprising in its best spots, you have to put down to a failure of nerve or drive. It's not Different Gear, Still Shit, but it is nowhere near as exciting as it might have been.

It's not that Thicke can't carry a tune. It's that he thinks that having songs that smoulder with sex appeal a la Luther Vandross, Boyz II Men or Barry White means that you have to degrade woman and boast about how your penis is bigger than the next fella's.

Ultimately, The Endless River is another Floyd album about the inability to communicate--it doesn't "say anything" or "go anywhere", but maybe that's the point. While it's unlikely to win the band many new admirers, the casual Floyd fan will find much to enjoy here.

Even without the cushy padding of Welcome to: Our House's clutch of Alex da Kid, AraabMuzik, and Hit-Boy beats, No Love Lost predictably sounds an awful lot like everything else on the radio.

It might be better to think of Hotel Sessions as a surviving collection of demos and rarities rather than a planned project. Handled in this way, the album begins to exude at least some charm.

If there's one problem with this pop/rap hybrid it is the skittish way she sometimes departs from the beat, losing her flow in EDM choruses or radio friendly R&B pop hooks. Iggy is strongest when she welds her words to a minimal yet delectable bass boom, spelling out her name with mischievous exaggeration.

The one-paced nature of the album ensures that it fails to hold the attention throughout, with the mind frequently dipping in and out of the record, and the suspicion lingers that I Declare Nothing would work better as a pair of EPs and some judicious pruning.

Most of the songs flatline – ambient, rambling soundscapes that are largely indistinguishable...It's no coincidence that the briefest songs, when Syd really gets down and makes her personality felt, are also some of the best.

For the majority of Hymns' runtime Russell decides to play it safe and prop up Kele's uninspired musings like he's just another programmable component of an increasingly polished, synthetic entity. That the two longstanding partners can still lock together so seamlessly musically is nice and all, but it also highlights the essential ingredient missing from this half-baked album: chaos.

Excuse My French so blatantly plunders rap radio's past and present that once one stops expecting anything original there's little left to do than mentally catalog the references. Yet while French Montana isn't doing anything new, he's also not doing anything wrong.

Even the most hardcore of Yes fans may forget that this exists in a couple months.

A curious listen, Sounds From Nowheresville is akin to having your memory wiped at exactly the same moment an experience is stored in the brain.

It feels like he's taking a step back; his covers album is livelier and more creative than this, perhaps because it didn't feel the need to live up to anything.

This is a piece of work in which good-quality ingredients have been handled without a great deal of tact.