Coated with a West Coast varnish and filled with radio-friendly melodies Hope St will provide great background music for warm evenings in the garden. With continued listening, however, it's liable to leave you cold.

The blatant, stocking-filler money-grab of tagging these songs on to a quirky hits compilation (minus Bohemian Rhapsody) isn’t in the Christmas spirit.

Making music by numbers shouldn’t be this tiring.

Throughout, the arrangements are as relentlessly upbeat and playfully retro as the album’s Alan Fears-designed artwork, stuffed with vocoders, peacocking basslines and laser-beam synth sounds. They’re also wildly referential, and largely fail to add anything either fresh or memorable to the conversation.

The first half's vocal tracks woefully resemble standard-issue chart fodder. There's some better instrumental stuff later on, but, overall, it's ordinary.

The more time you spend with each song, the more it sounds like a variation on something you’ve heard done better before, a formula in search of a hook.

She oversings to compensate, as if by keeping notes moving we won’t notice weaknesses, and there are moments of synthetic fluctuation that suggest recourse to autotune techniques routinely used to polish performances of lesser contemporary pop singers. The material does her no favours.

While the tricksy chord changes upon which most tracks are founded may be clever, or possibly ground-breaking, these recordings seriously lack oomph.

Their tenth studio album kicks off in fine form with the first single, San Quentin. ... If only the whole album was like this, but instead listeners will get whiplash from all the genre changes, which spans American rock, country and frat-boy pop.

There are things going on here that will, in all likelihood, percolate through to stadium pop in due course but Hyde lacks the vocal presence or structural songcraft to shape the material into something greater than its parts.

All Bay has really done is exchange one set of generic production clichés for another.

The result is not bad: though you miss the unpredictable blasts of raw hellfire from the cult classic Surfer Rosa era, the band find some gritty, grindy melodies in the bigger, slicker vein of 1991’s patchy Trompe Le Monde.

A string section and gospel choir barely add nuance to straight-ahead karaoke versions of Oasis classics and a few of Liam’s solo songs.

Sparer instrumentation and slack tempos mean that singer Luke Pritchard dominates, and his reedy voice fails to enliven trite lyrics about lust and fame.

It’s a shame to see a talented guy rushed into making the wrong record.

Their sixth album, however, sticks too rigidly to the formula.

The songs are weak, the sounds cheesily overfamiliar and a slightly second-rate string of collaborators (he wanted Lady Gaga and Rihanna but settled for Kylie Minogue and Britney Spears) fail to sprinkle the beats with any magic.

This record falls into all the icky, celebrity duet traps.

SERPENTINA isn’t a coherent whole but rather a doggerel and ill-considered mishmash of disparate parts.

Most tracks here aim to be an anthem, but none has the requisite melodic clout. It's hard to see them entering the super league on this visit.

It contains Frankie Knuckles-era house music, hip-hop breaks and some interesting electronica. However, the band are not the genre-defying pioneers they think they are.

Ultimately it amounts to two decent tunes in the singer-songwriter pop idiom, padded out with angsty filler and hot air.

A legion of co-producers attempt to recreate the slick dance-pop for which she is famed, but too often her husky voice and arch delivery are given short shrift by bloated house beats and perfunctory hooks.

All 4 Nothing ultimately fails to expand his sound.

Rap has been around for four decades now, and you might have hoped it would have evolved beyond this kind of backwards, deeply misogynist, abusively macho, greed- and status-obsessed posturing.

The foray ultimately fails because Laurie's voice is no more than adequate.

Shackled by its own turgid competency, Dear Scott fizzes with all the life of a demo tape recorded in a local community hall double-booked with a bingo night. No matter how loud you turn up the volume, it still sounds quiet. It sounds uncomfortably naked, too.

The most disappointing thing is how thin much of Donda 2 sounds, how messy and badly structured the songs are, how few pop hooks or memorable melodies it conjures, and how weak and repetitive West’s rhymes often are.