Mainstream Sellout portrays MGK as a victim of success; it gleams like a fancy ornament on an industry merry-go-round – then the music hits you, not with a roar, but a very loud meh.

Man of the Woods pitches unevenly between town and country, with folky campfire songs about the joys of nature arranged around electronic rhythms and electro funk. The two strains don’t really get along. When it’s bad, it’s cringe-inducing. But when it’s good, it’s world-beating.

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.

There are a few tasty future-pop moments, but mainly it's predictable r&b, weighed down with tiresome, ersatz sexiness.

There may be nothing particularly original here, but the gritty ambience of electric instrumentation suits Mumford & Sons’s way with melody, emotion and dynamics. Simply put, the Mumfords rock.

His second album is a regression. A year on, the gaudy guitar loops and sleek hip-hop beats sound mundane.

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

Packed with gospel choirs, church organs and soulful ululations condensed into a typically bravura tableaux of obscure samples, warped synths and spooky slabs of vocoder harmonies, Jesus Is King sounds as scintillating as anything in West’s considerable canon.

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.

Mostly this is a gimmicky album with ill-fitting techno and electro influences on plastic, poppy songs.

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.

He is, it is true, a singular talent and his inner monologues crackle with an undeniable dark alchemy. And yet, like a sermon that goes on too long, Kanye’s stream-of-conscience observations on Jesus, Kim Kardashian and the importance of being Kanye suffer for an absence of breathing space. Full of sound and fury it may be – but West’s latest ultimately lacks direction.

It’s moderately uplifting, all pretty easy going and easy listening.

They know how to knock a tune together and have delivered a pop party album thrillingly in tune with contemporary listening habits.

The quintet's debut is pretty good fun, fusing Stones-y raunch with brash Caribbean rhythms.

The infuriating thing is that there is a great album lurking here, one that a disciplined editor and more sonically adventurous producer might have uncorked.

Everything I Thought I Was is certainly not the career defining masterwork Timberlake seems to think it is, but nevertheless it’s enough to get him over that mid-life bump.

The Fifth sees Dizzee dropping his aitches between generic, anthemic, autotuned American choruses.

Each track has the invention to be a smash hit but the cumulative effect is rather wearing, an album of no emotional depth, in which everyone is going all out to deliver the big single.

This debut switches effortlessly from r&b ballads to punchy rap tunes. With her big voice and ballsy attitude, is she Ilford's very own Pink?

Like his misogynistic streak, his sound is stuck in the past. What keeps our attention is his exuberant delight in language itself, such as his geometry pun in River: “this love triangle / left us in a wrecked tangle”. (Say it aloud).

A flat-out belter of the Adele/Florence school, surrounded variously by daft orchestral sturm-und-drang and flimsy ProTools disco/house. Better may come.

This album continues the striptease of Britney’s career. But behind each discarded veil there is just another veil, an insubstantial gauze masking teams of (presumably unphotogenic) producers, writers, stylists and sloganeers.

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.

It is genuinely embarrassing at times, compounded by the intrusive sense that the songs were really written for an audience of one (who, like the rest of the world, has reportedly shown no interest in listening to it).

What I like most is the sense that these two musicians are beyond caring about perceptions, simply determined to have fun. 44/876 is a treat for grown-up fans of either artist.

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.

An uneven yet entertaining album.