Moffat doesn't do much with Mendelssohn's music except to chop it into annoying loops or stretch it out into quivering ambience that lacks the warmth and charm of his previous cut-up efforts. [Jun 2017, p.33]

An over-produced set of soppy ballads, Eagles-styled soft-rock and cod-disco. Sadly, the once great voice is shot, too. [Dec 2016, p.28]

It might work as visual theatre, but as an album, it's horribly relentless. [Jun 2016, p.71]

A stylistic and conceptual vacuum. [Jan 2016, p.78]

No range of light here, just a wan glow that denies the need for shade. [Apr 2014, p.71]

The hooks on tracks like "You'll Carry On Real Nice" are the kind of value-meal stodge that clogged the tail end of Britpop. [Dec 2013, p.66]

Hope In Hell is entirely dreadful, a grim farrago of frenzied riffing and belligerently adolescent lyrics. [Jul 2013, p.69]

It hard to work out what's more annoying from the rest, be it Dustin Payseur's forgot-my-gym-kit vocals, the self-important but frankly juvenile ambient interludes, otr the neat riffs, which sound like plugins from some indie-pop iPad composition app. [May 2013, p.67]

From the Top of Willamette Mountain sounds more confident than the UK debut he released earlier this year.

An in-joke gone horribly wrong. [Jan 2013, p.80]

"Heaven" is a decent stab at '80s synth pop; "Looking Hot" and "Push And Shove" mix bubblegum R&B with ragga-inspired middle eights; the rest is rather forgettable. [Dec 2012, p.75]

Where Flying Lotus scatterbrain brings emotive grooves out of madness, GLK can only manage ugly, mostly boring sketches. [Nov 2012, p.75]

The riffs are polite, the vocals maddeningly limo, and more than half the tracks are mere sketches they couldn't be bothered to colour in. [Sep 2012, p.73]

Their ragtag religious signifiers, stretching from the Mediterranean to Bengal, feel like gap year blog entries, and Cisneros' wizened sage delivery is ludicrous. [Aug 2012, p.77]

Madonna's 12th album has a good title and a nice cover, but that's almost as much as you can say in its favour. [Jun 2012, p.77]

They cite Wagner as an influence, sharing his bombast but none of the drama. [Apr 2012, p.69]

Music without charm or purpose, with all the nutritional value of a Twinkie. [Apr 2012, p.71]

Emotional Traffic contains a few soppy homilies to domesticity, a transparent bid for a Super Bowl halftime booking, and a great many reasons to listen to the equally polished, but vastly wittier, Brad Paisley. [May 2012, p.78]

Maximalists and circus ringmasters might enjoy it, but many will be scrabbling for the stop button. [May 2012, p67]

By attempting chillwave haze, Scando-Balearic sunlight, shoegaze and taut inoffensive grooves, Twin Sister are certainly en vogue, but also utterly inept. [Oct 2011, p.100]

Rock rears its head on "speed demon," but by that point, the riffs are drowned out by the sound of a joke having fatally gone too far. [Oct 2011, p.81]

Lyrically, the fare wavers from the unspectacularly anecdotal to the spinelessly soppy. [Jul 2011, p.121]

Anyone seeking the funky militancy of The Beatnigs or The Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy may be baffled. [Jul 2011, p.82]

This complacent record from long-time drone lover and former Lungfish guitarist Asa Osborne gets the recipe badly wrong. [Jun 2011, p.103]

What follows is the most overblown album in recent memory, every song instantly hitting the "big Music" button without giving the listener a chance to become acquainted. [May 2011, p.87]

The downhome strum of "Stuck Like Glue" has a certain charm--at least until its horrific cod-dancehall break down--but fails to redeem a depressingly calculated record. [Mar 2011, p.101]

The 23-year-old Valley girl's sonically lurid and brash, (supposedly) autobiographical debut may boast production heavyweights like Benny Blancoi, but her witless, cranked-to-11 stridency recalls Kelly Clarkson and Avril Lavigne rather than Pink or Britney. [May 2010, p.94]

These tuneless songs which either brim with maudlin self-pity or bounce along with enforced jollity. [Oct 2009, p.123]