There's a winning way with '70s soft-rock chord changes, but his staggering lyrical banalities makes most of this virtually unlistenable. [May 2009, p.89]

If once she was sweetly sardonic, now she sounds utterly bored, and collaborator Greg Kurtsin hardly helps with an anodyne synthpop production that makes excruciating excursions into rawhide country, pallid polka and Bontempi showtunes.

Sadly, Feed The Animals blends commercial US rap with rock classics with so little charm or skll, that even Jive Bunny is slightly annoyed you've used his name in vain. [Nov 2008, p.96]

This is music that was manufactured to be played everywhere except those places to which people go when they want to hear music. [Oct 2008, p.105]

A collection of nursery rhymes aimed at toddlers, it should prove nauseating to anyone over the age of three. [Nov 2008, p.92]

Life Processes sounds like mice playing Hundred Reasons covers. [May 2008, p.95]

Metal has teken giant evolutionary strides these past few years but, like mammoths frozen in ice, Def Leppard remain perfectly preserved in their own oblivion to them. [July 2008, p.91]

Funplex consists largely of a series of witless retreads of school disco hit 'Love Shack,' with Fred Schneider's deadpan "woo!" recalling an increasinglt weary holiday rep. [Apr 2008, p.83]

This is surely the desperate death-thore of a rank '90s relic. [Apr 2008, p.99]

Her music is similarly annoying, with her sugar-fuelled rockabilly-pop, she's the female Jack Penate. [Jan 2008, p.93]

Surely--surely!--this is an elaborate hoax. [Oct 2006, p.110]

The problem with The Weirdness is that it shoots its bolt immediately and has nothing left to offer. [Apr 2007, p.93]

They've turned their backs on disco and privileged operatic rock while retaining their--ahem!--inimitable sense of fun. [Dec 2006, p.106]

Finds her plumbing new depths of pomposity. [Aug 2006, p.84]

Much of it is endurance-defyingly dull. [Jul 2006, p.84]

It'll work neither in the club or in the home. [Jun 2006, p.108]

A dreary debut. [Feb 2006, p.74]

A dozen songs of unremitting blandness by a man with absolutely nothing left to say. [Oct 2005, p.96]

It was the anger and angst of a jilted 20-year-old that gave the original songs their edge--something entirely absent from these blandly matured acoustic versions. [Aug 2005, p.90]

Tourist begins earnestly... and continues through 11 torpid ballads, drained of all their earlier quirks, seemingly laboratory-designed for those who find Keane too edgy. [Feb 2005, p.83]

America's Sweetheart is petulant and self-pitying. Worse, it's self-righteous. Worse still, it's musically crass. [Mar 2004, p.98]

A pale retread of Get Rich... fashioned by lesser talents. [Feb 2004, p.69]

Perhaps the most inappropriately-titled album since The Best Of Sting. [Dec 2003, p.116]

Arid and mannered. [Nov 2003, p.112]

He's dispensed with the grittier elements and plumped for a straightforward US college rock backing, with dismal results. [Nov 2003, p.112]

This is turgid, formulaic guff. [Nov 2003, p.114]

Mancunian hipsters will shudder in disbelief. [July 2002, p.101]

The results are risible but the joke is no longer funny. [Feb 2003, p.77]