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]

Toxicity is virtually unlistenable: thrash metal splintered into a million pieces by unnecessary time changes, topped off with excruciatingly theatrical vocals. [Dec 2001, p.118]

He still sounds like a blue-collar phoney trying to be a poor man's Springsteen. [May 2002, p.104]

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]

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

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.

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]

The rhymes are gangsta shit at its laziest and most drearily noxious. [Mar 2002, p.111]

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

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]

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

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]

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

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

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

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

A sentimental indulgence destined for a theme-pub half-life. [Nov 2002, p.114]

On her underwhelming second album, we realise how nu-sould would sound stripped of all sonic invention, mischief and sensuality. [Dec 2002, p.151]

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]

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]

Basic, sludge-grey power pop that makes Weezer sound as kaleidoscopic as The Flaming Lips. [Nov 2002, p.128]

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

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

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

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]

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]

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

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

Chiefly consists of lumpen and joyless AOR rock, with a few rhythm loops to give an illusion of modernity. [Apr 2002, p.104]

"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]

Incompetent satire. [Apr 2003, p.106]

Much of this flaccid digi-guitar funk sounds like rough ideas Daft Punk rejected for Discovery. [Jun 2002, p.122]

What makes B&S great is conspicuous by its absence.... For completists only. [Jul 2002, p.101]

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

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

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

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]

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]

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

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]

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

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

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]

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

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]

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

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

Light is a dog's breakfast of weedy vocals, preachy platitudes and banal melodies that makes Sting sound like The Last Poets. [Jul 2010, p.112]

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

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

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]

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

Starts badly and gets worse for a very long time (77 minutes). [Jan 2002, p.146]

Squire's voice is awful, while his music and lyrics are those of a busker. [Nov 2002, p.113]

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

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]

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

It's grisly. [Sep 2009, p.90]

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

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]

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

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

An unctuous solo album mixing flaccid new songs with slick retreads of classics. [Jan 2018, p.24]

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]

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

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]

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

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]

Collins... sounds dated with his glossy production, precision session-playing and radio-friendly songs all done by numbers with a great big hole where a heart should be. [Dec 2002, p.129]