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]