"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]