Unless a couple more of these tracks manage to repeat the success of 'When I Grow Up' and stick on commercial radio, this is an album heading straight for the bargain bins.

It's downright bad.

Switzerland lacks any track with even a tenth of the standout potential of Danger! High Voltage. And it's a critical absence for Switzerland, because there's nothing on this record that makes you want to hear it a second time.

Most of the album's remaining tracks are utterly vacuous interpretations of songs that few are likely to care much about. They offer nothing new to anyone or anything.

If The Black Eyed Peas want to sing, dance and rap about having good nights and getting laid, that's fine; but expecting a discerning audience to buy this bottle-rocket crap as an album is pure delusion. If they're truly trying to achieve more, The Beginning is a pretty awful start.

This album is only worthy of more than one star for provoking a reaction. That, at least, is better than being merely another dull shade of musical grey. But only marginally.

Verve tracks such as Northern Soul and This Time were surprisingly successful attempts at funk. But the similar fusions attempted on United Nations Of Sound are so poorly executed that the album has to go down as a pompous, self-indulgent rock folly.

Fortune is the kind of record that will please Brown's many deluded female fans, but we cannot with good conscience give it a single star.