Green Day have become the very thing they once despised: buck-chasin’ mild boys of mayonnaise corporate rock.

The lameness of the words would be forgivable if they were paired with music that provided any kind of pleasant distraction. But across Happy People’s 10 tracks, the band prove themselves incapable of writing a single decent hook.

It is impeccably produced and sheened, but it sounds polished to the extent of being soulless.

Drowners is a fun little record, if you want to get all patronizing about it, but it’s difficult to get any further than that because of its staggering unoriginality.

For the most part, however, The Female Boss is a cynical and dire product which invites the riposte: Tulisa, you're fired.

When you're at Rihanna's level you can afford the best songwriters and producers in the business and sonically the album is generally far ahead of her peers. Yet if Sia's Diamonds is a sultry triumph, its character and uniqueness highlights the ultimately hollow pleasures of much around it.

Papa Roach have the tools to be a damn good rock band, but they'll never be one unless they change the bloody record.

It truly is awful.

Mature Themes is simple self-indulgence and that's rarely worth listening to.

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.

So there are a couple of silly tracks - but then there were two silly Bennett sisters [in Austen's Pride and Prejudice]. Sadly, the remainder of the album is all Mary and no Elizabeth; devoid of life, wit, or energy.

Replete with tacky production and recycled ideas, its few merits are stretched to near breaking point.

Hi-Tek's construction of techno beats and rave stabs on the quirky I Fink U Freeky and heavy brostep on opener Never Le Nkemise just add to the nauseating concoction of trash that comprises Ten$ion.

With half of rEVOLVEr emulating his older tracks and the other half making strained attempts to branch out into rap and dance, it appears that the rappa ternt sanga simply hasn't found anywhere else to turn.

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.

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.

Fixin' The Charts comes with a lofty goal: to grind down the blemishes that mar the rock face of the popular music mythos. But to attempt to "fix" history, to paint over its wrongs with a broad, sneerish stroke, is a gross mis-step in the career of one of anti-pop's savviest purveyors.

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.

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.

Clarke is a genuinely talented songwriter, if rather earnest in his intentions, but in Music for The People he and his mates seem to have lost the plot.

Petits Fours just has too many annoying bits about it to be good.

To Lose My Life is an album made to a predefined plan with skill and no heart.

All in, it suffers from a lack of focus and direction.

Unfortunately, all this really means is an extra emphasis on weirdly pitched keyboard riffs and slightly dated sounding beats.

You'll find more wit and invention on a solitary track by Ethan Kath and Alice Glass than you will on this depressingly retro and lumpen homage to a scene that wasn't even all that back in the day.

Rather than offering reinterpretation, Malin sounds like an annoying guest at a house party, who despite all efforts to hide the guitar has found it and insists on playing a disparate bunch of songs much to the annoyance of everyone else, none of whom quite have the heart to tell him to stop.

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.