The songs are pretty, the guitars are mellow, all complimentary and measured; dull, in other words.

This is a dog of an album, by anyone's standards, but if you play it next to 'If You're Feeling Sinister', which we did, then it is the sort of dog that shits all over the kitchen and has constant mange.

What once felt like maverick defiance on the part of the 'Shop now leaves them looking directionless, with Tjinder sounding increasingly like an unattractive combination of smugness and bitterness.

There's little of the pop sparkle that shone through the likes of 'The Modern Age' and 'Last Nite' even when - as with 'You Talk Way Too Much' - they're rewriting old material, and Julian's vocals are, to be blunt, awful, sounding uncomfortable to record and rather complacently nasal.

An album of dull, vocal virtuoso ballads.

For the uninitiated, they churn out a joyless mess of badly tuned indie guitar, spasmodic jazz drumming and cutesy vocalisations, and on 'O'Malley, Former Underdog' they overlay this with irritating electronica that is reminiscent of the noise your discman makes when your mobile phone is in the same pocket.

You can smell the impotent melodic desperation a mile off.

The vast bulk of this album is the sort of stuff you'd expect from an averagely talented bunch of first year music students. Who smoke way, way, way too much dope.

It must take a fair amount of skill and a peculiar single-mindedness to create something this consistently bland and tiresome.

As welcome as emphysema.

Like most of the cities Doves sing about, these songs are grey, drizzly, often unpleasant, and more often than not... very, very dull.

A very slickly produced record that's practically unlistenable.

There are many more interesting artists out there doing the kind of thing Jamie does with more panache and originality with voices that don't make me want to throw myself under an underground train, but they're not from Wimbledon.

Someone should put Blink 182 out of their misery.

If The Delays had succeeded in making the latter five-sixths of their debut as wondrous as the first portion, they could be credited with fair miracles.

About as boring as a record can be.

So while Hamilton Leithauser believes he's made a record comparable to the legendary 'The Basement Tapes', it seems almost churlish to point out that you'd be far better off digging out a copy of 'The Basement Tapes' and listening to it, than going out and purchasing 'A Hundred Miles Off' and listening to it once.

A rather predictable and mundane package.

So there are a couple of standout tracks, and the rest falls on its arse.

It took U2 10 years to reach this level of blandness.

Supporters have argued that this is " a perfect comedown album". In the sense that you'll feel like you're coming down even if you haven't taken anything, yes.

This air of superiority is pervasive on 'Our Earthly Pleasures', which is a pity when you consider contemporaries such as Franz Ferdinand can do clever without it getting in the way of the fact all they're really doing is making good pop records.

Not even the added muscle of playaz like Kid Koala, Afrika Bambaataa, Plug 3, Prince Paul and Mike Patton manage to lift this album above the low level pastiche it seems happy to be.

Listen to this record and you realise that by comparison, Robbie Williams does actually have some soul. And if that's not a damning indictment of one of the most execrable records you're likely to hear this decade, I don't know what is.

What we're offered here is pretty much a second take on the discordant beeps, Mani-ripped basslines and lazy hip hop breaks of their first album, with the addition of some hideously nipped and tucked string samples padding out their attempted lyrical bravado.

Yes, 'Don't Believe The Truth' is an improvement on the trilogy of folly that is 'Be Here Now', 'Heathen Chemistry' and 'Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants'. But so what? Can't polish a turd, you know.

There are no great ideas, or stunning movements, just ego-driven mush set to chocolate box arrangements. Oh, and a tendency towards the kind of vocals that Pink Floyd or Chris Rea might have been proud of.

With each track they descend further into the mire.

[An] irritating abomination.

Seriously poor, lowest common denominator bullshit.

Kaiser Chiefs have absolutely no talent or taste for innovation.

It feels like a mix-tape or compilation, an in-joke or doodle between the participants rather than a completed work for public consumption.

But this album isn't just really gratingly saccharine, yet simultaneously bland, it's wilfully so.

Hidden amongst the bilge, there are six proper songs here, with words and everything. But they only serve to prove how erratic Belle And Sebastian have become.

How anyone can describe Leeds' The Music as a "best new band" is beyond me. Unless they're over fifty, sport a footballer's perm and weep at Almost Famous.

Excruciating, toe-curling Pain, the sort that makes you want to leap through windows or run over children.

This record is about as bad it is possible for a record to be. It is offensive on every level - the music is bad, the rapping is bad, the sleeve is bad.

The ham-fisted attempt to modernise Stereophonics' sound... falls flat at every attempt as samples, effects and the odd electronic buzz avoid the underlying mulch like gas-gun fired dried peas off titanium.

It's sexless twaddle pure and simple, delivered by an over-contented and conceited artist with nothing left to offer the world than refried lyrics and quasi-profound meaningless phrases.

A Victorian freak show with a cracking voice, but just a few stolen Prince and Stevie Wonder tunes, Har Mar Superstar seems to be humiliating himself and reaching for the lowest common denominator in search of lays and some fleeting personal success.

Lyrically, he's got one thing to say: Kid Rock is back, Kid Rock has lots of money, Kid Rock has the dames licked down, Kid Rock is hard. Which is all good when done properly, with wit, but Kid Rock is not clever, and he's not funny.

'Down in Albion' is a truly abhorrent and occasionally upsetting record.

While their political musings... are well intended, the lyrics are so heinously bad and the music so incredibly earnest and bombastic, you're tearing it out of your CD player after five or six tracks.

Timbaland has revealed himself to be a crass, stupid, venal prick who is pretty much talentless outside of production for other people.

Finds her flailing club-footedly some twelve steps behind contemporary R&B, whispering distractedly through a seemingly unending array of interludes and phoning in songs that even Mariah at her most barely-there would dismiss as a trifle on the insipid side.

His new lyrical equation seems to be rip off someone else's words, add some street slang that would have been out of date five years ago, mention some brand names, say something offensive and then shoe horn it all together.

You can feel how dreadful this record is from the very first bar.

As concept albums go, this one wears very thin very quickly.

If this was the work of a new artist it's debatable whether it would even have seen the light of day, and it's certainly unlikely we'd've felt the need to even comment on it.

'Lions' is a mediocre album.

This bears the same relationship to pop music that wallpaper paste does to food.

An album of repetitive, insipid riffs: eleven tracks flakier than chippings and more irritating to your facial passages than toxic MDF sawdust.

Startling for all the wrong reasons.

This is so so crap.