This is music that rings shrilly with a deafening hollowness, an unashamed fakery akin to a dream-state where fantasy and reality have become mixed and hopelessly muddied.

Whether you could go so far as to call Guetta an auteur might be pushing it, but it's a cohesive effort, if not quite a work of art.

Two or three songs slip into Jack Johnson-ish blandness, but for the most part The Sound of Sunshine makes good on the promise of its undeniably appetising title.

The strange thing is, for all that it is all over the place, compilations of lost songs and outtakes are not supposed to hang together this well. Or be anywhere near this much fun.

Ultimately, A Dramatic Turn of Events probably isn't too far from what this band would've created even with Portnoy in the ranks. It still sounds like a Dream Theater album, and that's all anyone's ever going to ask for.

Glossing over realisations that the second half begins to drag, Hologram Jams won’t appease anybody who rates music to decimal points or regularly orders their record collection alphabetically. Instead, it’s fun in the same manner as a night out necking Lambrini and cheap cocktails.

Mine Is Yours occupies an unremarkable middle ground somewhere between their bluesy, abrasive tendencies and the kind of staidly proficient indie-rock that surely wasn't part of the plan to begin with.

Twin Atlantic no longer stand out enough from the host of similar power-pop and emo acts that have flooded the airwaves in recent years, and Free is depressingly characterised by unimaginative, one-paced hollers like The Ghost of Eddie and Time For You to Stand Up.

While Labrinth makes the right kind of noise, and provides a window into himself as an artist, at a fleeting 10 tracks Electronic Earth doesn't exactly give away the farm.

While this is a confident and at times sharply written debut, there's little to suggest that Dog Is Dead bring anything new to the table.

Sometimes the production is too slick, but Morissette avoids blandness because she's so idiosyncratic.

Perfectly serviceable, but this band missed their chance to make a third great album decades ago.

A ramshackle beast largely informed by the tension between the pair's aforementioned psychedelic styles.

Nick has a great pop voice--high and clear and strong. It isn’t a great rock voice though, and his desire to smash it into shape by spirited bellowing alone can curdle things, just as they should really start cooking.

Warm and confident throughout her second album, Hilson is becoming hard to ignore.

Otherwise every passing second is a vocal battle against a declining attention span, like a clicked finger in the face, forever.

If there is a heaven, and if Tupac, Cobain, Presley et al made it through the gates, chances are they're consoling a wincing, visibly embarrassed Jackson, cursing his inability to bolt the demos drawer in Neverland's vaults just that little bit tighter.

Visions of Trees are enjoying themselves, which is evident throughout this atmospheric and surprisingly tight album.

A depressingly compromised second LP from an artist yet to meet his early promise.

There's very little drive in Junk of the Heart, just a messy selection of meandering verses that surely can't be the product of three years' work.

If you know how Rod Stewart sounds, and are aware of these songs' traditional arrangements (sole new number aside), then you already know what Merry Christmas, Baby has in store. And whether or not you're going to want to pick it up from one.

So faithfully have Collins and his confreres recreated the Sound of Young America--shimmering tambourines drowning out drums, bass compressed to a fat, distorted throb--that it's hard not to be swept along.

The wooziness is reflected in Adam’s voice, which is whisper-soft, quiet and nasal, like a man whose parents sleep lightly and have to get up early for work. All of which makes Ocean Eyes a frustrating listen, or an enchanting one, depending on your stomach for meadow-skipping whimsy.

With the exception of the always inventive playing of guitarist Wes Borland, here Limp Bizkit sound like a band whose time has passed. Given that this is a group that boorishly exemplified the empty materialism and crass self-centredness that lurked at nu-metal's core, this is surely no bad thing.

California 37's peculiar teenage stance offers as many toe-curling moments as it does pleasant surprises.

Despite the contemporary co-writes, in an age where Take That work with Stuart Price and Nicola Roberts embraces Diplo's electro cool, this album comes across as a selection of competent B sides surrounding the fantastic Starlight.

There weren't too many opportunities for Jones to arrange or conduct during the course of this project, which is angled towards the vocal performance, whether sung or rapped. Its instrumental contributions serve mostly as a backdrop to the posturings of its guests.

It's exhausting, and somehow impatient. Swedish House Mafia don't earn their big moments, they throw them in whenever the ideas pot runs dry.