'Extinction Level Event 2' is often bloated and monotonous, making its one hour (plus!) run-time challenging to endure. What could be a colourful and important album is unequivocally tarnished by the tedious, repetitive, and needless opening seven tracks.

On Automaton, the band falters under the weight of its previous singles, leaving any possibility for chart success mired in a sound that comes across as tired and unoriginal, and the album listening experience as a monotonous ordeal.

The unerringly loyal will find enough here to sate a hunger for anthemic bobbins drenched in atmospheric production, but there’s little to match the handful of magical songs for which he is known.

It's not truly terrible, but it does feel akin to a musical version of King Kong Vs. Godzilla, two monsters decimating everything in their path until there's nothing left, except the back catalogues.

Courtesy of the blandly produced, overly-compressed vocal deliveries and guitar riffs from Jonas Brothers’ producer John Fields, the act all too easily fall into the inevitable trap of highly-structured song progressions backed by half-baked guitar solos on ‘Same Language’ and underwhelming chorus chants on ‘Kool’.

‘It’s Never Over’ is this band’s best TV On The Radio impression, and ‘Porno’ almost goes G-funk: a pleasant surprise. But undercooked electronics, impotent rhetoric, too-familiar crescendo-ing structures and an overall feeling that this needs further post-production attention render Reflektor an entirely substandard album.

A record of fireworks, but few surprises. The songs kept succinct, punchy, and direct; there’s no house production about-turns, no moments of revelation, just sheer, unadulterated Khaled. It’s like being strapped in to a rollercoaster – at points its exhilarating, at others terrifying, and by the end you’re eager for it to be over.

Unfortunately, the album barely reaches the most reasonable of expectations. The strength of their flawless magnum opus, 'Better Than Love', overshadows every other song on the LP.

Unfortunately, other than aiding nostalgia, there's not much else nice to say about The National Health.

For the most part, regrettably, Geography only showcases a producer out of his depth behind the mic.

One for the fanatical only.

Macklemore remains unsure of himself throughout, lacking the rapping skills and natural charisma needed to get things onto a surer footing. In the end, it’s a sadly fitting album title.

The music on 'Wax And Glue' shows potential, but the overall idea of the record is just too cluttered.

There’ve been worse assaults on the ears, that’s for sure. But for fans of the original eski sound, it’s a shame that Wiley has his eyes fixed too intently on his Ascent.

This album demonstrates that the desire disappeared long ago and that they were simply prolonging their career to delay the inevitable. For Hot Hot Heat, the fire has definitely gone out.

There’s barely a convincing lyric in the album and by the end you’re wondering whether the title itself has been chosen based on the sheer novelty.

It seems to fall between two stools, not supplying enough arena-filling arrogance while never truly indulging the more surprising elements of their record collections.

At worst, it’s forgettable--at others, it’s actually annoying in its repetition.

Lolloping along with little desire to vary pace or style, it is ultimately forgettable.

For the most part, though, this seems like a step in the wrong direction: a Nicki Minaj album from somebody who’s thoroughly fed up of being Nicki Minaj.

More Transworld Sport than Chariots Of Fire.

Considering the lucid, poignant albums to come to fruition from cabin writing retreats (Bon Iver’s ‘For Emma, Forever Ago’, Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Nebraska’ etc.)--Standards is an album that is almost completely devoid of such clarity and space.

The majority of Grateful is forgettable at best.

Hurts have always been pretty unabashed about their mainstream ambitions, which is fine, but as they explore them further, it becomes easier to strip away the affectations and see them for what they truly are: a cheesy pop band.

Separation is writ large across the themes of Ghost Stories--and knowing what came next in Martin’s personal life, perhaps that was always to be expected. What’s not is just how lifeless so much of this material is, how instantly forgettable these songs are.

Low In High School feels confused, misplaced, and tedious.

There simply isn’t much to latch on to here, and certainly nothing to suggest that Still Corners aren’t completely out of ideas.

One thing is for certain: they've produced a much more pop orientated album. Clash isn't anti-pop, but we are anticheese.

The Great Escape Artist is one-paced, bloodless, and frequently blighted by Dave Navarro's ersatz Edge-isms.

44/876 is like a hilarious fever dream somehow brought to life. Not entirely awful.

A chilling example of naked ambition prioritising production style over songwriting substance.

It's identikit jangle so packed with perfectly poised personality that I find it hard to take it even vaguely seriously.

The songs are trite punk workouts without any real imagination and, whilst there's a reasonable amount of endeavour and vigour, they're unlikely to raise anything other than idle curiosity amongst the curious idle.

There are some surprising hooks amongst predominantly ugly arrangements, and its ambition is admirable, but Plowing… proves woefully lacking in coherency, and fails as its makers’ next evolution.

Feels curiously unfocussed, and lacking in purpose.

Major Lazer’s best songs have always acted as overstimulating sugar-rushes - but the formula that was once fresh and boundary-pushing for mainstream pop now sounds outdated.

The Dreaming Room is an enormously frustrating record, as Mvula clearly has it in her to be an incredible artist. But at this point in her career, she remains a orchestra in need of a conductor.

At its best, Roaring 20s is clumsy and awkward. At its worst, it’s hectoring and condescending.

[An] offensively dull record.

Enter Shikari have the tools and drive to create something potentially mind-blowing, it’s just that they fell well short of the mark on this occasion.

The whole exercise seems so carefully crafted and desperately needy that any joy found within The Weight Of Your Love wears off the more you play it.

Most of Welcome Reality is so in your face and predictable it feels like the musical equivalent of a Michael Bay movie: loud, crass, periodically fun, but ultimately forgettable.

It’s not that Nihilistic Glamour Shots is some objectively terrible record, but it’s certainly not a great one. The music isn’t minimal, it’s mundane, a songwriting stodge that seems content to play in its own filth.

The first half of the album is particularly monotonous, with the one-man band fervently spewing similar hooks that show very little dynamism and only serve a purpose to maintain a foot tapping rhythm.

Her history and significance is rooted in rebellion--but that’s easy to overlook with a record this diluted.

Unfocused, inconsistent and underwhelming, The Heavy Entertainment Show is homogenised pop at its most stupefying.

Candy’s uncompromising approach has been a breath of fresh air when providing guest verses in the past, but a whole album of pornographic paeans will leave you feeling limp.

Moments of the Jacknife Lee-produced album are assured--Gary Lightbody over-emotes particularly well on the maudlin "Life-ning" and "The Symphony" is rightfully pompous--but the uneasy truth is that Snow Patrol are merely background dinner party music for accountants.

It’s clear that Coldplay retain their thirst, their passion for making music--it’s merely a shame that it results in such polite noises.

Some may find something deep and spiritual amongst the cuts on Outside, but it just makes this reviewer want to stay indoors.

It's not completely unfair to say that Déjà Vu won't be joining the pantheon of great albums any time soon.

Pharrell isn’t raising the game on G I R L--it’s a thoughtful, imaginative unit-shifter with some sincere themes running through it. But “different”? Not quite.

Unlike the release of his second studio album, KIRK released last year, a major fraction of 'Blame It On Baby' lacks effort and even originality.

Tracks like ‘Feeling Good, Feeling Great’, ‘High’ and ‘Guillotine’ feel soulless and lack the gusto that DZ Deathrays have shown through their live shows and previous releases. Albeit brief, there are glimmers in which the duo capture the visceral and angsty essence of their past through the tribal ‘Back _ Forth’ and closer ‘Witchcraft Pt. II’.

Despite these few fleeting moments of greatness, Everything Now feels like the band's first missfire record of their career, with its lack of a focused concept, cohesiveness and heart.

So many of the risks taken are either unevocative or plain annoying, particularly when the tracks are structured with so little sense of development.

Tracing the lush synth lines running through this album shows Epworth’s love affair with the retro electronics of the 1980s. But their pairing with the sensibilities of modern pop ends up feeling less like the 80s, and more like last decade’s 80s nostalgia.

For all its best intentions, Man of the Woods often feels rushed, occasionally underproduced and at times, unfinished. Lacking the effortless polish of previous releases, it troughs more than peaks and ends up floundering in its own ambition.

Predictably pristine, ultimately inessential.

It feels staid, played out, and more than a little boring; despite Ashcroft’s pleas for energy, it feels absolutely zonked out, the wire-thin production helmed by the songwriter himself.

Krept and Konan end up sounding like features on their own songs.

A blunt genre deserves a blunt assessment so, for what it's worth: in reflecting his mixtape interests, Brodinksi is well on his way to mastering one of the year's most disposable albums.

Anna is full of uninspired and recycled riffs starkly illuminated by the God awful woe-is-me-I’m-northern lyrics.

Of course groups should look to change and evolve, but this is solipsism at its worst.

The misstep is in the execution, resulting in sound that bears little resemblance to their previous efforts. At best, Limitless is an overly ambitious re-invention. At worst, it’s a terribly misjudged collection.

As a self-styled pop record then, Stay Together is something of a failure, distinctly lacking in hooks, entertainment value and any sort of real ingenuity.

This time, reckless abandon is replaced by forced jollity and the vibe turns from head trip to school trip.

Part of the problem is that Diplo has never done subtlety. He’s in his element when blasting vuvuzelas onstage, working with cliff-edge drops and acres of bass frequencies. Out on the open plains of songwriting he often feels lost, resulting in some startling lyrical simplicity.

B-Room is offensively inoffensive.

the way Technology compromises on solid songwriting in favour of material that’ll evoke carnage in a live setting is detrimental to the album as a whole.

The classical elements are independently pleasing--as you’d expect when elements of Shostakovich, Mozart and so on are used--but by drenching it all in commercial dance production, the supposed ‘fusion’ becomes a bastardisation.

Plods along with an overproduced pompousness that falls somewhere between boring and annoying.

As his flow goes off at a regular double time that his chart-scaling peers can only dislocate their jaws for, Dizzee’s personality shrinks into a tediously shallow pool of female ogling, obeying your thirst and his latest holiday snaps.

An often-insubstantial record, ‘Based On A True Story’ doesn’t offer much beyond surface. If Will Smith wanted to get his feelings down on tape, this album doesn’t come close; what emerges is instead a flailing, futile gesture.

Moby’s attempts to paper over a demonstrable lack of songwriting inspiration with grand string arrangements and a sequence of guest collaborators only emphasises the tedium here.

The Past, The Present, The Future has rebooted more of the bad tropes from that era than the good.

It's a real shame that out of 18 songs whittled down from a reported 462, the album has just three consistently good songs.

It’s all very pretty sounding on paper, but in reality lazily produced and poorly written.

Flimsy and unfulfilling, ‘Love Is Like’ stumbles to a halt with the crooning ‘My Love’ and insubstantial ‘California’.

Whilst it is undeniably their most experimental work, the record listens like an audio representation of Theresa May’s awkward robot-like dancing--confused, cringingly uncomfortable and desperately out of touch.

Green is never going to be a gritty rapper--but even taken as a straight-up pop-rap record, Growing Up In Public is disappointingly tame.

Smile leans on tired cliché and outdated dance-lite production.

Derulo has stripped away all of those oddities to focus purely on the music and, in the process, has lost much of what sets him apart from the pack.

This LP is hopelessly devoid of ideas.

As an album in its own right it is terrifically tedious, 40-something minutes of mindless, meandering muso-muscle flexing with a never-more-limp ineffectiveness.

This album might satiate the seasoned Kasabian fan, but for anyone else it just comes across as the dated output of false prophets.

Any trace of the identity that once set Foxes apart from other pop acts has been wiped clean. The album resembles a generic template, fashioned by several verified hit-makers, which could feature just about any old pop artist.

The main problem with this is that her voice is too wispy to hold its own versus the maximalist rave-pop of the day.... On top of this, Delirium just hasn't got the songs.

The songs are forgettable odes to familiar topics--home, heartbreak, dusting yourself off and picking yourself back up--that wouldn’t get a second glance if they’d been penned by someone less famous. Add to that some horrifically hackneyed clichés.

This latest offering is meandering chirpy slobber that sounds more boy band than ever.

To account for the offensively retrospective nature of this trawl of commonplace dance-floor garbage (we're talking Coldplay, Candi Staton and Justice), I must assume, first, that they spent the last two years in a timewarp somewhere between 1993 and 2006. And secondly, that they spent this time in trashy commercial nightclubs, where glowsticks never die, dancefloors rotate and there's a price reduction for hen parties.

Partly because it's so painfully eager to please. Sonorous sermons that really should hit home--delivered in an unseasoned multilingual mishmash of tongues (Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, English)--are unflattered by the ersatz backdrop of cheesy latin pop, dire orchestral muzak and (heavens preserve us) Meat Loaf-esque '70s prog.