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.