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Smile leans on tired cliché and outdated dance-lite production.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