It's a horribly overlong, confused creation and Aguilera's brash personality and lioness voice are often sacrificed in pursuit of its many different styles. But when its experiments work, she's never sounded so interesting.

Derulo's desperation to cover all commercial bases is only matched by an inability to stamp his own personality on them.

Emergency isn't quite the great leap that was expected but does at least carry a few optimistic signs for the future.

It's not vintage and it doesn't finally deliver what the hype of "Psyence Fiction" promised, but given enough time it's an album you could learn to love.

They’ve returned to the clamorous, powerchord-packed rock of their debut, with the inevitable result that it sounds fixed firmly by the formaldehyde of fashion in mid-90s post-grunge.

The Golden D' is Coxon's second stab at recording the most pointless album of all time and rest assured he's getting there.

This may be the point at which even those well-disposed to the nice and the quirky start to note diminishing returns.

Raises the nu-metal bar by weaving maturity, passion and the craft of songwriting into its steaming pile of passive-aggressive chord chomping.

Forget all you know about Christina Aguilera. She's discovered sex, rebellion, rock'n'roll and, at one amazing instant, drum'n'bass.

It's probably safer to view "Gettin In..." as the sound of an old man lying back in the ocean with well-deserved drink. A straight-up collection of rock n roll songs that he probably enjoyed playing on as much as anything else in his bizarre life.

While going reggae was always going to be risky, it's the severe lack of conviction - whether in Burgess's mumblings or songs general vagueness - that's the biggest problem.

The suspicion that Mika might have major talent under the plagiarism and cynicism is what makes "Life In Cartoon Motion" so remarkably unlovely.

The truth is most of this new record is karaoke, too--it's just that, like their fans, the band are so desperate to mean something that they have the gall to call it 'new'.

Essentially, Oasis have tentatively begun to master the art of becoming veterans: writing songs that reflect their circumstances and not a mythical image of what they once were; songs that suggest there's life in the old beast yet.

'White Lilies Island' sees Imbruglia free herself from the Alanis Morissette-clone image that you sense was very much forced last time around and actually manage to carve out an identity, both in her vocals and as a personality.

At its best 'Wishville' recalls the finest hours of Psychedelic Furs and Mancunian goth heroes The Chameleons and at its worst, the pomp stadium rock of Simple Minds.

The mixed messages are infuriating, and the complete lack of soul or identity perplexing.

This lumpen, bloated, boring album is as much of a let-down as any of Timbaland's other "solo" works.

It's effective, not good. More tellingly, it's catchy in spite of Ke$ha, not because of her.

Whacking on the slap and going electro needn't have felt so dysfunctional--the songs do hold up--but a complete disjunction in styles sounds confusing and ultimately robs the album, and perhaps her comeback, of an identity.

If his family and creditors truly cared about Michael Jackson's legacy, they would now let it and him rest in peace. And chimps will fly...

Kasabian and their brass-necks have long since appropriated The Music's mantle of anthem-whoring psychedelic horsemen and there's barely a moment over the course of 12 tracks here where they contest that.

Probably makes more sense in a theatre than on your CD player.

Not extraordinary music, but music that hits the nail right on the head of what constitutes good R&B: flawless vocals, opulent harmonies, and easy, reliable melodies.

That it'll be her most scrutinised release is a problem, because its stilted, wearying, obsessive concentration on an uncomfortably forced notion of it's creator's sexuality means it's the only album she's made in the last dozen years that doesn't merit such focussed attention.

With so much of the joyous, uplifting and just plain life-affirming Motown back catalogue freely available (not to mention the any number of soul all-nighters dotted across the country), Going Back is a redundant exercise into one man's nostalgia.

Had the production been toned down a bit, to just Young and some lo-fi synths, these songs would have worked much better. But then that would have invited even more comparisons to The Postal Service. A noble, but ultimately uninspiring, effort.

Souljaboytellem.com is hardly a revelation. Its strength though is its simplicity.

This is a pompous, blandly histrionic album, faintly monumental in its drabness.

An album that's desperately hard to listen to, let alone care about.

Undoubtedly one of the year's strangest releases.

His voice still sounds like it could curdle milk, an anaemic whine with no substance. Song-wise, this is mass-production fodder about which there's very little one can say.

Musically and vocally, there's few surprises but at least lyrically he's moved on from clever-ish wordplay and inane love songs, to tell tales of being generally screwed-up at the hands of the multi-million dollar pop machine.

The paucity of innovative ideas, reliance on old recipes and directionless experimenting make for a fairly tasteless repaste.

Sophie's chart positions may have dropped, but there's no dip in the quality pop on offer here.

Matinee is quite good; but 50 years on from the birth of rock'n'roll, quite good just isn't really good enough anymore.

Mainly, though, this is a terribly weary album, tedious when it strives to be seditionary, trading on utterly devalued notions of attitude and aggression.

Throughout, Southampton's own R Kelly, as silky-voiced as ever, seems determined to seize hold of his iffy image and re-establish his old school soul credentials.

His flow remains arguably one of the greatest out there; it would just be nice for him to have a bit more faith in his own mind, rather than those of our uber-producers.

Amazingly, perhaps, this is a cogent, compact and really quite good record, one that mixes upbeat, perhaps slightly clinical R&B with uber-ballads and occasional snatches of what appears to be an attempt at intimacy.

"Make Believe" is classic Weezer, further refining the template of unthreatening heavy metal riffs... welded to smart lyrics, largely of satirical nature, and infectious melody.

How the mighty have truly fallen.

Lopez mostly sticks to a successful formula - R&B lite with a Latin touch.

The record has some horrific moments, nearly all of them Borrell's.

Lopez' voice frequently sounds a trifle thin accompanied by the sort of sounds that we're better used to hearing behind a Creative Source or Gwen McRae vocal but the honeyed backing massages any real concerns from your mind.

Feeder are in danger of being a schizophrenic band, unrecognisable from their once “trademark” sound and prone to style swings on a whim.

Brave is actually one of her strongest albums to date.

Awesomely anodyne, breathtakingly boring and crushingly clichéd, â??Astronautâ? singularly fails to take flight.

It's not that Foxx can't sing.... It's not even really the lack of stunning songs. It's the fact that his super slick, super smooth R&B hasn't been either cool or fashionable for more than a decade.

A record that surgically removes all trace of sensuality and replaces it with calculated, mechanical, by-numbers bump'n'grind action.

Nelly and Akon do a reasonable job of making 'Body On Me' sound almost like a single, but it's not enough to change the fact that what could well be the best album of Ashanti's career is almost certain to be her most overlooked.

Beyond the artificiality of this album's every attempt to be loved, what's most surprising is Pharrell's failure to program so much as a decent beat.

Wisely though, they've seen this as a time to consolidate, not experiment or wander off on the tangents which have undermined them in the past.

The album, taken as a whole, is remarkably disjointed, because eight of the 13 songs on it have been written with the intention of dominating a different corner of music land.

The thing is, charisma and human warmth – or at least a plausible facsimile of them – are vital to the success of a ballad. And the bald fact is that Beyoncé and her handmaidens are utterly incapable of faking sentimentality.

There's none of the ABBA or Cardigans influence she claimed, nor any of the fun she seems to have in real life. For now she just sounds like another of pop's Stepford Wives.

Focused, slick and likable as “Rebirth” undeniably is in places, the fact that the Limited Edition comes with a sample of Ms Lopez’s new “Miami Glow” fragrance, confirms, that it’s still just another shameless exercise in brand extension.

"The Others" is no masterpiece, but it offers up a warm, beating heart where its rivals offer cold, cynical eyes.

"The Pick Of Destiny" is likely to be among the finest cock rock albums about magical plectrums released this year.

Good or bad, everything here sounds like a lesser version of someone else.

'Invincible' is an album almost unbearably mired in schmaltz.

His 12th album is so girly it should be wearing pink tights and a tiara.

Who You Are doesn't entirely deliver, but even when its songs fall short of the promised hype, their potential is obvious.

It's the state of the great man himself that's truly depressing. If the slurring on 'Murder' (pronounced muurrrerrr) is an attempt to sound like a stroke victim, it's worryingly convincing.

It's, well, a thoroughly professional record. And therein lies the problem. Method Man, perhaps more than any other Wu-Tang member bar ODB, has personality to burn, and trying to force it into a box fit for any other hit rapper is an impossible task.

Given the fact there are 25 tracks and a platoon of songwriters spread over Doll Domination's various bonus discs, it's not surprising that it occasionally succeeds, and there are hit singles to be found here.

It is a rarity: a proper album, from a proper pop star.

He still fires the occasional lyrical blank and his guitar playing has less of the sparks of the past, instead settling into a role complementing the songs rather than dominating them.

There's precious little of the extravagant muso twiddling and indulgent nonsense that has waylaid the band sometimes in the past.

Musically, it's a mess.

There is a tendency, due to the slow, quiet nature of these songs and the occasionally syrupy harmonies, for them to blend together. But look beneath the surface, to the fragile emotions that inspired these songs, and The Runaway remains a moving exercise in good old fashioned catharsis, one that exposes the sad hearts of this band more than ever before.

If you can manage to put such quibbles aside--and it will be a struggle--Light After Dark has some redeeming features.

Resurrect[s] the 1970s white ska world of The Specials, The Jam et al with varying degrees of success.

If they've kept the good stuff back in the hope of better times, the decision was misguided; but if this is the best they can manage, the portents are, in the original sense of the word, ill.

It is one thing to not take yourself to seriously but it is quite another to go to the other extreme. For all his knowing winks, Green walks the fine line between decadency and distaste.

The lack of creativity on display here is palpable.

All fine in principle, except we've heard it all a million times before.

There's nothing raunchy or attitudinal here, just blustering dance-pop numbers and mushy ballads that owe a debt to Lady Gaga, minus all the flesh, spunk and bonkers stilettos.

The album's sinewy rhythms and monochrome production sheen start to fade into the background after a while, but as far as capturing a certain political and musical zeitgeist, "Stealing Of A Nation" does so accurately, and with more honesty and integrity than most.

So safe and sanitised it makes The Fugees sound like NWA.

Sincere of intent and, as ever by Weller, stylishly and deftly delivered, "Studio 150" is a pleasant enough listen, which nevertheless will leave die-hard fans hankering for new Weller material.

The self-produced Beyond The Neighbourhood balances its meat and veg indie with enough electronic textures and hip hop beats to (sort of) catch the ear.

Unforgivably bad.

For people awaiting that second Jet album, this should prove a welcome distraction from their crayons. For the rest of us it's a look of bemusement and a scratched head.

Because beneath the clownishly self-effacing exterior, there's an artless ambition at work here that's terrible to behold.

A very dull record.

Unfortunately "Tourist" is derivative in only a one-dimensional sense: its imagination stopping where Wayne Coyne’s begins.

An average album over produced, Love? has Lopez throwing everything she's got at relaunching her pop career and coming up shorter than anyone could ever have thought possible.

Wham, bam, rock and glam, it's Marshall stacks turned up to 11 and Kelly riffing away in the steps of a heap of bands who do it better.

Earth To The Dandy Warhols is just vacuous mid-tempo babble and clatter.

The rest of the tracks bop along with various degrees of offensiveness or inoffensiveness, troubling and achieving nothing.

There's no gentle way of saying this, so let's cut to the chase. This record is, quite simply, useless.

On the evidence of 'Democrazy', the wrong self-indulgent flake got fired from Blur.

Unfortunately for the oh-so-cleverly named Mongrel are nothing more than a patronising exercise in telling the poor listener what they already know: that governments can be corrupt, war on the whole is not pleasant and we all have a right to freedom.

The problem lies in the fact that The Stooges have nothing left to say.

What's that sound? That's the sound of a barrel scraping and a career being flushed down a toilet.

A plodding collection of ballads carefully designed to show-off her jaw-dropping vocal range to the fullest.