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.

With lead single "Yeah!" being a genuine cyber funk masterpiece, and a lot of other perfectly respectable tunes backing it up, "Confessions" isn’t hard to like. But with the overall impression being of nice Usher making another nice album, it’s impossible to get excited about.

A sultry dance album crammed with excellent tunes.

It's by no means a bad album, just not his best by a long way, or the triumphant return it should have been.

Oblivion With Bells is a competent record and, it must be said, far stronger than the most recent releases by '90s contemporaries The Prodigy or The Chemical Brothers.

There exists a plodding, phoned-in emotional evenness here which, for a band trading on matters of the soul, is a big problem and one that will stop them entering the arenas those strings were employed for.

Unfortunately, none of it's even remotely memorable.

New frontiers for rock aren't exactly broached, but then that was hardly the point.

It's all a show with Kings Of Leon, and there's nothing they yearn for more than the chance to exercise their sexual prowess.

A curious and confusing follow-up.

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

For all the one-paced nature of its songwriting, wilfully lo-fi production values, inevitable Lily Allen comparisons and grating larynx, Panic Prevention is still an enthralling debut, and one that says infinitely more about the life of young Londoners than any amount of Bloc Party seriousness.

OK, so it’s not Norah Jones dinner party territory and there’s enough torturous mayhem to gratify their faithful ‘maggots’ but there’s equally a contrived nature underlying the habitual havoc.

Overall, 'Don't Be Afraid...' is a tad frustrating. Everything ticks along funkily and proficiently, but nothing really wants to stick out.

The Sun And The Moon", The Bravery's down-to-earth approach ought win them a second chance.

Instead of ending tensely and dramatically they are the final whimper and sigh of an album named after a band that have lost their way and aren't sure which direction they should be heading.

It's not, in the final reckoning, a terribly important and wildly impressive record.

'Old Ramon' is a slight affair cut from similar cloth to '...Blue Guitar', fuzzy with distortion, hampered by less than inspirational songwriting.

Built on a repetitious platform of bass, drums and guitar, what starts off as a genuinely thrilling journey tends to conclude in a cul-de-sac.

Leaping from the speakers in a fury of jarring axe steel, clocking rhythmic beats and clinical vocal swagger, ultimately this LP gives itself - at some 60 minutes length - an awful lot of time to say very little.

You suspect Fits would fit better live, where the audience have no choice but to go with it, but here the trio sound slightly too pre-occupied with pleasing themselves rather than the listener, greedily ripping through riffs with a tenacity that, while impressive, is often ultimately self-defeating.

It just sounds like she cannot be roused to feel very passionate about anything.

Ultimately it makes you feel the loss of Pavement all the more.

The Welsh agit-poppers' tenth album isn't terrible--certainly not as listless or confused as Lifeblood--but it does sound lazy, lyrically and sonically.

Britney Spears, Rihanna, Kelly Clarkson, Beyonce and Leanne Rimes are all artists Sparks' music evokes, but very little of it could be said to be distinctly hers.

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with this album - just the airbrushed production of tracks like James Taylor's 'Don't Let Me Be Lonely' robs them of any true grit and soul they might have had. And that, in a nutshell, is the problem afflicting Clapton at the moment, making for yet another average album to add to the list.

A few club chants ("You jump around like you ADHD! ADHD! ADHD!") and heavy beats crop up throughout but, in the main, N*E*R*D ironically struggle to break out of their own defined anything-goes freedom on what's just a solid record.

Fans of Aerosmith, and fans of good old Rock Music will love it.