But for all its stylish exuberance, 'Now' is an album full of wonderful sounds that's lamentably thin on songs.

Before descending without hope of return into the treacle swamp of R&B ballad hell that beckons at the halfway point, 'Dangerously In Love' offers a few passable moments.

It's hard to deny Papa Roach have a certain knack of crafting big, glossy, annoyingly catchy anthems for the Kerrang TV generation.

It makes for some pleasingly approachable music but that's not what he'll be remembered for.

They ‘sound’ well-written without actually being so – the ultimate in pop sophistry.

Kanye's ...Dark Twisted Fantasy is also the densely-produced work of a clearly erratic soul.

It helps to pick the right tune and Dando has good taste, judging Gram Parsons ('I Just Can't Take It Anymore'), Wire ('Fragile') and Townes Van Zandt ('Waiting Around To Die') to be worthy of homage. But that's all this album is, really. Homage.

There's little in The Departure to justify the trip.

Next time, she needs to dump the tired wild-girl shtick, unleash her lung-power and the world will fall at her feet. For now, this is just another album of production-line US pop.

But all too often there's the feeling that, in trying so hard to match the melodrama Ronson and Pallet have draped around him, Waller loses sight of the smaller picture and sounds confused, out of place.

Ultimately, the list of collaborators on She Wolf may be an impressive roll call, but perhaps Shakira would do better in listening to her own instincts than that of others.

Collapse Into Now isn't a bad album but crucially it isn't a classic.

We Are The Night feels bloated and ornate amongst the elegant functionalism of post-millennial club music.

Perhaps the less successful tracks here might have been novel and fresh 15 years ago, but interest in library music and analogue synths was piqued long ago and some of Love 2 sounds like one example of many these days.

They've turned into Morcheeba. A blunt appraisal, yes, but them's the facts.

Evil Urges isn't a bad album by any stretch of the imagination but it still manages to fall well short of expectations when applying the benchmark set by this fine band.

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

Crucially, it seems their ability to write a magisterially moving song such as "NYC" or "Obstacle No 1", both from their debut, seems to have abandoned them. In fairness, sonically speaking, this is their best effort yet.

The Black And White Album feels less like a fresh start than the end of something.

By third song, "Faded Beauty Queens", the recipe is already stalling, and the harmonies begin to sound flimsy.

Ethical incontinence notwithstanding, Xzibit is an undeniably charismatic vocalist, with a gift for pure, jolting, testosterone-packed aggression that leads to some rather magnificent moments.

Neither wholly satisfying nor wholly great.

While it's certainly refreshing to hear Oberst refrain from swaddling his emotionally-driven conceits in rock statesman's clothing, much of Conor Oberst seems too comfortably by-the-book to really leap off the page.

Perhaps with a bit more effort converting the jams into actual songs this would have been a worthy jump off as opposed to the album's incandescent highlight. Your forecast then, occasional flashes of brilliance but largely dreary.

This is bound to be praised to the hilt as the Next Big Thing, but rock outfit At The Drive In have only one thing going in their favour - the absence of competition. It's so close to being something beautiful, something to cling on to in these aurally barren times, but it's just so not quite.

It's a mixed bag certainly and while nothing else here scales the heights of the single that's made his name thus far, there are plenty of moments of pop confection steered with a degree of sophistication to suggest he's more than a one trick pony.

Appallingly tasteful.

Large parts of this album sound as if designed specifically to be played to fields full of semi-comatose revellers.