Girls And Weather is so cloyingly cheerful and eager to please that it might as well be "Big Brother" audition tape.

While she's been guilty of gluing sure-fire singles together with rotten fillers on her previous two albums, Britney uses this opportunity to take the odd risk and adds a welcome edge to her sound.

Imagine "Hello Nasty" if it had entirely consisted of "Three MCs And One DJ" and you're close to understanding exactly how "To The 5 Boroughs" sounds.

The change is clear from the outset with 'In The Mode' sounding like an album made by an act that no longer feels the need to pamper its audience. Gone are the gently loping double bass grooves and feathery vocals, replaced by a feverishly paced percussive assault that challenges both vocalists and live instruments alike to keep up.

Lazily accomplished without ever truly igniting, a classy update on a slightly dated hip-hop sound.

This is the first Muse album to sound - brace yourself, outrageous melodrama fans - ordinary.

He's spitting distance from a brilliant concept album about love and suburbia, but he keeps pulling back.

It's New Order-lite.

Much more of this and Shakira will surely take over the whole world with her mix of unthreatening pop / rock, lovingly naïve lyrics and cute tummy.

It's an album for well-mannered emotional crises in front of log fires, a soundtrack for quivering bottom lips.

At its best “The Silent Hours” is a robust, reasonably straight ahead rock record and at its worst, a lumpen, forgettable distraction.

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

One crucial difference is The Pierces' music has changed from something that sounded like awkward whimsy a few years ago into something middle-aged people will like; and that's basically the key to selling loads of records these days.

It makes for a cool sound that might be too inoffensive at times but which grabs all the right places most of the time.

Intense, grown-up and pretty it may be, but this record does nothing to move the whole cathartic/cinematic genre a millimetre further than where it was a decade ago.

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.

Sliced in half, Kelis' fourth album would be twice as good. As an EP it would be perfect. But in it's current incarnation, it's one to cherry pick from your favourite download store.

What potentially made Album exciting was that it seemed to understand that pop itself doesn't make sense, and that it can still work just as well with all the wrong notes in all the wrong order.

The problem is not that The Rakes haven't sought to evolve; it's that they've done so too self-consciously and slipped out of their depth.

There are some fiendishly catchy hooks and very occasionally a real quality to some of the songwriting, enough to suggest that there are better things to come from the young trio once simply aping the already done-to-death genre du jour has finally lost its appeal.

If you didnt get 'U.F.Orb' or 'Orblivion', this ain't going to change your mind. If youve never heard The Orb before, though, this is as good an introduction as any.

Sometimes it works - notably with Gorecki's and Ravel's work - but it frequently misses the mark, with his reinterpretation of Handel's 'Xerxes' sounding something like incidental muzak from a low-budget US soap.

The best songs on this cunning, efficient, frequently daft and fractionally disappointing album are the ones which sound most like the misty reveries of [their] debut.

And fortunately, Rickie also goes beyond the cliched songbook, choosing songs which the soaring yet contemplative voice lends itself perfectly to, and makes her own...

"Afrodisiac" is Brandy’s most personally revealing album to date and her least lyrically fluffy, but its intimacy is hamstrung by the MTV-flavoured, formulaic gloop with which most contemporary, American R&B now seems to be contaminated.

Night Work, the Sisters third studio album, is both their filthiest and most musically downbeat effort to date.

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.

It's an inferior re-run of the Marilyn Manson hammer horror panto that's been showing since '96.