The first half of the album as a whole is easy to forget....Cardinology takes a turn for the best around the midway point.

It’s not that "Welcome To The North" is a bad listen, but when you get to track six and you still seem to be stuck on track one, you get the feeling there must be more to ‘the music’ than this.

He still sounds temperamentally incapable of making a bad album, but he's made his first boring one.

"Jacket Full Of Danger" thinks it's funny but isn't - it's often pathetic.

"Crazy Itch Radio"... is the sound of an act running out of steam as it settles for the lowest common denominator with a nonchalant shrug of the shoulders.

They seem afraid to risk a good old-fashioned jungle break-out, the likes of which would be genuinely invigorating.

There's a good, possibly even a great, album in here somewhere, but Kid Cudi doesn't get very close to finding it.

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.

The follow-up to 'Play' is, essentially, 'Re-Play', a cynical rehash of the melancholic-yet-strangely-uplifting schtick which sold ten million albums and soundtracked every single advert of the last three years.

'Night Train' has been pitched as somewhere between an EP and a mini album, with the impending fifth to be the "proper" follow up to 'Perfect Symmetry'. For their sake, but mostly for our own, this gifted band need to try a lot harder when it comes to that one.

One battering, no-big impression album.

Put simply, this is B-Movie rock: from the death rattle vocals, to the clichéd riffs and hackneyed subject matter.

Naïve, twee, lacking imagination and pointlessly derivative on one hand but - with summer on the horizon and given a forgiving mood – this is also sunny, carefree and great background music to waft over your BBQ.

"9" picks up where the ubiquitous and two-million selling "O" left off. Hoarse howling to acoustic guitar strumming; folksy plucking to bleeding heart mutterings; Radiohead-a-like moments pull of portentous, look-at-me pauses and full band crescendos.

As a collection of songs it tentatively experiments with genres and musical devices so as to appear less of the poor man's B-sides of its predecessor; but at the same time daren't stray too far from the blueprint that made the quartet such a loveable bunch of rogues in the first place.

The production is lame, and the album as a whole is unconvincing in it's pretences as hi-energy, bouncy and above all youthful punk. And Dexter Holland's vocals simply grate after a while. Die-hard Offspring fans will find nothing which deviates from the original plot, so they won't lose any long-term believers from this offering.

Hot Hot Heat's religious devotion to early eighties new wave is simply embarrassing.

His records are not without merit and the better songs here more than deserve to find sizable audiences. But there's no sign that music is going to ever be anything more than an enjoyable sideline for a man whose greatest art continues to be created in other mediums.

While 'Shaman' is less than the sum of its parts and strays into AOR territory too much to ever truly be cutting edge, despite its R&B and Latin infusions, it will, at least in America, sell by the truckload.

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

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.

Only by The Night will undoubtedly sell bucketloads but there's no escaping the fact that creatively, Kings Of Leon have stalled.

Sprawled over 13 tracks, The Cure have attempted a microcosm of their oeuvre in one volume and despite their lofty ambitions, the results are a decidedly mixed bag at best.

However much electro trickery he has at his fingertips, he needs some songs first.

Its ambitions far exceed its ideas, and the record is sunk by the kind of sonic bloat normally reserved for self-regarding sophomore releases.

It wasn't disco-pop and it wasn't chart-fodder, and sadly for them--and their label--attempts to make them so with the help of Rick Rubin has resulted in a record that sounds similar to the last but with the heart ripped out.

If this fluffy, punk-lite petulance, devoid of any real personality is to your taste, lap it up.

If it were anyone else, this record would be fine. Solid. Entertaining. But it's not anyone else--Julian Casablancas, lead singer of The Strokes. As such, you look for more and expect to tune in to find Julian doing the same.