Repeated plays just refuse to reveal hidden depths. There aren‘t any. “Around The Sun” is just a really poor album, probably the first one that this band has ever put out.

The big-beated momentum of yore is bogged down in McClure's new graceless Gallagher sneer and left to stagnate by a band more interested in re-heating anaemic Kasabian-esque psychedelia than building a plinth from which to preach.

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.

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.

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

A stunningly bad record.

Songs that used to bounce and strut with foolhardy glee now amble, lamenting, the stench of booze and self-pity turning Romance At Short Notice into a wake.

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

"Christ Illusion" for the most part consists of leaden, grinding sludge devoid of any urgency or malevolence.

This album is nowhere near as imaginative or as interesting as its maker thinks it is.

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.

The Spirit Of Apollo, a record boasting some of the most pioneering musical talent of the last three decades, does not sound "timeless" but nor does it seem an appropriate tonic, voices passing unheralded in a confusion of mediocre, glossy production, guests from the stratosphere reduced to faces in the crowd.

Therein lies the danger of building an iconic persona on your current obsessions and an unerring belief in everyone else's interest in your thoughts. When it hits gold, it's magnetic; when judgement lapses, the convictions seem tired.

Track after track in an aimless blur of humming amps, pointless mucking about with effects, dreary jams propelled by meandering guitar interplay, and bleak, endless droning.

Despite this album's production credits reading like a PhD thesis, Korn's commercial masterplan is fatally undermined by certain glaring weaknesses, the main one being that their singer is a dunderheaded, sexist, self-pitying fool.

A product so meticulously calculated, so shamelessly designed for the widest possible demographic, so wholeheartedly shallow, you suspect Simon Fuller and Simon Cowell must be dumbstruck in admiration.

People will tell you Ladyhawke is fresh and exciting. They're wrong. It's horrendous.

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

The lumbering, ponderous nature of both music and vocals elsewhere makes you wonder if much of Songs In A&E wasn't actually recorded in hospital.

A cold and unengaging collection.

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 is pretty fluffy stuff.

'14 Shades of Grey' features no standout moments or highlights, just a formulaic, plodding, sixty plus moribund minutes that make this album about an hour too long. Avoid at all costs, even if you're a member of Staind's family.

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

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'.

Far from a behind-the-scenes veil-lifting, though, 'Doggumentary' largely ensures that the worst preconceptions of self-indulgent hip-hop remain in place.

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

Stripped of the rough guitars and eclectic production of the original, two things are exposed - those words and that voice. Neither fare well.