Boldness, you realise, is not the same thing as greatness, and James Blake is not a great album. It has great moments, some of which hint at possible directions after the dust has settled around this release.

Boy & Bear sound more like a personality-free replica of a radio-friendly sub-genre of the folk tradition, and fall way short of convincing us that they're the real deal.

There appears to be no point or cohesive structure to it whatsoever.

The result is a collection of workmanlike indie-rock songs that fall some way short of being a good album and a long, long way from being the work of a Godlike Genius.

Quite the mess all told.

On this record, Yellowcard cover all the same territory as those latter bands, with vague stories of broken friendships, frustrated romances and perfect summers that they'll never get back. Because… you know… growing up, like… sucks. The lack of detail is the problem here.

Man of the Woods is not an outright disaster but it is a significant disappointment--a record too preoccupied with image, volte face and forced “REAL” to fully engage as a coherent piece of craftsmanship.

It is churlish to dismiss a band after one record, however: there is potential here for so much more. This record, however, is the most irritating one you will have heard in a while.

Foo Fighters are now flabby, creaky, and worst of all past it.

It sounds like Corgan wanted to make a classic eighties 4AD-style shoegazing record, but instead of offering us something swirling and beautiful, we end up with an experience that is simply flat and grey.

Too much of Not Real is nondescript and dull.

There's no doubt Rivers is capable of astonishing creative output, supposedly at one time writing 384 songs in the space of three years. But, just because you can write a song every other day it doesn't mean that each one is worthy of being unleashed on the public.

Send Away The Tigers is the bloated swansong from a band that should have called it quits three albums ago.

It’s an album that provides a taste of something familiar, yet somehow flavourless.

Adele’s repetition is anchored further by some of the least dynamic work of her career. There’s nothing here to rival the playful malice of ‘Rumour Has It’ or the instant hit of ‘Rolling In The Deep’.

What we’re left with is an 8/10 EP stretched way past the point of interest, five or six songs in you start knocking half a mark off with every fresh coat of same-old. A worthy idea, but one you’ll rarely reach for twice.

In the end, it’s the lack of direction that’s fatal for Concrete and Gold; at least the last three records, scored through with problems as they were, had a sense of what was driving them, even if it was something as superficial as Sonic Highways’ city-hopping.

I have to accept that the band I once loved is now nothing more than a distant memory. Songs such as 'Tangerine' and 'Crash' have long been replaced by the new sound which owes much more to Keane and Coldplay in their melancholic approach.

You really can’t get het up one way or another about a song like ‘Waste a Moment’, which might as well be called ‘Lead Single’, nor can you muster up anything other than a yawn as ‘Conversation Piece’ stretches out like a cat in front of a fire on a cold winter night.

Along with the deliciously slick 'My Enemy' and recent single 'We Can't Fly' they serve as an exasperating reminder of just how good this album might have been. Instead these tracks merely serve as Aeroplane's black-box, sole survivors pulled from the flaming wreckage.

Ultimately, despite some innovation, United Nations of Sound cannot transcend the presence of its architect, who renders half the tracks fundamentally unlistenable with his horrible attempts to play gospel preacher or loverman.

The imposed restrictions are evident on this album and the effort to overcome them more so. The result is that tracks like 'Execution' and 'Frustrated Operator' sound amateurish, even awkward, in their extreme simplicity with nothing to mask the mundanity of their composition.

He's capable of weaving such a compelling mix of avant garde, classical and pop music, but this time the artist's self-indulgence has got the better of him.

As such, this is largely Southern Rock-lite: it is not brash or brazen--it is uninteresting and tedious.

With some clear-minded editing, a workable pair of EPs could have been forged from New Moon. As it is, the cumulative effect of lumping so many competing ideas together is a mess. A frustratingly muddled mess.

The result is an awkward balance of personal exploration which they refuse to commit to, and a relentless chirpiness which is becoming increasingly unnatural.

The Drums have had some personnel changes and are possibly re-finding their feet here, but Encyclopedia sees them badly tangled.

With greater vision Sea of Bees may one day become a more substantial proposition, but for now Julie Ann Baenziger's solo project barely papers over the cracks.

The Lawrence bros do pull some new tricks on Caracal. But the album marks the end of Disclosure as a band, and the beginning of Disclosure as a hit-dispensing enterprise that manufactures durable, no-stain, easy-to-clean products to please every audience.

Subtlety is an early casualty, lyrics and riffs hitting with all the grace and charm of a sledgehammer.

So yadda yadda yadda, a best of isn't as worthwhile as a group's actual albums, what a shocker.

If you've heard the singles, which you probably have, then you've heard the best Teenage Dream has to offer

This may be a more suitable album for a man of Iggy’s age to put out than his last, but that doesn’t make it a better one. Indeed the idea of an inoffensive Iggy Pop album seems itself almost offensive.

Whilst everyone else continues to pelt fellow pastiche merchants White Lies with sticks and dried lumps of shit, I might unfortunately suggest Cherish The Light Years to be an equally deserving recipiant of your faecal ammunition.

It's difficult to know where to stand with The Brink. It's vanilla, it's milk in tea, it's lager, it's a morning bowel movement. It just is.

Played out in full, the record resembles a depressing rummage through early-Nineties record racks--listenable, yes, but without the nerve to tickle more ear-pleasing teats

The general malaise that characterises Outside manifests itself in many forms: 'Mighty Long's overwhelming dearth of meaning, the sluggish pacing of 'People You Know' or the shortlived kick-back against mediocrity that is 'Freak Out'.

Too often, Scott and his band are guilty of lily gilding.

The Sunshine Underground suffers from muddled ideas and rampant over-ambition.

Again Athlete have purported a musical equivalent to a blank stare. It is there, it may intend to disperse meaning, but in the end it does nothing much, if anything at all. Blah, indeed.

There’s some interest to be found but for the most part he displays a real lack of daring.

Rose's voice is always likeable, accessible and expressive, sadly in the case of Work It Out it rarely has anything very interesting to express.

Hutchcraft might be the real problem here: he’s good at what he does, but he only does one thing: big and sad and serious.

Sure, the Foos are excellent at what they do. It’s just unfortunate that what they do is so unavoidably mediocre.

The trio’s meandering avant-rap is somehow more encumbered by its lack of ideas than its lack of editorial savvy.

Seventh Tree, though in some respects an organic redrafting of the autoerotic Goldfrapp template, picks up where Supernature left off in its setting of the controls for the heart of the mainstream, and misses badly the slickly subversive tone that lifted the band from the realms of coffee table mediocrity.

The problem isn’t in the songs themselves – there are plenty of choruses to sing along to, and some interesting lyrical snippets – it’s just that Fray has made such an effort to prove that he’s more than a swaggering Gallagher-ite that he smothers the record and doesn’t allow it to breathe.

Our Inventions feels terminally lacking in ambition and new ideas and a big step backwards for Lali Puna. The music is safe tweetronica, Trebejahr’s vocals inscrutable like a tasteful wallpaper.

For a band with such a legacy, and a pre-millennium back catalogue to die for, this record feels hollow and uninspiring.

All Hail Bright Futures withers under the glare of its own garish spotlight, and no amount of zest, pep or joviality can save it.

I listen to Milagres but I hear Coldplay.

To call 'Pretty In Black' disappointing would be an understatement in the least, particularly for a band whose delivery has matched their promise over their previous releases.

Catchy, bratty and phenomenally uninspiring, America Give Up is not so much shouting from the rooftops as howling at the moon.

While all the productions presented on End It All show real depth and attention to detail – like most releases associated with Anti-Pop Consortium – the words leave a bitter taste and the faint suggestion that Beans is way better with APC than without.

Where the two remaining musicians in the band appear to have gone astray, Michael Stipe sounds positively lost, never to be found again.

Riot sounds like a crunching, flashlight-white amalgamation of Avril Lavigne and Kelly Clarkson, save for token ballad "We Are Broken" that echoes the enchanting eighties sounds of Belinda Carlisle.

This is a collection of massive-sounding, impeccably-produced songs which mask their dearth of ideas with hackneyed bluster.

An obvious problem of the arrangements is that "big" often means cluttered, and most of the songs feel like they should have finished a verse and a chorus sooner.

On Splitting The Atom, though, the duo simply sound like they’ve run out of ideas, unsurprising given the opening half’s attempts to re-visit an album over 18 years old.

If only the album had been made up of songs where they’d allowed the songs to be low key and interesting, it could’ve been really good.

A French Kiss In The Chaos is neither artistically interesting nor indeed very good.

So safe they remain for Slow Air--with the same airbrushed slick of 2016’s Dead Blue, Greg Hughes and Tessa Murray pare back the fog machines and phone in a mostly forgettable series of pleasant enough new wave, as distant and vague as the storybook rainforest on the cover.

It has flashes (man this is writing itself), but they are like good new Simpsons episodes: few and far between.

Amidst the overstuffed yet predictable arrangements, the middle-of-the-road sentimentalism and lack of killer tunes, these brief moments can't prevent Ways To Forget itself proving to be largely forgettable.

All we're presented with here is a collection of half-baked, badly-produced versions of sounds we heard a couple of years ago.

That it still ends up being reasonably affecting is testament to the band’s essential likeability, but it’s not enough to escape the feeling that We’ll Live And Die... is a record that’s worryingly lacking in presence or character.

It’ll no doubt be lapped up by impressionable 14 year old girls the world over, but for a show that has so much more to offer this just smacks of studio exec. cash-in.

There's nothing wrong with making demands of the listener, but there's little to no reward to be found across these eight increasingly alienating compositions.

It'll no doubt sell by the bucket load; it's one for the completists and dads at Christmas, but first timers looking for an introduction to The Clash should definitely look elsewhere.

Perhaps it’s the poor choice of producer in Danger Mouse, perhaps it’s the band losing their nerve, but the whole thing feels bound by a laboured tastefulness.

In combination it’s not adding much--except that little something in the twang of Bell’s voice which is completely unique and compelling--a little something almost completely drowned out by obvious platitudes maintained for a bit too long and with a few too many strings in the background.

Wilder Mind is incredibly one-track, so much so that even on your first listen-through, you’ll likely already feel like you’ve heard closer ‘Hot Gates’ five or six times in the past hour.

Ephemeral, blissful, ambient.... It’s also a mess. But it chooses to be a mess. It tries to be a mess that’s smoothed over and therein genius should reside. But it hasn’t done that. Instead all that is presented is two overlong tracks of snippets of stuff.

It’s an album that’s playing it far too safe: melodies rise and fall, soaring and curving with painful predictability.

The sensitive sections are fine but tritely Musak at times. The power-soul sections feel a bit, sorry but, Jools Holland-y. There's nothing concrete that you can pinpoint that makes it feel false or weak per se.

Charm aside, it's an album by a cat.

This isn’t a particularly awful record--it’s simply a album full of typical sounding Stereophonics songs

Peel back the façade, and you’ll find two white dudes parroting phrases and stealing time-tested tricks to sustain the rebel mirage, to cover for the fact that they have no clue what they’re even talking about.

Slipway Fires is preposterous, and in a way I actually wish I liked it more.

While there are fleeting moments of inspiration, Solo Electric Bass is a cavernous black hole that is mostly devoid of anything truly affecting.

History of Modern is a record for the die-hard OMD fans only and those who have followed them throughout their career up to their last record 14 years ago might enjoy acquainting themselves with new, but familiar sounds.

The way London transcends genres and creates a blend between hip-hop and post-rock is certainly commendable, but there's nothing here that we haven't heard from TV on the Radio to save this album from sounding just a little bit silly.

This is an album that maintains the joyless musical brand Hutchcraft and Anderson crystallised with their two million selling debut.

Comprising of a sound that, though perfectly pretty, has already been done, and words that have already been said, Theyesandeye doesn’t really bring anything new to music.

Magna Carta... Holy Grail isn't a total bust, but neither is it anywhere close to Jay-Z's finest moments. Instead it's a strange and anodyne record, that speaks of a king, nay a god, who may not have lost his crown, but would benefit from leaving his lofty boardroom once in a while.

At heart, he's still a producer not a rapper (which explains how badly he hits the mic at times, more on that later). He's got that hit-making part down pat... it's just that he can't make good hits anymore.

A disappointingly tepid affair.

Ultimately, it’s all just too lazy. Yes, I know that’s the point, but this really is slacking overkill.

Accomplished yet instantly forgettable--a most fitting curtain call for such a confused endeavour.

A shame, really, since there are couple of songs here displaying a melodic facility far in excess of the record’s dumbed-down intent.

Our flower peddlers serve functional rock music, plastic utensils for rudimentary needs, easily disposable and just as easily replaced. And that’s frustrating, for several reasons.

It's not a bad record (they knew I was going to say that) and in the Eighties-MTV alternative rock-lite rush of Thrones it does have one genuinely great pop moment, which as far as I'm aware is more than can be said for any of its predecessors.

If this is The Vines’ vision then they have set their sights on something remarkably mundane.

This record has been hailed by some as a return to form, but it's every inch as pointless as his last couple of records and a contender for dullest album of the year.

In the end, perhaps In Search... is just so inbred it’s capable of little more than frenzied tail wagging on a podium - its maniac tongue lolling --all eager and expectant that someone will pin a rosette to it just for having a nice shiny coat.

All in all, the overriding impression left by The Lateness Of The Hour is that Alex Clare is a fairly gifted gentleman. But here his talents have been squandered on a collection of songs that fail to establish him as either a dance-pop titan or an emotive warbler.

‘Ratchet’ sets a fairly hedonistic tone, only for things to immediately lock down.... It all makes for an intriguing opening, two sides of Bloc Party on display in addition to their strengths and weaknesses. How curious, then, that the Nextwave Sessions immediately switches the focus to that Sessions bit, ushering in a strangely repetitive run of glorified demos.