Somewhere under all this reverb and murk, Gauntlet Hair may yet have the makings of a fine band, but the album burns out long before they have an opportunity to reveal wether this is true.

Yes these notes may occasionally be pretty, and delicate, but for that kind of money you expect something spectacular and groundbreaking, something either heart-wrenching or extravagantly euphoric. What you really have is a record with all the spirit of Microsoft Excel.

Battle For The Sun feels hazy, lazy and lost--a muggy summer afternoon. Predictable lyrics grate awkwardly like manufactured pop-factory produce, while a ‘nice’ helping of sunshine-synth and sighs paint a chirpy celebration of life and all its hand-clappy beauty. Meh.

Quite evidently her attempt to court an urban audience after the disco leanings of this record’s immediate predecessor-–whatever 'urban' actually means nowadays-–Madonna’s sidestepping outside of her shimmer-pop comfort zone has resulted in a well-intentioned failure of an album that will be a commercial success regardless of any critical indifference.

I Still Do is solid, unspectacular blues. Take Clapton’s voice out and this could be one of those Jules Holland collections they promote at weekends on Radio 2.

Something To Tell You is no disaster and you could do worse for background listening whilst tackling the ironing or something, but music really shouldn’t be quite this uninspired, nor should the artists at the helm.

Ultimately, with too few albums to warrant a truly outstanding collection and a top-heavy chronological ordering the hits may be direct, but the death feels painfully slow.

Even the most ardent of fans may find themselves somewhat irked to be given essentially the same album, from the same band for the fourth time.

Instead of building on what went before, or providing clues as to a future direction, Sakura sounds like a collection of B-sides--and forgettable ones at that.

Seventy minutes for only eight tracks is excessive, be they remixes or not, and each track is suffocated and diluted until it proves to be just some noise, somewhere.

Despite all the kooky, twee melodies that make up Beware And Be Grateful, despite the glossy production and multitudinous fragments of ideas that feature on it, even despite the fact that it's hard to think of another band that Maps & Atlases particularly sound like (maybe Grizzly Bear, a bit), this album fails the ultimate test – it's no fun.

It will do for the festivals but not without considerable help from their back catalogue.

[Nels Cline's] noodling is nice and all, but it’s akin to casting Jason Statham in an ITV period drama. Worse still is the treatment of Mike Jorgensen, who has such an instantly recognisable sound on the keyboard; I genuinely don’t know if he is even on this record. Some nice fluttery percussion on ‘Quarters’ aside, the brilliant Glenn Kotche barely is.

Hearing one of these songs by chance would be perfectly inoffensive, but listening to an entire album of them just feels like a chore.

With Ultra, Zomby might have finally removed any remaining warmth from his sound: the album is cold to the point of inaccessibility.

Night Work is a pastiche of Scissors Sisters' former glories that sees the band desperately sewing together the leftover scraps of their idols in a vain attempt to recapture the pertinence of their debut.

The Evening Descends isn’t actually a concept album (at least, I can’t find any hard evidence saying it is), but the mixture of overblown seriousness and misfiring silliness, cut with a bludgeoning lack of subtlety and some well-worn-out running themes, mean it sure as hell sounds like it would’ve been if it’d been given half a chance.

Different Gear, Still Speeding is not a disaster: by and large it radiates the stolid competence of a band on autopilot, with a couple of flashes of likeable enthusiasm.

Ripples is a record which will likely struggle have any relevance, impact or longevity beyond the goodwill of its own gestation. Which really is a shame.

Nevermind the continual rebooting of their franchise, this should be the time to quietly lay the series to rest and focus on the box-sets. This band simply have nothing more to say.

In spite of Rihanna's best efforts, Unapologetic is more depressing than offensive.

If you’ve got the savvy to work out how some of Reality Check is actually occasionally brilliant, then you should also be able to figure out it’s also absolute shit.

Welcome, Stranger!, unfortunately, leaves the listener largely nonplussed. And while a lot of these tracks are perfectly nice-sounding, it feels a bit tragic to consign a record by the Blue Aeroplanes to the background.

Essentially, Made Of Bricks is comprised of a lot of below-par b-sides, three pretty special tracks and then bunch of 'nice tries'...but don't expect anyone to be whistling them in three months' time.

Limp and uninspiring, this is a disappointing effort considering the potential the band initially showed back in 2009.

As a full album, this wafts innocuously past like a gentle Hawaiian breeze--too meek for any real surf, but just strong enough to be mildly of note to those wishing to hit the waves. That’s about the best that can be said of it.

The four Californians smother their country-fried rock with more southern tropes than a gravy-sodden biscuit, from the bits of blues and gospel and old timey R&B.

With at least half of these songs, there is almost nothing to say, nothing to be baffled by, nothing to argue about, and for that sad, whimpering reason, Pacific Daydream can probably be called Weezer’s worst album.

On the whole Mr Love & Justice is an album that sounds like it was made for the sake of it rather than to cascade any real statement of intent.

The sledgehammer approach makes sense, in a way, but only if the satire is sharp and coherent. Too often on Sheezus, it’s not.

His dull lyrics get made more of a point of through repetition, they shine brighter than his well-crafted moments of introspection. There's only so many times listening to a man singing about someone waiting at a bus stop can be bearable.

For all the nostalgia and bland meanderings it is worth visiting this record for the closing tracks alone--but you might not want to come back too often.

This sounds like Steve Wold, not Seasick Steve, and the result is an untidy, tedious affair.

There are hooks here, but they are scattered and often attached to tracks that come worryingly close to mediocre exercises in MOR.

No Pier Pressure shows just what too many cooks can do to a Beach Boy's broth.

Esben and the Witch seem stuck on an autopilot where any levity is out of bounds and an abyss beckons for all the wrong reasons.

What is disappointing about Slash, however, is the fact that it seems getting the names into the studio was where the creative process began and ended. So many of the songs here would simply not make it onto new albums from anyone involved.

From the very start, The Libertines is the sound of the band at its most muzzled; paralysed by poor production, underdeveloped songs and private lives that have become more sensational and noteworthy than the music.

There’s nothing inherently bad about anything on Losing, but nothing’s going to stick around, either.

Unfortunately, instead of producing an album that feels new, exciting, and refreshing--exactly what you’d expect from a band in their position--you get some lazy attempts at something different, before a retreat into the comforts of a tried and tested sound.

A majority of IMD is destined to end up splattered across car adverts and in film soundtracks where the scene is of a pulsing, throbbing, energetic nature. Sadly, that won't lend it any more substance.

This insistence on maxing out on subplot, comes at the expense of an initially intriguing premise and, ultimately, your attention span.

Junk is purely for Anthony Gonzalez. In that regard, it is indeed his most personal work. It is indeed a statement, though a cheap and hollow one, worthy of its title. Frankly, you expect better.

Black Pompadour is not a bad album, it’s just flat; it’s delivered with little to no passion, meaning that listening to it in its entirety will be a test of patience for some.

Even though it’s not overlong at only 55 minutes, it still feels bloated and unnecessary.

What The World Needs Now... is solid proof that reformations never sound good on record.

An album as close to a dictionary-standard definition of the word mediocre as there is likely to be in the whole of 2008.

There's nothing that really stands out as a hit on here, nothing to get the crowds in Whitesnake t-shirts (ironic or otherwise) moshing in the manner of Permission to Land's hits.

Elephant Shell finds the ambiguity created by this choice absolutely harrowing, however, and proceeds to run back to that basement with its eyes closed, one hand over its mouth and the other clutching its Bloc Party tapes.

Up, Guards And At Em is powerfully akin to going back to a club you haven't been to in years, only to find the same soundtrack playing. And there's few people out there who wouldn't find that boring.

x's first third is not without its issues but there is charm, not to mention the feeling that Sheeran really is trying to raise his game. A pity, then, that the remaining 35 minutes is alternatively as generic and simpering as it gets.

There are only fleeting glimpses of brilliance on a long-player littered with ideas that never seemed to get past the kernel stage.

This is duvet music, offering vague comfort but impossible to feel any excitement for.

The result with For Crying Out Loud is that it has bright moments but ultimately adds to the collection of below-par efforts that will do little to extinguish the elitism scorn that they attract.

Music is supposed to be a form of entertainment, but ‘Long Gone Before Daylight’ feels like a collection of aimless lullabies.

Familiar ground is where they’re most comfortable, and they still haven’t worked out how to successfully expand their horizons beyond that.

To be blunt though, for all the great literary and musical figures involved, the result of this creative vision sounds more or less the same as the music Natalie Merchant has been making for her whole solo career. Only more boring.

The rest of this collection floats between funny and worthless, tending much more towards the latter by the EP's close.

The State Of Things will no doubt be a big hit. But if anyone ever takes the time to give it a good proper listen they will find that it’s a wafer thin album of posturing and poor word play.

The problem with clipping. is that they sometimes seem to have an unusual idea of what makes good hip-hop. Sometimes it feels like the purely hip-hop side-project of a dodgy rap-metal group circa 2003.

Nine of the 13 tracks go over the five minute mark, and despite the combined fertility of Arcade Fire and producer James Murphy’s creative minds, very few tracks justify their running times.

While Don Broco’s desire not to retread old ground is commendable, their stated desire to focus on what makes them stand out as a rock band has fallen a little flat.

A Joyful Noise is a femme-power event album too shallow to achieve the import its creators intended.

Over the course of OF Tape Vol 2, souless-ness has curdled into banality.

Unbalanced and ill-executed at times, Hvarf-Heim is a supplementary release.

The Ascent doesn’t actually feel like a Wiley record. That’s mainly because it’s a struggle to find him amongst the gaggle of voices that spit their way across vapid efforts like the Chip and Ms D collaboration ‘Reload’ and the pedestrian Far East Movement-mauled ‘So Alive’.

This is a record that feels alarmingly lacking in purpose from a band whose glory days are now a good decade behind them. This one is for completists only.

Rip This is completely ignorable, and not a fun ambient music way.

It sounds like The Zutons trying to record one of their more out-there b-sides having just lost the ability to play music.

Blink-182 aficionados will find plenty to enjoy here, but for those who grew wearisome of the stale pop-punk formula years ago, +44’s debut album is an unnecessary purchase.

If you were there and want an audio-postcard of the night when noise and flashing lights broke your brain then add four to the given mark. Otherwise this is like pretty much every live album: pointless and skippable.

An album diluted by the indecision of its creators.

Struggles to offer the same level of excitement that previous Jaxx albums provided.

Overall Animal is a dumb album. Where it tries to be empowering and fun it comes off sounding like a spoilt brat singing the American Pie script through auto-tune.

[It] leaves this bizarre aftertaste – one not of immediate dislike, but one that’s pretty far from appealing enough to warrant a second sampling.

From the outset, No Mundane Options drifts by without asserting itself.

It seems they’ve not only gone and made that sensible and mature fifth album that every band past their sell-by date inflicts on their effervescently loyal fans, they’ve actually made a record that would be more appropriate in an old folks’ home than your local indie niterie.

Formula is strictly adhered to, and while pace may differ from one jolly strum-about to the next, the void where there should be a worthwhile tune remains.

But most of all, these songs really blow, man. Way to top-load it with three half-decent tracks at the start.

Devoid of inspiration, lacking in any edge, this is pathetic.

This aggressive tone is a constant throughout and pretty much breaks new boundaries in sounding absolutely ridiculous.

In the end, Hymns is quite a listless journey.

The bulk of the problems lies with the performance itself, and the material chosen.

A voice like Maguire's deserves infinitely better than the calculated dross on display here.

He is annoying, simple as; his repeated ego-stroking irritates like a mosquito bite on an already sunburned forearm – it only adds to the pain.

Big Mess is hardly much more than ten stabs at reclaiming a relevancy that was only marginally theirs to begin with.

I only wish that they had given us something with a little more substance rather than the bland mess we’ve been left with.

The Rapture have kept all the ingredients from their previous successes, but they have forgot to ignite the oven.

It’s a confused effort, with the songwriting faults, misguided lyrics, and the foolish sidelining of Cage the Elephant's greatest weapon (Schultz’s voice) torpedoing the vast majority of tracks.

It’s crushingly disappointing from a band that can sound so much better.

Not everything on By Default is misogynistic, mind, it’s just that when the lyrics aren’t threatening or creepy, they make [any] sense.

In many ways it's a hip joke of an album.

‘Timebomb Zone’s ugly rave onslaught strikes first – you feel the stretch of a wince appear. ‘Champions of London’ and ‘Boom Boom Tap’ follow up with a one-two punch; you never saw it coming. Maybe ‘Give Me A Signal’ would be a late highlight, and it is, unless you’ve heard ‘Higher State Of Consciousness’ more than once, or ‘Poison’, for that matter. You never stood a chance. The only reasons to recommend this record over its predecessor is that it’s shorter and doesn’t have Sleaford Mods on it.

In trying to be all things to all fans, all critics, all expectations, all click-bait corners, Harry Styles has failed to make a defining statement.

The Diving Board feels like an album made by somebody who’s spent the last few years performing the same set list night after night in Vegas.

In all of this, it's not that any one song is outright horrific (okay, 'Pink Lemonade' is pretty unbearable), more that the entire experience is a chore.

The sad thing is that while nobody expects Kaiser Chiefs to be re-inventing the wheel, we do expect a pretty rock-solid, perfect pop record. Yours Truly, Angry Mob most definitely isn't rock solid or perfect in any sense.

It's completely inessential at best, or a cynical cash-grab at worst.