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.

Bugg has always had one foot in the past and that’s fine, but On My One might as well be an official challenge to The Strypes in the ‘parents record collection’ department--though a mercifully more bearable one.

Absolutely without spark and wholly forgettable.

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.