He sometimes gets it right: the rare restraint of Positively 4th Street and Gates Of Eden hints at the fine album this might have been had Ferry and co given us more Dylan and less esque. [Apr 2007, p.108]

The new dad has ditched the gap-year spirituality to reach for a more adult world where poverty, war and uncertainty must be confronted, and it's a world beyond his expressive abilities. [Mar 2008, p.102]

It feels hemmed in by its own musical limitations. [Apr 2013, p.94]

Too much of it passes by easily, leaving little lasting impression. [Aug 2005, p.101]

Too much of this double album plods. [May 2017, p.98]

A selection of his own trademark cliches. [Oct 2014, p.90]

The use of borowed items invites comparisons, not only with the originals but also with other versions of the same song. And there Moorer fails the test. [Apr 2008, p.102]

He can make a sweet music, as on the soulful warble of 'Georgia,' but on most of the other occasions when Votolato's choppy riffs and off-beam melodies threaten to seduce you, Whitney's caterwaul butts in again. [Sep 2008, p.110]

Pale and pensive indie-pop, cooled to a chill, with [lead singer] Nouvion floating over a similarly tranquil, dreamy wash, like an American Sundays. [Apr 2012, p. 90]

This lot, however, aim for anthems, armed with zero melody. [Apr 2011, p.100]

Green can turn on the charm--countrified finale Blacken My Stay and Castles And Tassles are winners, and "castles and tassles and fatulent assholes" is a hysterical refrain - but overall, Minor Love is a curiously enervating affair. [Feb 2010, p. 95]

Plenty of nightmare visions of Skid Row LA, but really no fun at all. [Jan 2013, p.93]

All the ingredients for another hit album are here. The only thing missing is soul. [Dec 2007, p.110]

If you open your album with a song, 'Hard Times,' which rails against the mediocrity of the modern world, it might be worth ensuring it isn't the only tune out of 14 that sticks in the memory. [Jul 2009, p.105]

The orb's Dr. Alex Paterson and Thomas Fehlmann conduct themselves as if overawed by their hero. They allow Perry to prattle away unchecked. [Sep 2012, p.88]

Stereophonics jab at the same buttons that previously scored them six number 1s without breaking the mould. [Dec 2017, p.86]

Much of With You Tonight lacks vim and will likely have vacated your memory by tomorrow. [Mar 2017, p.90]

While the power-soak guitar solos ard gung-ho buck of Crazy Horse are present and correct, it's curious that Americana packs songs that don't fit its brief. [Jul 2012, p.88]

It's too mixed a bag of highlights and lowlights to be lovable. [Feb 2007, p.100]

Much of Supermodel feels alienatingly dense. [May 2014, p.86]

A mixed bag. [Apr 2013, p.96]

Nobody expected him, at 65, to be the street-walking cheetah of '73, rather just to raise his game, to try and bring that corrosive voice forward, commensurate with his age, the 2010s and, dammit, The Stooges. In short: he hasn't. [Jun 2013, p.87]

With no appealing tunes or choruses to hang his hat on, Caufield's limp, blank vocals founder. [Jul 2012, p.88]

Gradually swelling guitars, keyboards and massed backing-vocal "aaaahs" homogenise the sound while mostly confining Edwards' high voice to a rather inexpressive tone when her clear-cut words suggest snarl and sorrowing. [Feb 2012, p.99]

The ersatz '80s production, lyrical platitudes and soft focus atmospherics stray uncomfortably close to parody. [Jun 2013, p.85]

There's little discernable rhyme or reason holding it all together. [Oct 2006, p.110]

It's difficult to make either narrative or poetic sense of, well, what she's on about. [Jun 2012, p.85]

Drawn to look within, you run into the smart opacity of Reitherman's lyrics. [Sep 2009, p.96]

It makes poetic sense but, like many autobiographical songwriters, he knows the stories so well he fails to tell them. [Feb 2008, p.112]

This successor has some Morricone moments, but is comparatively wan and blandly moderne. [Jun 2015, p.96]

Dogged by sub-standard productions and uneasy alliances, it's left to the RZA and Madlib's younger brother Oh No to partially save his bacon. [Jun 2013, p.89]

Go To School is a misstep--the sound of talented young musicians over-reaching to the point of unlistenability. [Oct 2018, p.93]

There's promise here if they can stay out of jail or the loony bin. [Feb 2005, p.94]

What it lacks, however, is the quality of songwriting in his best best work from the '70s. [May 2015, p.90]

Motorcade Amnesiacs feels stifling, overbearing, all too wrapped up in its own perceived cleverness for the listener to really warm to. [Jun 2015, p.92]

A scrapbook of tuneful, scattershot fragments. [Mar 2004, p.97]

These bedroom demo-sounding efforts are primitive. {Jun 2012, p.85]

The increasingly frequent transitions between the finger picking subtlety of old to such newfound rockage are, however, simply too jarring for satisfactory listening. [Nov 2012, p.84]

Most tracks succumb to unambitious disco stylings. [Sep 2001, p.108]

Far from electrifying. [Jun 2015, p.86]

When the album's latter half descends into cluttered abstraction, Delicate Steve measures up as disappointingly slight. [Mar 2017, p.96]

Forget Me Not may echo Dancing In The Dark's intro, but it's bouncy energy is pure Ready Steady Go!, while the crisp, finger-poppin' stomp of If Your Prayers Don't Get To Heaven evokes gospel-tinged Motown. ... However, an ensuing sequence of stodgy ballads and grunty blue-collar rockers kill that aspiration, underscored by dreary production from Ted Hutt. [Mar 2018, p.92]

Michael Collins' garage rockers do Detroit techno. [March 2011, p. 97]

Overall Ghettoville feels unsettlingly cold; a stubborn statement of retirement in the form of a half-finished work. [Feb 2014, p.97]

Ultimately, The Runaway suffers from an excess of emotional drizzle and not enough musical firestorms. [Jul 2010, p.102]

[A] set of exhilarating if unrelenting Weezeresque thrash pop. [May 2014, p.96]

CSS's party-forever commitment is faltering. [Aug 2013, p.91]

It can perfectly capture the film's conflicted moods of sadness and euphoria, but just as easily turn cloying and sickly. [Jun 2012, p.87]

Considered restraint is a virtue, but Somewhere Else is hazardously polite. [Mar 2013, p.91]

There hasn't been quite enough time yet for them to construct much of a unique sonic indentity. [Aug 2009, p.94]

More spontaneity might have tempered this chill wind. [Oct 2014, p.87]

There's little real sense of progression here... and at times New Order sound dreary and ordinary. [May 2005, p.96]

On the plus side, Ross is in good voice, but as comeback albums go, this is an underwhelming affair. [Oct 2021, p.96]

If you didn't know what the band have been capable of, this would be good enough. [Aug 2005, p.94]

It's a puzzler.... Given brilliant execution, no doubt we'd still have come out with out hands up. Instead, it's patchy and the worst comes first. [Dec 2001, p.114]

Clearly the thrill of hearing new songs in their embryonic state could never be replicated, but as rendered in such pristine isolation even the cavalier back catalogue selections (rarely played early classic 1,000,000;one-that-got-away Romance) fell flat. [Dec 2009, p. 95]

Listen throws a helluva lot at the wall, and not much sticks. [Oct 2014, p.89]

The trio have bounced back from frontman Tim Rice-Oxley's surprise 2006 stinct in rehab by discovering the '80s. And not in a good way. [Nov 2008, p.108]

His most conventional and, frankly, dull [album] pursuing a plodding take on alt rock, in the uninteresting middle ground between early U2 and Stiltskin, with occasional dashes of doom-lite. [Aug. 2011, p. 101]

The songs are so wordy, the album so one-paced that it soon begins to sag. [Dec 2005, p.105]

Slick mediocrity. [Dec 2005, p.98]

The Vines are mostly surface and scratch, a vessel of strangely useless beauty. [Apr 2004, p.114]

This stripped-back retro-retread is in danger of playing to the opposite of their strengths. [Dec 2016, p.88]

Neither sparkly nor weird enough. [Sep 2008, p.110]

Over the course of a whole album their light-as-afeather mix of glacial keyboard, breathy vocals and mid-tempo time signatures begins to grate, and you wish producer Thom Monahan had made them take more risks. [Jun 2009, p.99]

Out Of Control is something kinda meh. [Jan 2008, p.104]

Repeated plays reveal a frustrating lack of memorable songs. [Nov 2004, p.102]

The lows arrive all too often. [Mar 2018, p.97]

It's hard to imagine even hardcore fans listening to this twice, as it sounds too much like an empty barrel being scraped. [Jan 2016, p.106]

This album stumbles on the lower slopes of her ambitions. [Mar 2002, p.101]

The other 48 selections feel forced or too like karaoke homework. [Oct 2021, p.92]

[An] unexpected and trenchantly singular statement. [Jul 2015, p.86]

If anywhere, this stuff belongs in interviews, not in songs. [Mar 2004, p.94]

When Todd sings his own I Saw The Light he sounds more comfortable than when negotiating The Cars' blustering powerpop. [Jun 2006, p.111]

This is very much sitting-in-the-pub-moaning music. [Dec 2014, p.98]

Embrace is schizophrenic stab at modernity, bolting synths and clattering drum patterns to forgettable harmonies, with limp results. [May 2014, p.88]

Noble concept, but possibly the dumbest clever-clogs album ever made. [Jun 2010, p.98]

The record's well-meaning earnestness is a little overwhelming, but it's the stuffed-crust arrangements that really grate, everything happening at once, and often for too long. [Apr 2022, p.81]

Pretty, but pointless. [Feb 2006, p.95]

Sadly A&E neither draws on personal crisis or the intimacy of "Acoustic Mainlines" [June 2008, p.106]

The hi-gloss but uneven Credo only partially convinces. [Feb 2011, p.100]

They sound a bit tired. [Sep 2004, p.98]

Their songs aren't as good as their playing. [Apr 2003, p.98]

An explicitly shambling and weedy breed of music rendered with slavish precision, even muscularity... Decent tunes. [Dec 2011, p.100]

Drum-heavy powerpop is more comfortable in bleached denim and white trainers, about three decades too late for assured heavy rotation on MTV.

System Of A Down frontman is caught trying too hard. Again. [Oct. 2010, p. 101]

This second album owes nothing to Kevin Shields and just about everything to the Smashing Pumpkins. [May 2009, p.69]

The somnambulant nihilism of his one-trick flow and the risible machismo of choruses quickly wear out SpaceGhostPurrp's welcome. [Aug 2012, p.87]

Clapton's guitar still sings, howls and weeps, but this is for the staunchest God-heads only. [Jan 2019, p.90]

The North feels like a shuffle back into soft focus. [Jan 2013, p.98]

The lyrics have become downright soppy and the melodies turned trite. [Feb 2004, p.92]

The Coopers are adept with lyrics, big on attitude, but often lack that X-factor. [Nov 2003, p.131]

She seems to have a sound that needs more sophisticated compositions. [Nov 2004, p.95]

It's surprising how straight down the line this album is. [Jul 2009, p.94]

You try to remember a single melody or hook from the record and you're found wanting. [Apr 2009, p.99]

Heyes has polished the band into tedium, with live guitars and drums drowned out by high sheen studio gloss and painfully dated loops. [Sep 2004, p.104]

Frontman Brendan Urie has a knack for jaunty pop but Pretty Odd is too clinical and calculated for one so young. [May 2008, p.102]

While Harvieu's voice shows she's got potential, the material tends towards the bland and boring. [May 2012, p.84]