Hayes has hedged his bets, and it shows. Somewhere amongst these 25 tracks is probably a halfway decent album. It's just swamped.

The Front Bottoms here have underperformed with what is a tiresome collection of repetitive songs that don’t require much effort to listen to.

The record does admittedly sound excellent. Urgent and rippling with intensity it has a power that is let down by the lack of simply great songs. Far too many tracks follow an increasingly tired and weary rock formula.

At its best, this album is nothing more than a passable appropriation of pop reggae in 2013.

It's admirable that they have made such a shameless ode to that which they deem most important to their musical output, or at least what they thought might sell, but the way in which it seems so forced and uncomfortable is the opposite of what anyone would have expected.

Plenty of time is wasted on auto tune, to the detriment of almost all the album's vocals.

With Everybody Wants To Be On TV, they've given those masses what they want. But there's nothing for the discerning music fan.

The ingredients might be mixed correctly, but the cake hasn’t quite risen.

You're left feeling like you're listening the audio equivalent of a normally classy mum dressing up in her daughter’s clothing.

If only they worked a little harder at it, they could be so much more than indie fodder for those who find Kasabian's recent work a little too experimental.

While the album is polished, Kassidy rarely take themselves out of their comfort zone. It's a decent album, but much like its predecessor, it's nothing to shout about.

Too often on For Cryin’ Out Loud, he plays it far too safe and sounds up sounding like any other pop singer – and, as there’s a lot of competition out there, a bit more daring may be required should Finneas come out of the production/songwriting shadows next time.

The album essentially involves wallowing in 45 minutes of one man's competently performed but largely uninteresting catharsis, and there are unlikely to be too many takers either now or in the future unless LeBlanc lowers his lofty ambitions and frankly, chills out a bit.

The band's experimental side (the side that made them good) has suffered, as if "Wires" was the new blueprint on how to write successful songs.

With The Age Of Adz, Stevens may simply be trying too hard.

The overall effect is one of cloying, claustrophobic one-paced idolatry that needs a bit of fresh air and a good night out.

Sometimes moody, sometimes optimistic, this doesn’t feel sure of what it wants to be and instead feels a little like an Air outtakes album.

Too much of Memphis sounds like a pale copy of a much more impressive band, and Magic Kids really need to find their own, less cloying, voice if they're going to produce something worthwhile.

Though the band sound in reasonably good form and the album shows how much Burgess has developed as a singer over the years, overall the songs themselves are just not strong enough. The Charlatans don't touch us this time.

Wired Together is a patchwork of half-finished schemes - loud enough to give you a headache, bland enough to stop you thinking - that pales next to its genre contemporaries and seems to aspire to little more than making a trendy noise.

It is in reality a bit boring, a bit generic, and a bit aggravating.

At its best Intimacy is taut and claustrophobic or movingly sentimental, but for the main part it is repetitious and bafflingly poorly realised, especially given that they could have had an extra six months to work on it.

The album just sounds like the same guitar riffs recycled, with the distortion merging them all into one.

While the album is far from musically innovative, to cite it as an entirely unrewarding and joyless listen would be hyper-critical and plain wrong.

Ultimately it's hard to see this matching the levels of their early success.

This is one for hardcore fans only and casual listeners will be better off waiting for the inevitable Greatest Hits compilation.

With too much empty bluster and not enough decent songs, Sam's Town can only be regarded as a step back for The Killers.

It feels mechanical, a band on auto-pilot, going through the motions of songwriting and recording but with their hearts elsewhere.

The problem with Tides End as a whole is that it all sounds a bit like a blander, toned-down version of every electro-rock album released in the late Noughties, and unfortunately for Minks, five years isn’t long enough for people to get nostalgic about a certain sound.

A few good ideas emerge, but are then repeated endlessly to the point of sheer boredom.

A few of the tracks have a moment, usually a chorus, that you might want to play back a few times. But like Editors, taken as an album there's nothing unique, rewarding, or even merely engaging enough to be worthy of another spin.

Unfortunately Night Visions is so safe and middle of the road that it leaves you with the same hollow feeling that Las Vegas can, without the dizzying high and sensual assault that got you there in the first place.

Considered as a whole, or even as two self-serving parts, Saturday Nights And Sunday Mornings is so generic and unenlightening that you will probably not remember hearing it within an hour or so.

If New Glow is anything to go by, the creative well seems to be starting to run dry.

The problem with Colors is that where once he innovated, Beck now seems to be imitating the slew of fizzing faceless pop clogging the airwaves buried under a mesh of corporate production.

Tom McRae is so desperately trying to convince us that he's still a curmudgeon and angst continues to fill his soul, but it sounds unconvincingly flat.

This rather bloated record should be regarded as a disappointment - an interesting one, but a disappointment none the less.

This record is essentially a minor curiosity, akin to the publication of the band members' childhood drawings--occasionally interesting within context but unsatisfactory and fruitless in itself.

It’s not the worst album in the world, but it certainly doesn’t live up to the acres of hype that have led up to it. It’s just rather average.

The DJing skills are still there and the grooves hold together throughout, though there is rarely much of interest on top of them. ... There are also precisely eight bars in The Cards’ mid-section where the drums hit just right, before they’re replaced with yet more poorly-mixed elements. These moments are so few and far between, however, that it’s hard to justify the album’s raison d’être.

(ONe) is decidedly safe and anything but experimental.

The band's way with a catchy hook and a summery, laid back vibe may yet see them overtake Maroon 5, but that's where their lofty thoughts should settle for now.

It would be easy to look at the words and assume that this was a band on the brink of a split, were it not for the fact that their first album featured a very similar outlook and identikit themes. Essentially, it is hard to see where the band might go from here.

The curious would do best to avoid, and die-hard Robbins fans better advised to watch one of his multitude of films.

Sure, nostalgia abounds (albeit with a bit more modern sheen), but The Bishops have, in a terrible way, outdone themselves in their songwriting, and have given new meaning to the term 'autopilot'.

The album is a 60 minute blur, and while there are brief moments of clarity there's just nothing special about Blood Money.

There's little familiarity, too little to relate to on Certified.

In the end, Keep Calm And Carry On is a forgettable, throwaway stopgap, a dog-eared blast of mediocrity in the career of a mainstay band.

It's an album that is perfectly inoffensive, but in the end, there is nothing here that hasn't been done before--and done much better.

While Leto's vocals remain as central as ever, there's only so much you can take of his constant overbearing bellowing. Love Lust Faith + Dreams was set up as a new chapter for the band. The end result just feels empty.

At the end of it all, you realise there's really nothing here.

While Deaf Havana have worked hard to get where they are, there’s no getting away from the fact that Old Souls is a substantial step in the wrong direction.

With a lack of tunes to come back for, maybe it would have become a better record if they weren't so focused on stardom and the charts.

No Tourists is a change of heart, but it proves Howlett’s instincts right with its lack of inspiration. Making this record probably did bore them, just as it bores this reviewer to listen to most of it, and while there are signs of life in places it’s mostly, to quote Jeremy, so futile.

Until Now never quite shakes the feeling of being a little gratuitous--a few euphoric gems aside, there isn't enough creative spark on the record to justify its existence, and listening to it feels about as useful as attending a Swedes gig without the live atmosphere.

The sad thing is, Gomez has one of the most pleasant and distinctive voices of her Disney cohorts, but she's let down by an album of weak songs that try too hard to be family friendly. Back to the drawing board for this cartoon pop star.

Sadly, Do It In The AM is formulaic, conveyor-belt pop music with no discernable feeling or soul to it.

The whole thing just feels so lightweight, as if the remaining members of CSS are struggling not to play their instruments but to get any magic out of them.

Seven Rainbows is too limited to reflect the globe-trotting wanderlust of this character, Alice Gold. It's too tame to namecheck her wishlist, too insipid to do them justice.

A functional album it may be but Closer To The Truth does nothing to puncture the illusions which so many love about Cher and that, ultimately, may be the best anyone can expect at this point.

In buying in so emphatically into a US pop/soul template, Stone has effectively erased what made her so intriguing in the first place.

They asked, so we'll tell. Does it offend me? No. Does it bore me? Yes.

I was so looking forward to hearing Monkey: Journey to the West, as I'd totally succumbed to its charm in the theatre, but I'd advise anyone approaching this CD to do so with caution, especially if you've not seen it in its glory in the theatre where it belongs.

If plodding indie-by-numbers with the odd nice tune thrown in is your bag, jump right in. Those seeking a bit more invention may care to look elsewhere.

These dated trance beats and chunks of grime tinged R&B aren't going to earn him any new fans, so he's flipped the default switch; if in doubt, get a bit naughty.

They rarely take a step out of their neat little country twinged pop-rock corner. This is a real shame because these songs belie a musicianship that can produce work much greater than this.

Man Made suffers from too much material, not enough editorial oversight, and not nearly enough inspired composition.

This is not an album that you're going to come back to again and again. It's tuneful in places, but ultimately pretty vapid.

Overall, Hard Candy lacks subtlety and is overworked and overproduced.

After 30 years since their first incarnation, has the flowing fountain of creative inspiration finally run dry for the Bunnymen?

The album has undoubtedly been an opus of dedication but essentially there is no spontaneity.

Overall, there's nothing much here for even Wainwright obsessives to get excited about. Buy it as a companion for the far superior DVD, or if you're desperate for a souvenir of the Release The Stars tour. Otherwise, this is strictly for completists only.

Producer Will.I.Am's contributions are, for the most part, utterly bland and lacking in bite. The sanitised R'n'B of Heaven is embarrassing with a generic construction that feels as if he went to a superstore and it took it off the shelf.

Unfortunately, such small moments of inspiration are only peppered throughout, and they're not enough to make up for an entire album of ramblings.

Overall there's just too much bland corporate sludge rock here to make any geniune lasting impression.

Regardless of how good the voice is, if the music does not follow suit then there's only so far you can get.

There is some real chemistry here, but for the third album, it may be advisable to pay more attention to quality control in order to make the truly epic album that is doubtlessly lying somewhere within The Dead Weather.

Few could deny her vocal talents but you can't help but feel the character that made her stand out in a crowded pop room has been diluted somewhere along the line.

For all their individual talents and collective intentions, The Little Willies just don't measure up to the greats they invoke.

So while they aren't 'middle of the road' yet, their rumble needs to find a direction of their own before finding their speed limit.

All in all, it’s hard to see this appealing to anyone other Gabriel completists.

Northampton’s Child has a brilliant trap-style beat which comes with one of Slowthai’s better performances, as if being more autobiographical implicitly encouraged him to find his own voice. But these moments are too few and far between to save a record that reveals the whirlwind of hype around Slowthai to be not much more than invisible garments on an arrogant emperor.

The main problem with Gallagher-Squire is that it all sounds a bit lazy and predictable. You get the impression that they know this too.

This is flat, formulaic and forgettable.

On Magna Carta... Holy Grail, Jay comes off as even more pretentious than Kanye.

The memorable melodies expressed by Chadwick, drive Eyes Wide and Accidental Anarchist passionately along, and album closer Fight Or Flight is undoubtedly a gem in the rough of an otherwise largely underwhelming effort.

It does sound very different from their previous two albums. Unfortunately, in doing so, they’ve produced the most crushingly average album of the year so far.

Indeed, at some worrying points, Gray sounds like he's on the point of expiring, so croaky and listless is his voice.

A thoroughly professional, exquisitely produced, and utterly soulless album.

After six years away this pasty Americana comes as a big disappointment.

The third instalment in his Actual Life series continues the concept of an artistic journal, but fails to convey the intended poignancy.

It contains nothing noteworthy, nothing to grab the listener's attention, and will have few going back for repeated listens.

There's more than just a niggle that Free isn't breaking new ground. More disturbingly, the album is a wasted chance to build on Vivarium, and isn't as good as so much of the music it tries to emulate.

It is to be hoped that they will continue to make relevant urban commentaries as they have done prior to this brave but largely disappointing record.

It's those lyrics that make much of this second album such a disappointment.

When it comes down to it, the second part of Green Day's trilogy of albums is another crushing disappointment.

It sounds a bit like they're trying too hard, trying to be too clever in their pursuit of "technicolour joy".

The band seem to be far too familiar with the sonic designs of The Incredible String Band and Comus. Espers II sounds more like a lovelorn impersonation of the music than a radical exploration of its possibilities.