Brandy is on fine form throughout, purring pillow talk and murmuring sweet nothings to anyone insane enough to listen. Now she loves him, now she doesn't. Really, it's too much.

Like Eminem, Williams is desperate to give his own spin on tabloid coverage and determined to prove himself as human as the rest of us, but incapable of letting us forget he's a star. Except Eminem is the voice of a generation while Robbie Williams is just the voice of Robbie Williams, and while Eminem has Dre, Robbie has a ramshackle posse of musicians roped in to create this album's (wait for it) 'spontaneous' live sound.

The nuance and specificity of his last album’s songwriting is largely absent; instead ‘Autumn Variations’ is akin to aimlessly swiping through Instagram, blurry snaps of followers’ leafy happenings whizzing past in a distracted daze.

Young ends up smothered by unconvincing soundscapes on all but two acoustic tunes that stand out by virtue of actually not sounding like a hurricane.

OThe real problem is the gloopy, mush-mouthed ballads that take up the rest of the album.

Elephants on Acid is a frustrating listen, flitting between the unbeatable glory of Cypress Hill’s 90s and the eventual journey into middling experimental rap that followed.

Moby has created an album full of saccharine strings, endless loops and narcoleptic synths. The mind boggles.

He's terribly earnest. [4 Nov 2006, p.35]

Unfortunately, Lupine Howl's debut long-player errs on the side of the canine, wolvish thrills hidden behind some positively vegetarian noodling.

The 20-track project adeptly captures the sadness and social isolation sparked by Young Thug’s time away, but conveys it with such lethargy and incoherence that you’re simply left feeling sorry for him rather than inspired by his storytelling.

A curious hybrid, channelling both Bruce Springsteen's 'Darkness On The Edge Of Town' and Hendrix's 'Electric Ladyland' into proper classic rock ('Cherokee Werewolf') moments, but elsewhere sounding a bit elevator music.

The truth is that metal fans used to have a word for music like this, and that word is wimpy. [1 Oct 2005, p.45]

Save for the brief reprieves of the barbed, anti-everything 'Words I Never Said' and the historical rewrite of 'All Black Everything', Lasers walks a fine line between conscious hip-hop and sleepwalking.

But trying to be something you are obviously not does have its downfalls, the main one being - true colours are never easy to hide. Early on, songs such as 'Take Care Of Me', and 'I'm Keepin' You', have a guarded and helpless feel to them. She sounds even less confident and seems to provide a glimpse of inner pain.

For All The Dogs- his third solo LP in as many years – not only feels tiring, but sounds tired too.

Wilson's voice is a sorry wisp of what it once was. [19 Jun 2004, p.57]

Here they're going through the motions, missionary style, with mechanical jangly pop and the wince-inducing triteness of Cosentino's lyrics.

Underclass Hero they've gone straight for the commercial mother lode, pitching their sound almost equidistantly between 'The Black Parade' and 'American Idiot' (insert your own 'parade of idiots' gag here).... If you already own those albums, why waste your time with this?

Kasher wrote this as the soundtrack to his screenplay, but on this evidence it could debut on The Hallmark Channel.

Red is more a poor parody of the genre than a booty shaker.

There's no deely-bopping 'Wow And Flutter' on here. [4 Mar 2006, p.29]

For an album called Melodia written by a self-confessed Beatles fanatic who once penned the gorgeous ‘Homesick’ and ‘Winning Days’, actual melodies are rare and most, like ‘Hey’ or the turgid ‘She Is Gone’, sound embryonic at best.

Four years on, his fifth album just feels stodgily generic.

Angels & Airwaves labour under the illusion that "mature" equals "worthwhile;" and that means long, directionless songs swathed in echo pedals and factory-set keyboards.

Just when you think they’ve already smithereened the silly barrier, what the world needs most swiftly turns up: Hadouken! go Auto-Tune.

Rolling Blackouts sees them doing what The Go! Team do: flailing and yelping like meth-addicted Energiser bunnies, which, as you may have figured, is not a compliment.

Only the Bond-esque 'Confide In Me' is worthwhile in an otherwise sorry array of pop bangers left soggy on the barbecue.

The debut album from half-Scottish, half-Swedish songwriter Nina Nesbitt is pop so sugary it’ll rot your teeth.

It's an album full of the sort of drippy ballads and droopy soft rock that should induce an involuntary gag reflex in anyone under the age of 45.

'Ultra Payloaded' is largely sub-U2.

The sad fact is that Blink-182 are now indistinguishable from the increasingly tedious 'teenage dirtbag' genre they helped spawn.

If soukous and Congolese rumba sound exotic, the reality is as bland as yam quiche.

Sparse, directionless and half-formed, Trans AM's eighth LP is nowhere near the radical transformation its title suggests.

Undersexed and over here, let's send them back to where they, indeed, belong.

At best, his words are boring, silly or totally forgettable.

The title track is 11 minutes of painfully celestial balladeering self-indulgence, a mess of standard-Sufjan jittering flutes mixed with the most offensive noise from his best-avoided early electronic period.

There's now something a bit crumbly, a bit rattly about E&TB. [17 Sep 2005, p.58]

A lacklustre collection of what sounds like pallid versions of previous hits.

Musically this is the sound of middle America at its most ugly and nauseating...

Anodyne dance music for people who don't go to clubs, comedown music for people who don't do drugs.

Vile, goth-jock pop with all the wit and nuance of a urine-soaked sock.

Their latest album You is very much an acquired taste, a wonky clatter that eight fellas with wayward Warren Ellis beards and DIY instrument workshops in their sheds will surely jizz themselves silly over.

It’s business as usual with the release of their spaghetti-mess fourth.

Allen’s old sharp eye feels watery on Sheezus, squinting at the discourse around feminism, race and privilege unfolding online in 2014, and riding them as a bandwagon back to the middle of the very space the Myspace-spawned pop star once owned, but not having the conviction to do much with them once she’s arrived.

Just when you think Audio Secrecy can get no more infuriating, you find the most overwrought of the ballads lodging their tunes inside the melodic part of your cranium.

The music is as grotesquely over-produced as its lyrics are undercooked, with glossy drum rolls and naff scratching segments fighting for attention on the gruesome battlefield.

Unfortunately, this is not only their weakest album, it's their most confused.

Too much of Not Your Kind Of People is pedestrian, anodyne and utterly unremarkable.

After two albums treading water in the tricky oceans of landfill indie, the tides are turning.

More problematic than the bad lyrics or air of disengagement is Higgins' involvement. Too much of the album sounds washed out and painfully clean.

‘Take A Look In The Mirror’ doesn’t just sound like a bad album, it sounds like a broken record.

Too often, the follow-up to their 600,000-selling debut 'Spit', is plain overbearing, a violent marriage of melody and brutality that makes for a highly uneasy listen.

Focus-grouped, paranoid and please-all.

Just as you're starting to see light at the end of the tunnel, you realise that there's another five-track EP by these self-absorbed, boring, aesthetically bankrupt bellends still to go. Double bummer.

Madonna and Perez Hilton may be fans, then, but if you’ve got even a passing interest in actually enjoying a record, don’t buy this one.

It seems Shaddix still writes most of his songs in purple ink in diaries with little locks on. [28 Aug 2004, p.56]

Overall, it misses Hot Chip’s outsider appeal completely, coming off as whingey and middle aged. Don’t bother.

This latest effort sees her turn indistinguishable. [1 Apr 2006, p.43]

This time the Mickie Most-omatic (phasers set to Winehouse) has dredged up someone so inauthentic she makes Duffy look like Johnny Cash.

Though there’s a lot to dislike, there’s also the bones of something interesting here. If only they’d stuck with making more numbers like the enticing Adam Green-ish gypsy pop of ‘Neal’, they might just have won us over.

It can indeed be shunted into the drawer marked "I can't believe I used to like this band." [17 Jun 2006, p.39]

This stinks of trying too hard.

How anyone outside the walls of a mental asylum could genuinely enjoy the annoyingly repetitive industrial drum-throbs, aimless experimento-guitar crunches and lyrics about "reeking gonads" that characterise songs called things like 'Epizootics!' is beyond me.

Unless you’re hyped up on a cocktail of Sunny D and Haribo yourself, you’ll find most of this album very annoying indeed.

All that seems to have been lost over the years of caning from the likes of ‘We Are Electric’ and ‘Danse En France’ are the tunes.

The effect this record has, with its remedial drumming, crappy store-bought synth presets and faux-sensitive, third-form lyrics, is as pleasant as unnecessary eye surgery.

Kittie are rubbish, with a permanent lyrical setting of "Feel A Bit Miserable, Parents Don't Understand Me" and no original ideas whatsoever. [21 Aug 2004, p.49]

Avoid this tosh at all costs.

Semisonic are the lambswool jumper pulled over the eyes of people who have an irresistible soft spot for 'classic' songwriting. Fail to give their songs full attention - and God knows, that's easy enough - you could almost believe this is literate radio-friendly pop; just the thing for those blustery rides through an imaginary Santa Monica freeway.

For a genre that once sounded astonishingly futuristic, it is quite remarkable how tired and old house sounds now.

Too often their over-earnest delivery is unbearable.

The message is simple: the joke isn’t funny any more, last orders rang long ago and the game is well and truly up.

Shocker! The long-awaited (it says here) follow-up to a sublimely average debut is another half-arsed muppet show executed with the charisma of a terminally ill sloth.

Wayne's 10th studio album sees memory of his charisma and sparkle during that mid '00s era fade further.

Mostly, what their reliance on groove rather than tune adds up to is dirge.

Four albums later and it's more of the same, minus the big hooks.

More over-produced introspection. [6 Aug 2005, p.56]

It's certainly a messy record, made by half of a broken legend.

Richard Paul Ashcroft has assembled that most ruggedly authentic of musical backings, a team of LA session players, and walked them through all of his most anodyne default settings, at a deadeningly flat pace.

An exercise in taking a joke way too far.

It tries to capture the essence of 1973 without having any big hairy old prog hits on it. Which is a bit like trying to capture the essence of the Star Wars films by cutting out all the bits in space.

You could argue Wolfmother’s ballsy and carefree hi-octane music is all just innocent fun, ideally washed down with a six pack of tinnies. Yet it’s utterly devoid of soul and intelligence.

More of the same from an act who have been ploughing the same furrow for so long they'll be reaching the Earth's core soon. [5 Jun 2004, p.57]

Cydonia is a stillborn relic, flawed throughout by chronically stunted ambitions.

Excruciating fret wankery... appalling metal funk... and Chris Cornell 'singing' like a castrated gibbon throughout. [2 Sep 2006, p.21]

Mary J Blige, Ella bloody Fitzgerald and the odious Cee Lo (see above) all phone in a hand, but… look, just get the book [his autobiography], OK? It's brilliant, and this isn't.

While Happy Families’ snappy sludge hints at a slight reprieve, the jingle-jangle whimsy of Larry Lizard is a tired reminder that there’s only one crime worse than being outright bad--and that’s being as mind-numbingly banal as this.

This record moves way beyond armchair psychology - in fact, there are armchairs that have a cannier grasp of the mind.

It’s about as exotic as a cocktail umbrella.

Doomed to lurk unplayed at the back of your collection. [2 Oct 2004, p.64]

Insipid marshmallow post-rock that occasionally sniffs in the direction of Yuck or Mogwai, but mostly glowers in a dismally cloying, precious nostalgia.

'Worlds Apart' reads like a suicide note of a band that's tried to intellectualise its place in the canon of Western music and, in doing so, recognised its own irrelevance. [22 Jan 2005, p.51]

It’s decent in places but it’s just… you know that feeling you get when someone you love is so wracked with pointless worry that you just want to shake them and shake them until they snap out of it?

They swiftly slump back into portentous jams made for mourning failed crops, made worse by the ye olde farmhand Yoda-isms of Eric Pulido.

It works for the red-raw confessional 'Family Portrait', but everything else is so bad Natalie Imbruglia would be proud.

If Skinner is coasting on production duties, then Harvey is overcompensating on the vocals.

Reek[s] of overt smugness and wilful obliqueness. [16 Apr 2005, p.51]

It's not quite pop enough to dance to, and almost shlock-country enough to make you give up listening to music altogether.