At their best the Young Knives can write as good a pop song as anyone in the country, but this is a disappointing second effort ironically weighed down by the English eccentricities that once helped them stand out from the pack.

Does nothing wrong but could do with a bit of meat. [13 Aug 2005, p.58]

It shows range, sure, but it feels so disparate that it's just baffling. Worse, none of these poses and personae actually feel convincing.

Unlike Cash, the ego on display here still sounds like it's got the whip hand on the talent and you never really start to like him. [4 Mar 2006, p.31]

Not, by any means, a disaster. More a cruel glimpse of a talent that occasionally blazes but is frustratingly inconsistent.

While they’ve never been terribly fashionable, they’ve always used that to their advantage, projecting a underdog siege mentality whilst simultaneously selling out arenas. Concrete Love, however, is nothing to beat their own drum about.

In the end, whether it's a cynical bid for the mainstream or an experiment gone wrong, Riot barely registers as a minor disturbance.

Here are 13 songs of dire cod-reggae, OK stoner rock and quite-good-'80s AOR, which makes them the thinking man's Tenacious D, for what that's worth.

Round the back nine (‘Golden Fire’, ‘Kilmore’s End’, ‘Overnight’), the attention to detail slips, and they end up with a load of meat patties of twee that just come across as Owl City in fashionable shoes, a whiny inner-child deserving of a smacked botty-bot.

So swathed in electronic trickery, space-age swoops and super-produced vocals is My Electric Family, though, that it ends up a little soulless; individually the tracks have a removed piquancy, but an hour’s solid exposure leaves you yearning for a crackle, some fuzz, or any human intervention.

Not sure-footed enough in its subversion, its artificiality feels fake rather than carefully plotted.

Rivas’ voice isn’t enormously distinctive, either, meaning Sky Swimming rarely eclipses the dreaded adjective ''pleasant''.

Ultimately, it’s sketchy and uneven, ridiculous in as many of the wrong ways as the right, but not quite the disaster its tracklisting would suggest.

Adele is not yet ready to produce an album of sufficient depth to match her voice.

Throw in the tinny synth on 'Fish In The Sky' and this album couldn't get any more late-'70s if it tried. If it was a TV programme, it'd be Starsky & Hutch--a dubious honour to say the least.

Almost every sound here is precision-tooled for maximum obnoxious effect.

Korn's eighth is actually an interesting listen; as diverse as the witless art of nu-metal gets. That doesn't mean it's good. It merely leaves us with a numbing dilemma: we want to hate it, but we can't.

Dios (Malos) are clearly capable of breezily mordant psychedelia nd thumpingly pie-eyed pop... Sadly, they're not so hot on tunes you can't help whistling. [4 Mar 2006, p.31]

Its bluster and sheen ends up burying the barbed poetry of frontman Mike Duce.

These country-blues laments are seriously sleepy-eyed. [10 Sep 2005, p.66]

The former Sylvia Young alumnis’ latest solo offering is a mixed bag of soulfully gritty D’Angelo-influenced vocals and Busta Rhymes-esque rants.

His considerable production chops can't disguise that his songwriting too often feels half-formed.

It’s hard to knock stompers like ‘Roaring Waters’ either, but the vanilla title track and the plodding ‘Hammer & Tongs’, come off as cheesy, even for this lot.

The reality is Free Energy sound like ’90s rock berks Terrorvision. It’s not all woe--‘Bad Stuff’ is like an FM rock Pavement--but it makes us worry that Murphy might be losing his edge.

A mildly diverting collection of the good (DJ Cam, Model 500), bad (Beth Orton, Mary Margaret O'Hara) and pleasantly forgettable (Dubtribe Sound System, Ananda Project).

Their sixth album is also as pretentious as you would expect a record named after a novel by Austrian feminist author Elfriede Jelinek to be.

Wiz proclaims that his "life is like a movie". Maybe so, but he needs to delete some scenes.

'Sad' is an Adele-apeing weepie, 'Payphone' has a guest rap from Wiz Khalifa, and both 'Lucky Strike' and 'Fortune Teller' feature cod-dubstep breakdowns.