Word-heavy, tune-light songs don't help... Worse, O'Connor's delicate voice can be heard puffing, straining and - horrors - singing flat!

Lewis's voice is impressively elastic throughout but lacks any grit or style.

Vocally, a combination of steel and fragility is required, but Campbell can be frustratingly hesitant, often tending towards the limp side of haunting or ethereal.

It's the sound of the summer! If summer for you means a fake tan and drinking WKD for a week in the Med with the likes of Kelly Rowland and Will.I.Am popping up as guests with your fave.

The third album by Polar Bear suggests that this is a band running out of ideas.

Their McFly-like soulless pop-rock is unlistenable tosh.

X is merely a slightly above average collection of tracks.

There's an OK cover of Tommy James and the Shondells' 'Crimson and Clover,' but mostly this album's where Prince has stuck his fill3r.

Brett Anderson has reached a creative menopause.

As ever, this most eloquent of rappers is stronger on zingers than philosophical coherence. But his dismal taste in beats strands his poetry in a sea of mediocrity.

A frustrating set with glimpses of gorgeousness.

But OutKast's "Speakerboxxx/The Love Below" aside, it's debatable whether there has been call for a double album since "Sign O' the Times" in 1987, and this is clearly another case for the prosecution.

For fans only.

Teenager is as flat as the Mojave Desert, and, like a fusty pastel sweater bought as a birthday present, it's cosy yet bland.

So where do you go when you've been a backing singer for the Pussycat Dolls? Not straight to the scrapheap but kooky la-la land, it transpires here.

Fast Man/Raider Man is sluggish country rock.

Fans looking for an air-guitar gurning masterclass may be disappointed.

Shorn of his camp finery, not to mention his preferred subject matter - androgynous boys from suburbia kissing under nuclear skies - his voice, still an acquired taste, proves ill-suited to introspection.

Somewhere between Ennio Morricone, Talk Talk and late-period Massive Attack, it is atmospheric, if relentlessly bleak, with the exception of cult director Abel Ferrara's imitation of Bob Dylan on 'Open Up Your Eyes'.

When they're not apeing War-era U2 ('Crystal Ball') they're apeing Achtung Baby-era U2 ('Is It Any Wonder?'). Otherwise they plod along, piano clip-clopping under all the electronic fuss, in thrall to their own pseudo-profundity.

After nine albums the Nashville oddball's parade of styles has dissolved into ambient noodling.

It sounds like creepy supper club music.

Though the songs are all praises to the Creator (or His prophet), there is little sense of joy.

Proficient and predictably salacious.

Shadow's head scratching choice of singers detract from the potency of his fluid beats.

A New Tide is a respectable affair reminiscent of the Beta Band at best (Airstream Driver) and David Gray at its coffee-table worst, courtesy of vocalist Ian Ball's folksy bleat.

Frontman Pete Murphy overdoes the drama, leaving little space for the songs to breathe, while his colleagues fail to access the mystique that at their peak, in the early Eighties, served to distinguish them from goth's also-rans.

Predictably, it's not among the quintet's finest hours.