The London five’s debut effort is hampered by uninspired, unmemorable songwriting and a baby-proofed approach to recording and composing that ensures anything that could be described as edgy or life-affirming is, at best, lost in translation.

Whatever's On Your Mind fails to leave much of a lasting impression aside from the hooks and the impressive way the band can make a straightforward pop tune sonically adventurous.

The faults of Bouquet lie not in the genre lane-switch, but in the artist’s seeming disdain for her own talent, which by-and-large goes unutilised here in favour of an exceptionally flavourless, dirt-road bland, pop country excursion.

With a good production, some of these tracks could have been saved, but by all accounts, Let the Bad Times Roll is the worst album The Offspring have ever made.

The Used have taken the best elements of their previous releases, refined them and delivered the strongest album of their career.

Listen to the guest performances if you dare; just tune out the pedestrian rapping.

Scars & Stories may be nothing more than a pleasant retread of The Fray's established style, but it does a commendable job of delivering quality in lieu of novelty.

Minor complaints aside, pound for pound and song for song, Unbreakable may just be the best pop album of the year so far.

There’s something for everyone, and OCS do well to cater to a crowd who are afraid of falling with the rest of us into the future.

Any halfway interesting endeavor is either quickly discarded or frustratingly bereft of further exploration and expansion.

MSTRKRFT and Keeler have never been ones for half measures. Operator’s overall refusal to do just that, its inexorable 808 death march through a digital hell, makes it MSTRKRFT’s best album yet, not to mention an impressive approximation of DFA1979’s live show, in spirit if not in sound.

The unfortunate harm that has come with Portnoy's dismissal is that the drum sections are now entirely bland and lack any real power. This combined with the band's decision to include three ballads are really the only things wrong with A Dramatic Turn of Events.

Sadly, ‘Coloratura’ is not enough to save the LP from being a mess. In the end, you can’t even say you are disappointed anymore. This is who Coldplay are now, producing the most casual music for the most casual listeners possible.

Imagine the worst Good Charlotte song repeating “I fell in love with an emo girl” as a chorus. ... If anything, the more trap-infused tracks gracing the record’s back half fare better, solely because they aren’t direct copies of some of the most well-known pop punk songs of all time. Moreover, the extremely overblown production doesn’t achieve the same maximalism here, making for a comparatively listenable bunch of songs. Key word: comparatively.

To summarise, Man of the Woods is an astoundingly poor, inconsistent, and sloppily constructed outing from an artist whose defining feature has been his ability to cleanly reinvent his image.

These slightly above average hooks/melodies deserve better. I deserve better. So tell me it’s over.

The Brink is less immediate than all of the band's prior releases and is indeed a grower when given time to settle.

Arcade Fire seems incapable of crafting tracks now in which one solid musical element isn’t let down by another poor one. As a longtime fan, the resulting calamity has been like being unable to look away from a car crash.

There's a give and take at work on Mine Is Yours, one that fans of their earlier work will either love or hate.

While the album also has its fair share of bona fide, looks-like-we-just-broke-the-bottom-of-the-barrel moments ("Fire It Up" instantly comes to mind here), Disturbed manage to do just enough to keep metal purists from dispensing with them completely.

A shorter, more focused affair could've easily been just as essential as Uncaged, while other cuts might have been more suitable for side projects or standalone singles. Few people will enjoy the album from start to finish, being clearly sewn to have something appealing to just about everyone, so pick up what you like and add it to your collection.

Not even some admittedly slick production can drag this out of the mire.

The massive dip in quality towards the end, including the progressive worsening through closing, bonus and hidden tracks, is disappointing, considering how well the album begins.

Comprised of bass-driven pop turns (see the hooky backing vocals of ‘Formaldehyde’) and evocative mood pieces containing occasional flourishes of Americana (courtesy of American co-producer Jacquire King), nothing in the album’s solid latter half will reach out and grab you. However, there is just enough diversity evident in these tunes to stave off indifference and reward repeated listening.

Truly, the blame lies at the feet of Sean, whose limp bars and flow make middling fare of ten reasonably well-rounded bangers.

The problem with Something To Die For is that it's an album built to succeed on the strength of its hooks and not its songwriting.

While she has not found Torn Mk.II and continues to prove her weaknesses as a vocalist, Imbruglia has at least shown some much welcome diversity here. That, along with her hallmark sweet melodies, means that Come To Life is at least worth a listen.

In the glutton of pretty records, With Our Heads in the Clouds and Our Hearts in the Fields presents itself as a merely a needle in the haystack; the likelihood is that it will be lost in the mix, not good enough to be remember, but also not bad enough to be singled-out.

It aims to give fans something different, but it does the bare minimum.

It fails on every level. It’s not fun. It’s not sexy. It’s not impressive. It’s not inventive.

It is the last two tracks of EP2 that bring a little disappointment.

While Saints Of Los Angeles is occasionally stunning, as is consistent with Sixx’s recent return to form, it often sounds too much like something Nikki Sixx would expect Crüe fans to like, rather than the top-class rock n’ roll he’s time-and-time-again proven himself capable of making.

Might Delete Later is a miscalculation at every level and may prove in time to be his version of Chance the Rapper’s The Big Day.

To try and explain just how bad the "music" is on this disc is about as much of a masochistic exercise as listening to it.

Black is fully replete with every sound Weezer could think to chuck on it, from "Too Many Thoughts in My Head"'s crazy funk guitar to Pat's double-tracked kits and looping beats to the labyrinthine, breathtaking basslines.

In fairness, Witness isn't a failure, and its good intentions, both politically and sexually, aren't insufferable as much as they are listless and unsatisfying.

There are no surprises (other than the lyrics about cutting himself) and nothing all that redeeming to take away from the listen.

California 37 erases Train's original identity, simply leaving us with a train wreck.

Fly From Here attempts to offer, amongst all this, an image of Yes that isn't hampered by the past, with five tracks smuggled onto the end of the record but having no narrative relation to the 'epic' that sells it.

There are a lot of cosmetics present to cover up the band’s shortcomings, but not even the most epic posturing and glossy production can hide this record’s blemishes.

It's not Kanye's return to form, but it does enough to stave off the kind musical irrelevance that seemed to be creeping up on him as his detestable personal misconduct began to dwarf his poor-to-middling studio output.

Universal Mind Control is offensively bad.

Sure, there are a handful of half-decent cuts included here, but even they have limited lasting value. Meanwhile, the filler (arguably half the LP) is mind-numbingly boring.

This misguided eagerness to please is endemic throughout the album’s 12 tracks, from the appropriation of other artists’ styles (the chunky riffing and brutish vocals of ‘Hammerhead’ are reminiscent of Dave Grohl, while closer ‘Rage And Grace’ is a transparent attempt to recreate the vitality of Green Day’s ‘American Idiot’) to Holland’s equally unrelatable lyrics.

I can forgive a couple of transgressions if Teenage Dream redeemed itself with songs that were more than trashy, one-dimensional pop, but, alas, the rest of the album is just as predictable as the VMAs and only marginally more entertaining.

Comparing to what the band has done in recent years though, Siren Charms is still an unforgivable misstep containing oversights in both songwriting and execution that such a veteran band should be able to spot and correct.

Baptize is as much a trip through modern day Atreyu cliché as it highlights the best of the group’s more...aged cuts.

Like "Red Carpet Massacre," The Block is proof that it requires more than the best producers and songwriters to make good pop music

For as poor as Man of the Woods was, at least it was ambitious…unlike whatever this amorphous clump of hackneyed trends is.

Korn feel tired, bland and dated.

Overall, Days Go By ends up as a solid record only because there are traces of The Offspring again and not a band that tries to copy others.

This moment of fuzzed-out, fucked-up pop music with questionably scant odes to rap music is not designed for posterity. To his credit, Post gets that, and is content to make overlong albums where every song can be a single. Not every song on beerbongs and bentleys can be a single, but there’s enough of them hiding in there to make it one of 2018’s more rewarding releases.

Aside from its opening track, which I’ll get to, this album is essentially a blank space.

Integrity to the fans, the fun tongue-in-cheek of the album and the no-*** rock n roll makes Here and Now a standout record for 2011, and may even win Nickelback some new fans.

Faith takes every single ounce of her experiences and infuses them into her music. It results in one hell of a theatrical roller-coaster ride that holds attention from beginning to end.

There are no good songs. There are no ‘moments’ that make any of these 18 songs worth listening to. There’s nothing that implies there is potential, there are no guests that make Eminem worth listening to, there are no good lyrics, there are no good production flourishes, and there aren’t any melodies. There’s no evident flow, and there isn’t anything to be gained from listening to this that can’t be done by listening to literally anything else.

As a whole, Cardiology is an attempt to leave behind the band's failed newer sound and return to their pop-punk roots.

The New Game signifies Mudvayne's transition from elite metal juggernaut to their inevitable fade into obscurity.

At a mere thirty-six minutes, it’s not a stretch to see Britney Jean as a half-baked effort, more of a commitment to be completed and shipped off than the labor of love it was touted as.

Underclass Hero tries its best to be profound and musically challenging, however its only success is found, without exception, in the tracks which drop the pretense entirely and return to the formula which made the group popular to begin with.

There’s no question about which side of the disc is the more interesting- sleaze beats manufactured sentiment any day--but ultimately it’s the country half that most people will pay attention to, and to that end there is very little to actively criticise.

It sounds like the work of a band who are simply trying to get their feelings off their chest, rather than one trying to sell records.

Every song layers Levine's singing/clumsy rapping over the most cringe inducing trap beats, and most of the time he sounds like a middle-aged stepdad trying to sound "hip" to get in good with his stepson. It's transparent cultural and trend pandering, and even when Levine adheres to his bread and butter, the melodies are more vanilla than usual.

Revolting, messy, lazy, and undeniably Sum 41, Screaming Bloody Murder is a dead band moaning in its grave. Any highlights here more or less just belong to other, better bands, or even Sum 41 themselves from the past.

Of course, nothing on This is Forever is really new territory; the 80’s influenced synthesizers, the electronic drums, the monotone vocalist, it’s all been heard before. It’s all been done so much better.

The album’s music is a similar story, theoretically well-equipped with its slick production and generous emphasis on slide guitar, yet so heartlessly procedural in its composition and homogenous in its tempo that its encapsulation of the country Experience misses the elation and dynamism of wind-in-your-hair and ends up for more cholesterol-in-your-burger.

A more confident, complete record than its predecessor, No Baggage sees Dolores O'Riordan building on old strengths, while broadening her artistic scope farther than it's been in thirteen years.

Shinedown has the raw talent to keep Amaryllis afloat, but the album is full of holes and it always appears to be on the verge of sinking.

The Death of Slim Shady (Coupe De Grace) isn’t a blazing return to glory, but it is an intriguing album filled with some legitimately light-hearted and funny moments – something I feel has been sorely lacking in his material for years now – the battle between Eminem and Slim Shady is a great concept that is explored pretty competently here, and the instrumentation, while far from perfect, captures the essence of what he’s trying to accomplish here.

One More Light sees the band embracing its melodic core, and offering no apologies as they expound upon it.

NAV is front-to-back one of the blandest takes on the genre so far.

Any message contained within Lulu is lost in the whirl of discordant guitar work, Reed's mutterings and the complete sense of abject disappointment that surrounds the entire album.

What we get is listless by the numbers "latin rock", dull, sleepy ballads, and overblown Diva numbers I wouldn't wish on Whitney Houston.

Every song is so utterly devoid of energy, like they've released a record composed of the spaces between the notes in all their previous work.

The production quality is a crowning grace throughout the album in the face of some very dodgy writing and bad musical choices.

Cringe-worthy lines are unfortunately rampant through The Weirdness’s (long) forty minutes.

Truthfully, Super Collider is just a Megadeth album born of complacency and issued with only the faintest interest in remaining relevant.

Finding Beauty in Negative Spaces is nearly all negative space with very little beauty.

So it's hard to know how to peg Vaccine, ultimately--it's both a brave move and a safe one, both a shock and something you could have seen coming. What's not in doubt, though, is that it's a very good album.