Serving as nothing more than a temporary diversion or side note to his fully realised work, this is worth a cursory listen for the insight alone.

His career for the last decade is basically that of a chicken with its head lopped off, running around the coop unawares whilst coughing up a never-ending stream of blood. If you couldn’t guess, Eat Me, Drink Me is where the fowl finally falls over and collapses in a pile of its fellow poultry’s fecal matter.

Doves’ strength lies in their careful sculpting of the sonic and the emotional, and here they’ve restrained their palette and scope so much that the result is grey.

Even The Bravery, easily the most similar band in approach to White Rose Movement and rightly derided for their style over substance rehashes of the past, at least had a couple of memorably fine songs. The White Rose Movement, on the other hand, have the style, but little substance to back it up.

The Cost is bleached of any sort of lifeblood, stumbling out of the gate and moping towards the finish line.

Completely forgettable.

Like many comedy albums, it delivers initial laughs, with few surprises for continual listening.

This album is flat boring musically and sonically.

All in all, Birth of a Prince seems more like a stepping stone to better things than a fully fledged work in its own right.

Thickfreakness is an unrelentingly dour record - perhaps this music was best left in the past.

Friends: believe me when I say that the combination between the two disparate elements–unbearably goofy synth-pop and sub-par commentary on various parties’ political shortcomings–is indeed a deadly one.

The problem with D12 isn’t that all of them are crap, its just that they’re not given enough room to breath and prove themselves to be better than average.

This album is 80% total shite.

Panic Movement is far too samey and too much emphasis is put on the lyrics, which are not the Hiss' strong suit.

Hocus Pocus is comprised mostly of fleeting moments of brilliance where it all just coalesces for a moment, and then returns to its MOR state of undeveloped garbage.

The evidence now seems indisputable that Wilson is completely, totally, finally spent as a creative force—as it is, we’re treading dangerously close to “How many failed collaborators does it take to produce a half-decent Brian Wilson album?” territory (answer: you can’t count that high).

Unfortunately, while Kweli’s message is spot-on, his delivery of that message is highly flawed.

If these songs have a certain melancholic charm, it has been obscured beneath an impenetrably bland sheen.

The only song worth a second listen is 'Smithereens.'

It’s not that change is bad, but Wolf is moving into areas already well covered and away from ideas that beg for more exploration.

Alright Still is nothing more than pop for people who hate pop music, poptimist Quorn, phony music for people who can't let go of their inhibitions (indie-bitions?) and have to have their music classified as REAL.

There are hooks aplenty, but they’re mushed into a production job that’s so caustically lacking in detail and depth, so over-inflated and etch-a-sketched in timbre, that it’s almost unlistenable on anything but the most rudimentary of laptop speakers.

By making a bad album that also tries so assiduously to distance themselves from the backpacker movement that they unintentionally pioneered, they may have cut off their most fervent and loyal supporters and the chance of gaining a mainstream audience.

Its artistic detours are even more jarring than those of Worlds Apart. The good news is that its quality is far less erratic. The bad news is the reason why: it's almost uniformly awful.

The little things are annoying, of course, like the “that'll do” pointless pop culture punnery namedrops that litter (“Starz in Their Eyes”/”Alicia Quays”), or the way they take up so much time with vocal samples from (old documentaries/self-help tapes) in the same way that a struggling student quotes increasingly large and irrelevant passages of text in a desperate attempt to meet a word count.

Relentlessly benign.

They ape New Order's "Movement," surely that combo's most static and dullest album. Dengler and rather good drummer Sam Fogarino don't get many chances to shine, letting guitarist Daniel Kessler create the kind of textures that often get mistaken for progress.

The music is the same. As immediate and worthy as some of these songs are, the chugging guitars and oar-bank handclaps and background HEY!s don't sound like the work of a band that really likes this music and wishes it'd been around to make it at the time and probably deserved to be, the way the Donnas' old jailbait anthems could; they sound like bad one-liners.