They show a weakness for the winsome, but Faye O'Rourke's fabulous foghorn fixes that: when she takes the mic, Cars' promise rings out loudly.

For all the virtuosity in his fingers, Jerry is no singer, and this collection of tasteful exhibits needs faces [guest singers]. The faces save the record.

She makes a half-decent dance diva on "I Need Your Love", but I'd ask whether that doesn't defeat the object of being Ellie Goulding, though I still don't know what that object is.

There is in these performances a slightly mannered theatricalism which you will need to reconcile with any desire you may harbour for either simple affect or no affect at all.

Save Rock and Roll features unexpected excursions into rave-pop, and numerous celebrity cameos, but enough airbrushed pop-punk to prove they haven't forgotten which side their bread's buttered.

Just when the world is no longer particularly bothered about a new Arctic Monkeys record, they've finally released one worth being bothered about – at least in parts.

Songs typically travel from the spindly to the epic, and extol the virtues of living life to the full.

It's about time he delivered something of substance. YCTAODNT fits the bill, kinda. It's long on heartbreak and short on yee-haw affectations.

Their festival-friendly rap-rave-metal goes "the-generation-that-are-going-to-change-the-world" political.

[In French] it's beguiling and sexy. When she crosses the Channel and sings in English, she's a ten-a-penny kook-merchant.

It's pleasant enough, but on the whole feels like Hynes' sketches towards an album, rather than the finished item.

Set your sights high, by all means, but when each track sounds like an attempt to emulate a specific great (Bruce, Bob, Leonard, the Band etc) the confused listener can't help but be left thinking "Will the real Low Anthem please stand up?"

Her voice hangs inertly among racks of lustrous guitars like a worn shirt.

It's an album you can hear without ever really noticing. Radox for the ears.

In place of politics, or any kind of point, all this album offers is a parade of premium brands, from Grey Goose to Louboutin. The overriding sensation is akin to reading one of those luxury-shopping magazines you get on planes while a mediocre hip-hop station plays over the headphones.

Any good songs sound like demos awaiting their final form.

It plays like a very conventional, early-90s pop record.

They've brought touches of ska and Latin into the mix, but KD&L still don't do anything Imelda May can do better.

The duo often leave any sense of taste with their gumboots outside on the doorstep.

His 12th album is certainly magnum: 59 often leaden, mostly hubristic minutes to make that 1215 Grand Charter seem like light relief.

Through the Night aims for Dusty in Memphis, but it lands closer to Petula Clark.

This comeback album suggests a hiatus spent in a cryogenic freezer. Which is to say that they sound the same ... only rather less vital.

His breathless, this-really-matters delivery is ill-served by lines such as "Ain't a fan of vegetables/ It ain't about the peas".

CYHSY now sound more or less exactly like The Killers.

Unless you have a natural predisposition towards the enjoyment of self-consciously nerdy vocals and jangling harmonic songs taking a 'sideways looks' at life, Sky Full Of Holes will leave you completely unmoved.

Each to their own. For me, there's nothing here not to like, but even less to love.

Marcus Mumford leaves his Irish-folk years behind and adopts a transatlantic burr for “The Wolf”, whose chugging riff and sappy lyrics (“You are all I’ve ever longed for”) pinpoint the album’s core failings: absences of both lateral intrigue and the elemental oomph its track-titles (“Broad-Shouldered Beasts”, indeed) hint at.

Presumably not this unremittingly OK collection of hazy pop-rock singalongs paying anodyne homage to the Ramones, Jesus and Mary Chain and, er, Interpol.

It's often barely there, notably the final minutes of "Lux 4". This is musical homeopathy.

The main duty of pop is to be catchy, and it's a duty which DNA mostly shirks miserably.

It’s what The Feeling might sound like if they were American; endlessly “nice”, but with nothing to stir the soul.

It is cursory, lumpen and dull.

Even without the unpleasant association of the Chris Brown guest slot here, #willpower (we're letting people hashtag their album titles now?) is a charmless listen.

Good songs, largely, if songs broadly governed by the imperative to “heal”: a worthy intention, for sure, but fluffed up massively in a compressed space like this, also a rather stifling one.

Tuneful enough, his debut is an MOR bricolage of prevailing musical styles.

"Lioness" reinforces what we already knew: Winehouse was, in every sense, wasted.

Madonna may have done this stuff first, but nowadays Lady Gaga does it better. MDNA? Meh-DNA.

It's the sound of a deeply dim man backed by competent-but-conventional musicians.

Coming from a band who blatantly don't want to be a band any more, Angles is inevitably disjointed. But it's not disastrous.

It’s depressing to find more of the disco-tooled super-producer [will.i.am] same here, allied to faintly atypical ballads that, nonetheless, add little to Spears’s synthetic sex-doll sheen.

The wan vocals and listless melodies conspire to render such eclecticism [on this album] as flavourless as a Cup-a-Soup variety pack.

Yes, it sounds like you imagine: slightly artificial, pop-inflected chunk-rock, with dustbin-lid drums, loads of guitars and even a hint of voice box/Auto Tune.

It takes no chances. This is a record that browbeats and bullies you into submission with its sheer massiveness, courtesy of producer Brian Eno.

This feels like a wearisome exercise in reasserting his market appeal.

What’s inside? Nothing. Which is, coincidentally, what this album adds to the treasury of human art.

It's a Gary Barlow idea of what indie music sounds like.

[A] bog-standard shamateur indie rock, with riffs borrowed from The Smiths and Velvets, lyrics borrowed from Dylan and Iggy.

So Long’s strenuously busy patchwork leaves you wondering how something so superficially impressive ends up making so little impact. The answer lies in the way the Bicycle Clubbers rarely deliver these gap-year reports with decisive force enough to thrill, or dwell on an idea for long enough to fulfill its promise.

Mostly it's clichéd Pelion heaped on cheesy Ossa in a mountain range of sickly gestures.

Self-help and sauce remain the remit, which might have been less tiring if “Roar”, “Walking on Air” and “This Moment” offered forms fresher than, respectively, the robo-stutter of Rihanna’s “Umbrella”, weary Italo-house pianos and strenuous stadium bluster to enliven their empowerment-speak.

Charmless kiss-offs (“Don’t”) and sappy sentiments (“People Fall in Love in Mysterious Ways”) dominate otherwise, landing with the thud of the authentically uninspiring.

As off-the-peg as Primark, the Rihan-droid returns with more dancefloor fodder which has all the right bleeps in all the right places, but nothing to make you go "wow".

Boyle's versions are professionally executed but phenomenally dreary.

Every intro twinkles and every chorus swells effectively enough. But if indie carries on like this, we're gonna need a bigger landfill.

Ditto & co ... appear to have disastrously lost their fire. Only "Love in a Foreign Place" shows the sort of strutting disco beast they are capable of. It's too little. But not, one still hopes, too late.

Sadly for the listener, this is mostly a collection of one-paced songs more heartbroken than heartbreaking.

An album which merely proves that the Cranberries haven't lost their knack of saying nothing in a grating way.

When he shuts up, and lets the shambling jangle and daydreamy exotica take over, it's great. When he sings, it's murder.

This is a production in search of an album, a massive empty shell, a big expensive nothing.

This quickly becomes the stuff of a thousand, middling US soft-rockers and when they're not whining like Maroon 5, they're whining like Blink-182.

Like most pop albums, it's front-loaded. The banging club tunes, like the chart-topping "Young" are at the start, then it slumps into a series of obligatory ballads on which her unremarkable voice is somewhat stretched.

Strangeland is drenched in reverb-heavy piano, Chicken Soup for the Soul maxims and moderately maudlin musings about not being young any more.

[Since I Saw You Last] falls below Barlow’s best--“Patience”, “Rule the World”--at just the point when he needed to up his game.

There are too many plodding ballads, sentimental on the piano and heavy on the cymbals.

Mostly No End sounds like pretty much anyone noodling about in their shed.

Everything's turned up to 11 but content is absolute zero. If the Cribs were any more landfill, they'd have seagulls following them around.

The results have a tendency to make you look at the ceiling.

Sun is an album of polished electronic pop that mostly struggles to distinguish itself from the current slew of female singers.

The rest of Kiss is like opening a tweenager's diary (titles include "Tonight I'm Getting Over You") and setting it to synthy, house beats, but nothing has the crossover appeal of that debut single.

It's an hour of radio-friendly pop-rock in a Deacon Blue meets pre-ironic U2 vein, all over-reverbed vocals and mildly modish electronics.

The sixth album by these Kentucky alt-country types sees them risk destroying forever the aura of existential gravitas they've accrued with the previous five.

Apart from a lovely snare-drum loop on "Recat" (annoyingly, all the tracks are called Re-something or other), this is barely even a head-nodding experience.

Most of disc one consists of ponderous, blustering nonsense, with a black chandelier used as a metaphor for depression. Disc two shows more promise.

Max Martin, Mr "Baby One More Time", has been roped in again along with scores of interchangeable Scandinavians to create an album of autotuned landfill chartpop which you will scour in vain for anything on a par with "Womanizer".

All Syco needed to do was reprise her staggering first TV audition. Astonishingly, they've dropped the ball.

It's coated in a layer of pseudo-authenticity, but ultimately it's a record which aims for Bo Diddley or Johnny Cash and merely attains Dire Straits.

It's nice that Shaddix is still alive, but Papa Roach remain irretrievably atrocious.

Tthey run the gamut from cheesy to cheesier with Hucknall managing to make every song sound impressively dated.

Nothing to see here.

He specialises in staggeringly banal lyrics ("Grow old with me", "When you hold me in your arms I can feel your heart") delivered in an overwrought cry-baby warble, and song structures with big predictable sub-Keane, sub-Arcade Fire crescendos.

He sounds utterly burnt out. Poor.

It's a pop record, which means one killer track would redeem everything. Predictably enough, it never comes.

Morissette is the sort of woman who does yoga to ensure she can still gaze at her navel... Self-obsessed.

Even if it's a joke, it's a joke you don't wanna hear.

This debut is so lame, it makes the Beady Eye album sound like Let It Bleed.

The sooner this bunch of plums fade back into obscurity, the better.