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

Like most of Unapologetic, it's ["Nobody's Business" is] instantly forgettable.

Brilliant, frustrating, thrilling and irritating. In other words, exactly what we’ve come to expect from an Edward Sharpe album.

There's an excess of bog-standard radio-friendly pop-rock, and a couple of wet weepies à la "Don't Speak".

In spirit, their third album takes them back to their origins as an independent group from Glasgow making defiantly direct music in an age of detachment.

This is another acting job, in a sense, and Laurie's faux-Southern drawl grates a little, but he's assembled a band of N'awlins old hands to add authenticity.

Throwaways (“Jewels n’ Drugs”) and power-ballad (“DOPE”) digressions weigh heavy on the pacing, but the arch “Mary Jane Holland” and “Swine” occupy livelier turf.

Nothing you wouldn't expect.

They're reunited with vocalist N'Dea Davenport but don't really need her, their dressing-up-to-go-out groove being the thing.

It adds up to a shallowly appealing, summery package; glossily produced and personality free.

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.

Well, these things are relative, and this record is still jam-packed with purest filth and unrepentant excess.

Overlong at 19 tracks, it has its moments.

What Corazon certainly contains is a brightly recorded, punchy collection of “Latin” beats and melodies, plus some rock, featuring a handful of distinguished guests and the familiar overflying drone of Carlos’s own guitar obbligati.

Gimmicks aside, any version of TFIM with a core of "Little Shocks", "Start with Nothing", "When all is Quiet", "Man on Mars" and "Heard it Break" won't go far wrong. [Review of UK release The Future Is Medieval]

It's high-class karaoke, covering the Chi-Lites, Dorothy Moore, The Dells, Womack & Womack.

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.

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.

This long-delayed third album sets out to make the Hackney diva "current" again.

Her talent and pain are equally raw and equally audible.

This is an artist with taste and opinions of her own, not just a schedule and a fanbase to satisfy.

There is nothing not to love about it.

Each song sounds much like the last but with hooks like this, who needs prizes for subtlety?

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

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

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

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

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

It all hangs together quite nicely if, as ever, rather uninvolvingly.

The eighth Marilyn Manson album features some of his finest lyrics yet and, musically, it often approaches the heyday of Holy Wood and Mechanical Animals.

The writing is generic, the studio-craft impressive. Enjoyment will depend on how you get on with the voice and its hooting cannonade of mannerisms.

It's on close personal terms with magnificence.

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

This has more bounce and sees Lovefoxxx & co close to their best.

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

It won’t frighten the horses, but it might encourage you to buy an overpriced T-shirt.

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

He wins you over, eventually.

Nothing to see here.

Collections constitutes a fairly sharp decline.

From dancehall/nu-metal hybrids to dubstep-meets-Bond theme balladry, its bombastic stuff, but also finely tuned in its balance of sincerity and showmanship.

A strange end to a strange album, whose mood, to invoke one of their earlier songs, is not so much "Fuck You, It's Over" as "fuck yeah, it's over!"

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.

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.

What matters is that the I Monster team have cooked up a production that matches our expectations of a League LP.

The result is not, however, a revolution in his sound but a refinement.

It's bright and brash, sometimes almost life-affirming, but leaves you wondering two things (the influence of Graceland and singing in a comedy "foreign" accent).

The constant here is Arthur’s voice: genuinely soulful and able to switch from MC to Marvin at the flick of a falsetto.

Those who endured Williams’s recent X Factor performance need not fear: this brassy sequel to 2001’s big-band LP Swing When You’re Winning, is actually rather listenable.

It's much more fun than the Brandon Flowers album. Which, admittedly, isn't very big talk at all.

It's difficult to tell, though, how much is sock and how much darn.

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.

They unapologetically rip into this album with a pulsating and mangled electro-pop opener called "D-Day", and rarely, if ever, lapse into giving people a poor photocopy of Parallel Lines.

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.

Given its sudden sharp downward turn, it’s hard to unreservedly recommend Another Country. But there are enough decent moments to justify a bit of iTunes cherry-picking, at least.

A charming companion piece to The Best of...

A rapid sugar rush, followed by a gradual crash.

Electra Heart is too professional to be truly terrible, but it's never clever enough to be more than merely toytown.

Boyle's versions are professionally executed but phenomenally dreary.

This is an instantly engaging showcase of the 23-year-old Aussie’s talents--poppy without diluting her fierce-flowing charisma.

Its best moments are its electro-pop numbers.

From dancefloor tracks such as "Shake It" to a lover's rock vibe on "Only Thing Missing Was You", Franti has made an eclectic, conscious album

It's deeply engrossing and rings resoundingly with cultural and historical truth.

"Yes You Do", a 1950s rock'n'roll love song updated for the synth age, is the standout track, but "Bassline" is the most typical.

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

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

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

[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.

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

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.

Evolution is a perfect Frankenstorm of over-produced American R&B.

Planta feels lightweight; not much really catches the ear or imagination.

MFAD! finds them sounding like exactly what they are, namely an airbrushed, Massachusetts version of the Stones.

Humbugness aside, though, it's a serviceable collection of jazzy covers and duets.

This is an album that deserves at least to reacquaint the Ting Tings with the outskirts of Somewheresville.

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

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".

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

Her Lennox-meets-Tyler, or Welch-meets-Tunstall lungs boom out across a Heart FM-friendly pop-rock sound which sometimes attains a sweeping Stevie Nicks drama but often merely reaches Dido level.

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.

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.

He sounds utterly burnt out. Poor.

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

Taken in individual portions, they're a refreshing jolt to the system, but a whole album's worth feels like being force-fed a gallon of Sunny Delight.

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

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.