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.