It is gloss and fluff masquerading as euphoric heartbreak. It makes Savage Garden sound like Leonard Cohen.

Magna Carta offers only a few vivid images but even fewer full songs. The album's relentless spewing of wealth will be enough to repel some listeners, but that's not exactly the problem here, it's that his brags are often unimaginative and humourless.

Nicki Minaj's second album is pop postmodernity in an advanced state of hollow, banal meaningless, and the first causality is Minaj herself.

Fans of the characteristic Kylesa stomp will find enough of it remaining in the cracks to keep them entertained, but the originality and kinetic force of their vision has become a splutter.

The growing distance of time and space unfortunately seems to have had an effect on the album, which, while not without its bright spots, is disjointed and lacks the group chemistry that’s kept their best work so resonant over the years.

This is a piece of work in which good-quality ingredients have been handled without a great deal of tact.

RZA does his fair share of huffing and puffing on A Better Tomorrow (see hooks to 'Hold The Heater' and 'Crushed Egos'), but the widescreen production lacks the intensity to motivate a jaded clan.

Hardwired... to Self-Destruct, on the other hand, is a tired and somewhat cynical album that’s simply responding to market demand. It’s kind of like when your dad busts out his old-school skate board—cool for a bit, but, after day three of him “getting back into it” (he also refuses to change out of his old Pink Floyd shirt), you just want him to stop.

While they’re [Genuine American Girl and You And All Of Your Friends] two of the album's best songs, they, like the previous ten tracks, suffer from not just overproduction and out-of-date musical aesthetics, but also a half-hearted attempt to assert something pure about the rock of yore.

There are plenty of nicely recorded aural treats dotted across 6 Feet Beneath The Moon, but they're swimming in a sea of dull mediocrity.

Convenanza regularly dips into a bag of tried and tested moves that are little more than default settings: dubby basslines, plenty of space, echoes, jazzy trumpets that sound like deflating balloons and so on.

The only thing Settle succeeds at is repurposing generic late 90s funky house into a sound that people seem to have been brainwashed into thinking is new and exciting.

It's all too hammy, too rich to absorb.

Squandered its potential. Maruja emerge from the studio with raucous rap-rock and meandering jam music in tow, resulting in an album full of the same songs several times over. By the end, listeners may feel they have deja vu. Fans may feel they have dementia.

The net result is a lack of texture and the element of surprise that made this album's predecessor so wonderfully seductive.

Ultimately, Hoodies All Summer sounds like it’s been ‘fixed’ by a major label trying to improve Kano’s chances of radio play by throwing some poppy hooks and production into the mix and praying for the best. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, but in this case the result is simply banal.

This feels, in many ways, more like a compilation than a coherent album: a selection of tracks created in tribute to the late artist, rather than a cogent piece of art crafted by her exacting hand. It isn’t so much that this tries and fails to replicate what SOPHIE did best – or, more accurately, what only SOPHIE did – but more that it steers too far away from that, likely (and with good reason) to avoid criticism on that front.

‘Out Of These Blues’ adds a country twang to the formula. ‘Live With Hope’ uses a gospel choir. A couple of others are more stripped back and equally forgettable.

Yuck aren't actually terrible, but their second album--and first since the departure of frontman Daniel Blumberg--is just eminently forgettable.

‘Bloom Baby Bloom’ had so much going for it. Why couldn’t Wolf Alice apply that level of vision, skill, invention and audaciousness to the rest of The Clearing? As radio friendly as Fleetwood Mac usually were, they didn’t win the world’s respect by holding back timidly for 80 per cent of each album, or being content to let only the vocals do the talking.

Overall, Madonna’s fourteenth album Madame X feels as if Mirwais had mostly completed a decent run-of-the-mill modern pop record, albeit with a cool hotch-potch global feel; hip nods in place to fado, dub and other micro-genres dunked amongst the trap and retro disco. But then just before sign-off, Herself went through the top-lines with a sharpie. ... None of these carefully curated flourishes feel as if they truly live inside the ‘whole’ of this music. Instead it all feels plonked on top of a template.

What really makes Sheezus so frustrating, though, is that among the dross there are some genuinely interesting tracks here.

There’s simply so little spark here, barely glowing embers and blackened dust where once Radiohead blazed a fascinating, furious trail for others to attempt to follow.

I feel as if it’s mostly the gathering of pieces for a record that was being constructed prior to a tragedy, with the grief itself manifesting in the abandonment of that work and this half-complete thing we get instead. Tricky is a shadow of his former self, playing the role of a shadow of his former self, which was always a selfhood in shadow.

Nothing on Comedown Machine really sounds natural either; it comes across awkward, hollow, like dead-chemistry trying listlessly to spark.

It's sad to report then, that Psychedelic Pill is nothing less than a crushing disappointment as it gives way to Young's most meandering and directionless tendencies.

A curious listen, Sounds From Nowheresville is akin to having your memory wiped at exactly the same moment an experience is stored in the brain.

It's not that Thicke can't carry a tune. It's that he thinks that having songs that smoulder with sex appeal a la Luther Vandross, Boyz II Men or Barry White means that you have to degrade woman and boast about how your penis is bigger than the next fella's.

There’s a distracted short-attention-span looseness going on that feels artificial and I hope it is, because otherwise it’s just thick. Shallowness worn proudly. Where some lines technically work, overall it gets so disjointed and almost comedically dumb-arse, it becomes less than the sum of its parts.

There's very little to be found within From The Very Depths to warrant repeat plays, and it's safe to say when the dusk mercifully settles on Venom (or on 2015, for that matter), this clumsy attempt at modern metal will not be remembered.

With occasional flashes of their previous excellence, Spine Hits has too many drab moments to make this anything other than their weakest work yet by far.

The album is at its best when the margins are jammed full--tinny tambourine here, guitar feedback there, a wash of cellos dipping into the mix.

One of the first things that jumps out at the listener, and it's something which persists throughout, is the disconnectedness between Smith and Elena Poulou in the control room, arsing about with daft voices and keyboard squiggles respectively, and the big lads at the back.

Akin to scrolling down a Tumblr dashboard, A.L.L.A as a whole lacks coherence but features some impressive displays of aestheticism.

The combination of Eno's obsession with stasis and his attachment to novelty for its own sake does the album in.

For those that need a bit of background music The Slow Rush is a competent record, but it’s impossible to actively listen to it for a prolonged period of time without despairing. At least now that this is out, there probably won’t be another one for a few years.

There was a time when Primal Scream were considered essential, an acclaimed element of the indie rock landscape, and more than anything, Chaosmosis simply confirms that those days remain firmly in the past.

It is not even sprawling and directionless but just painstakingly mediocre throughout.

All too often Paralytic Stalks feels like an attempt to assume the role of indie-pop's Steve Vai by competitively crushing structural formats underfoot until there's nothing left but dusty granules.

Musically, it’s a travesty. .... Little glimmers of Mike Patton’s personality do, accidentally, seep in. His campy performance during ‘Heaven’s Breath’ lands somewhere between Alice Cooper and Nick Cave.

Unfortunately, most of it sounds like Jason Williamson jogged into a pillar box. The guest musicians include David Yow and Jamie Cullum, a VIP list that draws attention to IDLES' own inadequacy. IDLES' by-numbers rock plod has none of the sensitive jazz swing of The Jesus Lizard nor can it match the unhinged ferocity of Cullum at his most feral. ... Three albums in and the hype has died down. The ideas are drying up. The lack of substance is wholly exposed.

Not only does Sweet Heart Sweet Light hit all patented Spiritualized thematic buttons squarely between the eyes – religion, drugs, sickness and redemption – it is also a record that covers everything with a Wyoming sized scoop of full-fat icky sentiment.

The problem here isn't Dr Luke smothering Marina's idiosyncracies so much as Marina/Electra herself crafting them into something paper-thin and paper-cut annoying.

The World We Left Behind is, on a purely artistic level, the worst album released under the Nachtmystium banner. The major issue is that it lacks the creativity, the devilish glint, and the poisonous confidence that Judd previously injected (no pun intended) into Nachtmystium, his personal vehicle for experimentation and excess.

Ultimately, this is a celebration, rather than an analysis, of several species of awfulness.

There's certainly scant magic here.

For everything else there's Coldplay: reliable, built to move, and able to run on hot air alone.

I hated this kind of Lemonheads-lite, floral-dressed, clompety-booted, neurotic ninny inanity the first time round, I have absolutely no idea how anyone could be arsed to expend the (admittedly small) effort it takes to produce such a pointless photocopy ... [but] not even I can find it in my bitter heart to hate the Nickelodeon-Dinosaur Jr bounce of "Georgia" or the honey-toned amble of "Suicide Policeman".

The covers portion is entirely without merit, Turner having managed to extract every last atom of enjoyment from every single one of the songs he's chosen.

It opens with a piano motif that could’ve come straight from Chris Martin’s candle-scented fingers. The matching vocals are so annoyingly whispered, they practically qualify as ASMR. Halfway through, the song changes tack and starts courting the modern market for anxiety pop. ... More specifically, it makes you think, “Does this sound like a needy Mercury Rev, a ham-fisted Grandaddy, or Wings without the easy-going self-awareness?

Not only are the concepts themselves reductive and half-baked and the lyrics risibly clumsy, but the songs appear to have been composed in less time than it actually takes to perform them.

Yet for all their bluster of writing anthems for a new generation and saving guitar music, the reality is little more than a damp squib.

Lousy With Sylvanbriar is a drab, insufferably uninteresting album.

The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends is a flatulent folly, humming with the sulphurous reek of self-indulgence.

On Confess his tired, joyless music and moribund, hackneyed and hankey lyricism suggests a man whose concept of romanticism would go nicely with a Nairn cracker and dab of quince jelly.

Another eleven baseless mehs that belong nowhere else than on a blog that no one reads.

It would take a hell of a reinvention to pull back Primal Scream from this stinking brink. Come Ahead is a record that fails, fatally, to recognise that Bobby Gillespie was always Primal Scream’s least compelling element.

This new material represents not only their most heinous effort to date; it might in fact be among the most appalling things to ever exist, empirically speaking.