There's definitely real talent with LeBlanc but he needs to forget about having an image created for him and concentrate, as one of his musical heroes Townes Van Zandt might have put on, on writing for the sake of the song.

Crazy In Love aside, this generically pleasant and wafty album makes a better accompaniment to laundering sheets than rolling in (or being tied up with) them.

That this is Manson’s most accessible and focused album in years counts for very little; there is simply no shock value when all you have to offer are cheap shocks.

Even where the musical ideas are strong, they're sapped by the determinedly relaxed ambiance.

Hardcore fans should be satisfied, but Road recycles outdated myths of rock machismo from a pantomime villain determined to go out in a blaze of clichés.

These soft shoe shuffles sway up and down the same few notes, with the affectionate embrace of mother of the groom dances.

Business as usual, then, with few new thrills.

The problem with Justice is that Bieber thinks his music is more powerful than it actually is.

Madonna's infinite varieties have certainly staled.

Though the materials accompanying Nobody is Listening insist that it’s Zayn’s most personal record to date, and the one over which he’s had the most personal control, it’s hard to find much trace of him here.

Their once-ebullient anthems have been replaced by a collection of mid-tempo, uninspiringly ponderous tracks.

The most devoted of devotees will get a kick out of this album, but even they will struggle to ignore its flaws, or how genuinely fed up – rather than his usual showboating – Morrissey sounds at times.

Less the return of a pop titan, Swag feels like a cry to be heard. At times it’s uncomfortable, messy and a little confused – but perhaps after all this time, music is the only thing Justin Bieber knows will make people listen. Whether he has anything worth saying is another matter though.

Coated with a West Coast varnish and filled with radio-friendly melodies Hope St will provide great background music for warm evenings in the garden. With continued listening, however, it's liable to leave you cold.

Something Beautiful has three decent tracks (fizzy dance song End Of the World, emotional ballad More to Lose and the elegiac Golden Burning Sun) and one absolute monster of a sad banger, Easy Lover, that stands out like a blazing beacon amidst a parade of trite ditties overstretched far beyond their natural life to encompass banal poetic codas.

The blatant, stocking-filler money-grab of tagging these songs on to a quirky hits compilation (minus Bohemian Rhapsody) isn’t in the Christmas spirit.

Making music by numbers shouldn’t be this tiring.

Throughout, the arrangements are as relentlessly upbeat and playfully retro as the album’s Alan Fears-designed artwork, stuffed with vocoders, peacocking basslines and laser-beam synth sounds. They’re also wildly referential, and largely fail to add anything either fresh or memorable to the conversation.

The first half's vocal tracks woefully resemble standard-issue chart fodder. There's some better instrumental stuff later on, but, overall, it's ordinary.

The more time you spend with each song, the more it sounds like a variation on something you’ve heard done better before, a formula in search of a hook.

A triumph of marketing, it’s hard to escape notions that this shiny “new” version of the Anthology series essentially comprises remasters of previously remastered rejects.

She oversings to compensate, as if by keeping notes moving we won’t notice weaknesses, and there are moments of synthetic fluctuation that suggest recourse to autotune techniques routinely used to polish performances of lesser contemporary pop singers. The material does her no favours.

While the tricksy chord changes upon which most tracks are founded may be clever, or possibly ground-breaking, these recordings seriously lack oomph.

Their tenth studio album kicks off in fine form with the first single, San Quentin. ... If only the whole album was like this, but instead listeners will get whiplash from all the genre changes, which spans American rock, country and frat-boy pop.

There are things going on here that will, in all likelihood, percolate through to stadium pop in due course but Hyde lacks the vocal presence or structural songcraft to shape the material into something greater than its parts.

All Bay has really done is exchange one set of generic production clichés for another.

The result is not bad: though you miss the unpredictable blasts of raw hellfire from the cult classic Surfer Rosa era, the band find some gritty, grindy melodies in the bigger, slicker vein of 1991’s patchy Trompe Le Monde.

A string section and gospel choir barely add nuance to straight-ahead karaoke versions of Oasis classics and a few of Liam’s solo songs.