This injection-moulded pastiche isn't exactly bad, but feels totally pointless. [Jul 2011, p.86]

A mish-mash of tracks from or intended for film soundtracks, is mearly more of the same with added strings. [Sep 2008, p.109]

The first six tracks or so of Stone Love are as good a soundtrack to summer as you're likely to get this year... Thereafter it's an interminable sea of coma-inducing ballads. [Sep 2004, p.104]

The drawback, as ever, is Blunt’s warbly, whining, strangled voice, which sounds increasingly like a bad Weird Al Yankovic parody.

They haven't yet shown enough thrills in righteousness to challenge gangsta's dark, easy attraction. [Nov 2002, p.129]

There are some pleasantly elaborate, wayward songs here... Forays into funk and Tom Waits' scrapyard are cringe-inducing, though. [Sep 2004, p.110]

The result is exhausting, an album of songs that all want to be showstoppers. [Dec 2011, p.86]

The dream-logic mixing is a strength, where folk songs from Adele Diane and Songs Of Green Pheasant tumble to the forefront, but most tracks are limp, effete and boring. [Mar 2015, p.84]

Here Lies Love could do with a lot less reportage and a great deal more drama, melody and wit. If anything, with morem not less, artistsic licence. [Mar 2010, p.99]

Deeply average. [Apr 2004, p.91]

Their one great idea grows tiresome over an album's length. [Oct 2010, p.88]

While something could have been made of the contrast between Francis's keening howl and Paley's guttural slur, proceedings are let down by the songs. [Oct 2011, p.95]

Producer Jari Haapalainen successfully blends it all together, but Karolina Komstedt's vacant vocals remian glacially unmoved. [Jul 2010, p.104]

Too one-speed to attain the subtlety of Zep, too constipated to really funk out. [Oct 2006, p.99]

An utterly gloomungous affair with barely a crack of light piercing the lowering clouds of misery. [Jan 2004, p.116]

The thing with the L-event EP is that across four tracks, there isn't the room afforded on their best LPs for something resembling accessibility. [Nov-Dec 2013, p.100]

Maybe it's not Albini's fault that El Rey lacks the melodic thrust of earlier projects, but this is wiry, unappealing fare. [July 2008, p.114]

It's unlikely comfort is their aim, but that's the effect oif this over-familiar blend of woozy disaffection and slow-burning sensuality. [Apr 2010, p.83]

Not quite criminal, but close. [Jul 2012, p.84]

Unfortunately, every note is so restrained as to verge on the apologetic, resulting in songs capable of being forgotten even while they're playing. [Oct 2009, p.101]

Seems an innocuous exercise in regurgitation rather than innovation. [Dec 2002, p.131]

Their third album sees them toughening up some, with much of their whimsical dreaminess tramped underfoot in their seeming desire to become a more conventional, NME-friendly, rock band. [Feb 2006, p.81]

They rather more resemble the wilfully over-wrought pastiches of Flight Of The Conchords, but without the jokes. [Sep 2009, p.82]

The sing-along antics of the home crowd can be a little irritating. [Aug 2002, p.107]

A lush but unthrilling album. [Nov 2003, p.122]

Much of it seems to bluster without delivering. [Aug 2005, p.87]

The quartet are once again playing it safe with their crowd-pleasing formula of surging riffs, queasily memorable choruses and lyrics which, like Mystic Meg horoscopes burn with portent while saying nothing. [Dec 2011, p.96]

The vast majority of it still sounds like what it was: cerebral, bloodless 'dance' music for junkies, the kind of posturing Gotham tripe we used to describe as "atonal" and "angular." [Aug 2003, p.120]