Perhaps the most inappropriately-titled album since The Best Of Sting. [Dec 2003, p.116]

Chiefly consists of lumpen and joyless AOR rock, with a few rhythm loops to give an illusion of modernity. [Apr 2002, p.104]

Their ragtag religious signifiers, stretching from the Mediterranean to Bengal, feel like gap year blog entries, and Cisneros' wizened sage delivery is ludicrous. [Aug 2012, p.77]

What makes B&S great is conspicuous by its absence.... For completists only. [Jul 2002, p.101]

Maximalists and circus ringmasters might enjoy it, but many will be scrabbling for the stop button. [May 2012, p67]

The problem with The Weirdness is that it shoots its bolt immediately and has nothing left to offer. [Apr 2007, p.93]

He still sounds like a blue-collar phoney trying to be a poor man's Springsteen. [May 2002, p.104]

This is music that was manufactured to be played everywhere except those places to which people go when they want to hear music. [Oct 2008, p.105]

A sentimental indulgence destined for a theme-pub half-life. [Nov 2002, p.114]

This complacent record from long-time drone lover and former Lungfish guitarist Asa Osborne gets the recipe badly wrong. [Jun 2011, p.103]

This is turgid, formulaic guff. [Nov 2003, p.114]

A pale retread of Get Rich... fashioned by lesser talents. [Feb 2004, p.69]

Life Processes sounds like mice playing Hundred Reasons covers. [May 2008, p.95]

Squire's voice is awful, while his music and lyrics are those of a busker. [Nov 2002, p.113]

Lyrically, the fare wavers from the unspectacularly anecdotal to the spinelessly soppy. [Jul 2011, p.121]

The results are risible but the joke is no longer funny. [Feb 2003, p.77]

Her music is similarly annoying, with her sugar-fuelled rockabilly-pop, she's the female Jack Penate. [Jan 2008, p.93]

What follows is the most overblown album in recent memory, every song instantly hitting the "big Music" button without giving the listener a chance to become acquainted. [May 2011, p.87]

They've turned their backs on disco and privileged operatic rock while retaining their--ahem!--inimitable sense of fun. [Dec 2006, p.106]

It'll work neither in the club or in the home. [Jun 2006, p.108]

Light is a dog's breakfast of weedy vocals, preachy platitudes and banal melodies that makes Sting sound like The Last Poets. [Jul 2010, p.112]

There's a winning way with '70s soft-rock chord changes, but his staggering lyrical banalities makes most of this virtually unlistenable. [May 2009, p.89]

Funplex consists largely of a series of witless retreads of school disco hit 'Love Shack,' with Fred Schneider's deadpan "woo!" recalling an increasinglt weary holiday rep. [Apr 2008, p.83]

Sadly, Feed The Animals blends commercial US rap with rock classics with so little charm or skll, that even Jive Bunny is slightly annoyed you've used his name in vain. [Nov 2008, p.96]

The riffs are polite, the vocals maddeningly limo, and more than half the tracks are mere sketches they couldn't be bothered to colour in. [Sep 2012, p.73]

Metal has teken giant evolutionary strides these past few years but, like mammoths frozen in ice, Def Leppard remain perfectly preserved in their own oblivion to them. [July 2008, p.91]

Tourist begins earnestly... and continues through 11 torpid ballads, drained of all their earlier quirks, seemingly laboratory-designed for those who find Keane too edgy. [Feb 2005, p.83]

The downhome strum of "Stuck Like Glue" has a certain charm--at least until its horrific cod-dancehall break down--but fails to redeem a depressingly calculated record. [Mar 2011, p.101]