Anyone seeking the funky militancy of The Beatnigs or The Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy may be baffled. [Jul 2011, p.82]

Rock rears its head on "speed demon," but by that point, the riffs are drowned out by the sound of a joke having fatally gone too far. [Oct 2011, p.81]

On her underwhelming second album, we realise how nu-sould would sound stripped of all sonic invention, mischief and sensuality. [Dec 2002, p.151]

Collins... sounds dated with his glossy production, precision session-playing and radio-friendly songs all done by numbers with a great big hole where a heart should be. [Dec 2002, p.129]

These tuneless songs which either brim with maudlin self-pity or bounce along with enforced jollity. [Oct 2009, p.123]

By attempting chillwave haze, Scando-Balearic sunlight, shoegaze and taut inoffensive grooves, Twin Sister are certainly en vogue, but also utterly inept. [Oct 2011, p.100]

Hope In Hell is entirely dreadful, a grim farrago of frenzied riffing and belligerently adolescent lyrics. [Jul 2013, p.69]

Music without charm or purpose, with all the nutritional value of a Twinkie. [Apr 2012, p.71]

The rhymes are gangsta shit at its laziest and most drearily noxious. [Mar 2002, p.111]

The hooks on tracks like "You'll Carry On Real Nice" are the kind of value-meal stodge that clogged the tail end of Britpop. [Dec 2013, p.66]

Emotional Traffic contains a few soppy homilies to domesticity, a transparent bid for a Super Bowl halftime booking, and a great many reasons to listen to the equally polished, but vastly wittier, Brad Paisley. [May 2012, p.78]

A collection of nursery rhymes aimed at toddlers, it should prove nauseating to anyone over the age of three. [Nov 2008, p.92]

America's Sweetheart is petulant and self-pitying. Worse, it's self-righteous. Worse still, it's musically crass. [Mar 2004, p.98]

Incompetent satire. [Apr 2003, p.106]

Basic, sludge-grey power pop that makes Weezer sound as kaleidoscopic as The Flaming Lips. [Nov 2002, p.128]

This is surely the desperate death-thore of a rank '90s relic. [Apr 2008, p.99]

If once she was sweetly sardonic, now she sounds utterly bored, and collaborator Greg Kurtsin hardly helps with an anodyne synthpop production that makes excruciating excursions into rawhide country, pallid polka and Bontempi showtunes.

He's dispensed with the grittier elements and plumped for a straightforward US college rock backing, with dismal results. [Nov 2003, p.112]

The 23-year-old Valley girl's sonically lurid and brash, (supposedly) autobiographical debut may boast production heavyweights like Benny Blancoi, but her witless, cranked-to-11 stridency recalls Kelly Clarkson and Avril Lavigne rather than Pink or Britney. [May 2010, p.94]