The music is the same. As immediate and worthy as some of these songs are, the chugging guitars and oar-bank handclaps and background HEY!s don't sound like the work of a band that really likes this music and wishes it'd been around to make it at the time and probably deserved to be, the way the Donnas' old jailbait anthems could; they sound like bad one-liners.

There isn’t an ounce of life in Curtis.

There are hooks aplenty, but they’re mushed into a production job that’s so caustically lacking in detail and depth, so over-inflated and etch-a-sketched in timbre, that it’s almost unlistenable on anything but the most rudimentary of laptop speakers.

The little things are annoying, of course, like the “that'll do” pointless pop culture punnery namedrops that litter (“Starz in Their Eyes”/”Alicia Quays”), or the way they take up so much time with vocal samples from (old documentaries/self-help tapes) in the same way that a struggling student quotes increasingly large and irrelevant passages of text in a desperate attempt to meet a word count.

There’s no moderation on Cookies, no inner temperate telling the lads, "Enough’s enough," whether it’s following yet another crack about getting paralytic on drugs, another glammy, mascara-running-from-the-sweat-and-effort guitar solo, or that nth attempt to be cheeky.

We Are the Night isn’t awful, but you can hear the rigidity of its formula, like the motorik title tune that burps up its eponymy every few seconds along a signless, moody highway.

A record that's so deathly serious that each of it's ten songs could be associated with its very own biblical plague.

It’s all just too "over-" - overcooked, overheated, whatever you want to call it.

They ape New Order's "Movement," surely that combo's most static and dullest album. Dengler and rather good drummer Sam Fogarino don't get many chances to shine, letting guitarist Daniel Kessler create the kind of textures that often get mistaken for progress.

New Young Pony Club claim they can give us what we want, but they haven’t got a clue what we need.

A couple of times on Uncle Dysfunktional the Mondays break out of their past and attempt to come to grips with more contemporary forms, but it’s less than convincing.

His career for the last decade is basically that of a chicken with its head lopped off, running around the coop unawares whilst coughing up a never-ending stream of blood. If you couldn’t guess, Eat Me, Drink Me is where the fowl finally falls over and collapses in a pile of its fellow poultry’s fecal matter.

The Horrors aren’t horrifying and Strange House is nowhere near strange enough.

Adding a set of young female characters to this drab mix only accentuates that a concept is needed to bolster the actual music.

There are no great songs to speak of on Dumb Luck, and in fact there are just a few that I would hesitatingly call “good,” or more important, “memorable.”

Despite being four years in the making, Traffic and Weather finds Fountains Of Wayne offering more of the same and yet decidedly less, working your nerves to the point where you’ll wonder whether you ever truly liked them in the first place.

There’s simply no charm or subtlety on show here, and not even any cheeky, bona fide pop thrills in the vein of “Everyday I Love You Less & Less.”

Mika makes music that sounds like vegetables with all the flavour boiled out of them. Blandness born out of a fear of doing anything new, interesting, or provocative. Blandness born from a fear of alienating a single person with a single piece of conviction in your music.

This is the band’s most listless, amelodic effort to date.

The Cost is bleached of any sort of lifeblood, stumbling out of the gate and moping towards the finish line.

Alright Still is nothing more than pop for people who hate pop music, poptimist Quorn, phony music for people who can't let go of their inhibitions (indie-bitions?) and have to have their music classified as REAL.

Just go buy an album that isn’t this one.

Mos Def sounds positively lifeless and distant.

On his few appearances on “The Re-Up,” Em sounds completely lost, grasping for a new subject for his roving mind, or even for a reason to keep rapping.

Its artistic detours are even more jarring than those of Worlds Apart. The good news is that its quality is far less erratic. The bad news is the reason why: it's almost uniformly awful.

The biggest problem might be Rice’s vocal technique. On O, he had a tendency to endearingly strain for notes he couldn’t reach. Now, it sounds like he’s purposefully written songs to allow him to overextend his thin voice.

An irritating listen.

There’s no such dirty, beautiful reality on his new album, just grand empty gestures backed by production polish and symphonic schmaltz.