Sorry, Boyzone fans. Sorry, Mum, I know you like him. Ronan Keating's time in the limelight has been stretched even thinner than the skin over his huge, aerodynamic cheekbones. There's only so much strangled, baritone honking that this reviewer can take before wanting to pour sealing wax into his ears.

The prospect of listening to a whole album by the guy actually filled me with horror at first but, for you, I did it. I tried. Even more than that, the prospect of listening to an album of Ronan Keating songs which feature him sitting on the prow of a barnacle-encrusted seaboat, wearing a scarf and gazing manfully into the middle distance, was almost too much - and a description of the cover was nearly as much as you got. They might as well have called it You Won't Enjoy This, and short of him stopping singing and taking up a career as an accordion player I can't imagine anything changing in the near future. Sorry, everyone. Sorry, Ronan.

This sounds exactly like you'd expect a Ronan Keating album to. There are songs which features violins and the lyric "little sister" intoned with the kind of gut-wrenching emotion that suggest that Ronan was trying to multi-task and clear a Guinness hangover backlog at the same time as laying down some tracks. There are tracks that Richard Marx circa 1991 would have discarded for being too soppy. There is frequent mawkish, misdirected use of lame metaphor (the track Superman should probably have been called Kryptonite, as that's the effect it has).

Every now and again he tries to do trendy and raunchy - Back In The Backseat, a charming tale of car-based lovin' set to a Right Said Fred thumpa-dumpa drumbeat, is a horrifying glimpse into what it might actually be like to be seduced by the crooner - and So Far Away, the closing song on the album, is an apt description of where I wanted to be from my speakers, or the radio, or television, or anywhere I might accidentally be exposed to this ever again.