Regular readers of these hallowed pages will already be aware that I’m not an uberfan of Mr Calvin Harris. I admire his balls for carving out a career as a solo artist despite being no more able to sing than I am, and sticking the same backing track behind every single song he does, but after that, the appreciation ends abruptly.

Ready For The Weekend, Harris’ long-awaited second album, does nothing to change my mind. Harris has invented a new genre with this record, something I bet he thought would be a good thing. But scrapheap pop, as I’m calling it, is just as hatefully dull and dreary as landfill indie. It just wears sequins and gyrates its bony rear into your face gratuitously.

The best pop albums come on the back of massive singles and ride on the crest of their success, and in I’m Not Alone and Dance Wiv Me, Harris has two huge hits in his armoury. Unfortunately, it’s so long since those two tracks were ripping up dancefloors they have been forgotten about, and even in the months since they first appeared, they don’t seem to have aged well at all, their original vitality and thrust lost among the beige of the rest of the album.

The title track, and the single picked to hopefully fire the record into the charts (which to be fair worked, but let us remember that Mr Blobby had a Number One single. The British record-buying public are simply not to be trusted), is a hopelessly ill-advised plinky-plonk ditty with rent-a-beat drum machine backing. Mary Pearce provides the singing on the chorus, but there’s nothing in her voice to make it distinguishable from hundreds of bedroom hairbrush singers across the land.

Yeah Yeah Yeah La La La appeared on a Coke advert, which should be warning enough of the gagging stench of commerciality that floods out of it. And have you ever heard of such an utterly ridiculous song title? Upcoming single Flashback is no better, despite containing all the hallmarks of a big hit. It has a bit that goes “wooooooooah wooooooooooah”. It has big emphatic Pete Tong dance noise in the background. It has a breakdown bit where everything stops momentarily. It has lyrics that could fit on the back of a fag packet, and that probably could have been written by a bright four-year-old.

It’s hard to find anything nice to say about this record. It is consistent, it’s just consistently bad. It’s too studied and deliberate to be anything better than average, and most of Harris’ ideas are horribly pitched and badly drawn out.

No doubt it will go down with gurning morons in their flourescent Henley t-shirts and their too-short-too-tight spangly dress-wearing slapper girlfriends, but for the discerning music consumer, this is just shit.