If your bag is relentless hectoring from five angry, tune averse firebrands, feel free to have at it. Doubtlessly great live, though. [Apr 2026, p.81]

It turns out these eternal survivors have gone out with neither a whimper nor a snarl. [Apr 2026, p.76]

It might not be essential, but it's not without merit. [Apr 2026, p.80]

A few more enticing tunes within the mix might really elevate them to a higher plane. [Mar 2026, p.78]

It's the sound of a man and his chums enjoying each other's gifts as they rattle out some slightly scuzzy slices of rock delight. [Feb 2026, p.78]

As a collection, Anthology 4 charts a parallel path through the Beatles’ career, one with a tacky postscript in the 21st century. As a Beatles record, it is not very good, offering nothing exciting in terms of rarities (wow, the “strings only” version of Something from the Abbey Road 50th anniversary edition) or insight. [Dec 2025, p.84]

It only ever recalls a fuzz-jangling, beefed-up Sundays is surprising, but yeah, it'll do. [Dec 2025, p.79]

For The Sake Of Bethel Woods confirmed that they are not the band they once were but A Bridge To Far flows directly on from there with many of the songs more theoretical in nature. [Dec 2025, p.78]

The drunken waltz of Bad Reputation offers a few minutes of interest, but the album fails to adequately raise the temperature. [Nov 2025, p.81]

Some reasonably good live music (Elephant’s Memory bring to Lennon’s music a bluesy heaviness that sometimes suits it and sometimes doesn’t), some intriguing demos (arguably the best material here, whether it be rare Lennon originals or decent rock’n’roll covers) and most of Some Time In New York City, an album that suffers from: a) being terrible, especially The Luck Of The Irish, a song that makes Ed Sheeran’s Galway Girl sound like The Chieftains), and b) the omission of its one great song, whose title means it has been excised from the album. One for the history buffs. [Nov 2025, p.84]

The result, albeit low-key, is a charming, warm-hearted collection. [Oct 2025, p.79]

A collection of songs so sugar-coated it should probably have been packaged with insulin. [Oct 2025, p.72]

They're clearly having a blast, in every sense - there's enough noirish sarcasm to make that clear - but there's also a punk nihilism at play that makes this debut album a compellingly unsettling listen. [Sep 2025, p.77]

Universal platitudes makes Ricochet feel like Disney-fied protest compared to some of the thornier acts and topics grabbing headlines right now, but there's no denying the message of unity is on point. There's a maturity to Ricochet's sound. [Sep 2025, p.81]

Employing rhythmic sideswipes, jarring guitar clangour and dub bass frequencies through a production filter marked 'Mud'. [Summer 2025, p.79]

Its shorter, pacier tracks up the dynamism, making for a pummelling - if somewhat relentless - experience as deep-strata hardcore tracks like Detroit and Blackage shift gears into more ponderous interludes. [Jun 2025, p.72]

Their hearts are in the right place, but their percussion needs pumping. [May 2025, p.79]

It's an album outside its own time, designed to intrigue the dedicated few rather than service the content-consuming many, and if nothing else it's bringing the art of enigmatic charisma back to the world of rock. [Apr 2025, p.74]

Long on delicately gauzy, seductively shoegazey atmospheric, but short on whup-ass. [Apr 2025, p.77]

Universe Room continues the indie-prog leanings of last year's Strut Of Kings, as though R.E.M were dipping into the less coherent corners of Tommy and Nursery Cryme, but across its 17 tracks finds time for plenty of lo-fi diversion too. [Apr 2025, p.72]

The streak of familiarity that runs through the album is down to the way songwriters Wesley Schultz and Jeremiah Fraites construct their folk-pop melodies and arrangements, but they've given their sound a fresh impetus. [Apr 2025, p.70]

There’s a rejuvenated feel to this reunion album of the ‘dream team’, which is themed around the impact of sleep disruption from sleepwalking to nightmares. [Mar 2025, p.77]

Stephen Lawrie grumbles dutifully over the anticipated Spacemen 3 guitar squalls, and tracks like Shake It All Out and This Train Rolls On do their traditional misery-in-motion thing. Nothing Matters suggests an out-take from Iggy’s The Idiot that was ditched for resembling Dum Dum Boys too closely. [Oct 2024, p.74]

Things take a kitschy turn for the sickly sweet. [Dec 2024, p.79]

This isn’t completely terrible – duets with Willie Nelson improve anything – it’s just frustratingly unessential. [Dec 2024, p.75]

Differing from its predecessor by visiting 2021 studio album I Don’t Live Here Anymore (notably on Harmonia’s Dream) and showcasing a seven-piece band, there’s trickery afoot: some tracks are spliced from multiple takes. It’s hard to argue with the hugeness when it hits though. [Dec 2024, p.74]

Dud tracks are unfortunate, as Come Ahead does contain some pretty decent music when everyone involved puts their minds to it. But even the album’s title - an old Glasgow colloquialism that basically translates as ‘Yes, I would like to fight you’ – fails to measure up to its intent as a triumphant comeback. Primal Scream: don’t remember them this way. [Nov 2024, p.74]

The nagging sense remains that way too much effort has been put into reinterpreting other artists’ material instead of writing their own. [Nov 2024, p.76]

Hitchcock strips away all the production embellishments of its musical highlights and presents them as they would have been written. The resulting album is a decidedly mixed bag. [Nov 2024, p.73]

You don't come to this band foe an easy rode and a soothing soundtrack to while away the hours; you come to them to be pummelled with some horrible but mesmerising noise. And on Synthesizer they deliver in abundance once again. [Nov 2024, p.75]

Treasured songs suffer repeated acts of vandalism. On many nights, Dylan and the guys howl the chorus of Like A Rolling Stone frat party-style. Conversely, the 1974 release Forever Young (from the Planet Waves album) gets regular care and rises in stature as a Boomer benediction. [Oct 2024, p.83]

If it’s dumb fun in the sun you’re after, these are the rodents you’re looking for. [Sep 2024, p.69]

Frontman Brandon Coleman is alike a more muscular, less reedy Neil Young. .... A turbulent album. [Aug 2024, p.72]

The songs themselves are among Lennon's worst. .... This reissue comes in a box full of new mixes - several CDs or vinyl LPs of Raw Mixes, Ultimate mixes and Out-Takes, none of which add anything much other than a sense that one's ears have been syringed for no good reason. [Summer 2024, p.83]

The majority is syncopated lightweight pop, as if selected by algorithms for mass consumption. [Aug 2024, p.72]

This, somewhat muted, first album in 20 years lacks much of the Beck-like shuffle and experimental pop lustre of that early era, but boasts a mature earthy seam thanks to Barlow lacing its noirish alt.folk, 80s-inflected crypt rock and melodic drone and dub experiments with touches of Middle Eastern instrumentation. [Summer 2024, p.72]

Alcohol And Cocainemarijuananicotine, is borderline endearing, while Love Thyself reminds us that Taylor-Taylor can still write pop hooks whenever he can be bothered. [May 2024, p.77]

Crow redeems herself somewhat with the useful chorus of the I-love-my-kids closer Waiting In The Wings, but only somewhat. Some good singles, as always, but unfortunately a long way from career highlights Sheryl Crow and The Globe Sessions. [May 2024, p.79]

At points it's jazzy, then psychedelic, then with the sort of undulating groove that makes you wonder what it might have sounded like if Booker T jammed with the Average White Band. [Mar 2024, p.81]

Ultimately a completist's set. [Dec 2023, p.84]

'Zingers exhibit a whole lotta heart. But sometimes heart alone's not enough. [Dec 2023, p.79]

Hard Light works so well because rather than cling on to relevance during the wilderness years, Drop Nineteen have simply waited and let the world catch up with them. [Dec 2023, p.77]

Some nifty tricks - mashing their own Lonely In Your Nightmare into Rick James's Super Freak, for example - but not enough treat. [Dec 2023, p.74]

The mood varies across the record. [Nov 2023, p.81]

What it lacks is a pulse-quickening ‘showcase track’ – a Fire And Water, a Mr Big, a Running With The Pack, a Burning Sky… a (to continue the 12 o’clock theme) Midnight Moonlight, even. It’s all rather countrified and subdued. [Oct 2023, p.84]

Double down on revitalising their music while finding new logs to throw on the philosophical fire. [Oct 2023, p.81]

It's invariably over-punctuated by hyperactive prog-metallic drumming and paradiddly percussion that leaves little space for their ideas to breath, while memorable hooks or riffs get buried in the chaos. [Sep 2023, p.79]

Matches vintage MaximumRock'N'Roll short, sharp, DIY hardcore blurts with kindergarten puppetry to baffling effect. [Aug 2023, p.79]

Romy Vager's vocals are raw, earnest, and Tambourine is Brain Worms distilled, a taut memoir of remote mourning. [Jul 2023, p.87]

Those with sensitive ears will find its more extreme moments indigestible, but it remains impressive stuff. [May 2023, p.78]

The album reveals it's the breadth of his influences - Latin as well as Led Zeppelin - that accounts for his own style. But you will need to be a drum fan. [Jun 2023, p.74]

High Flyin' is fine, a romp, a moment captured in time. ... It remains more a curiosity than a necessity, though. [Jun 2023, p.82]

It's elegiac, claustrophobic and contagiously disturbed. [Apr 2023, p.79]

Four discs of heavy-lidded, slope-shouldered, shoe-gazing aural opioids. [May 2023, p.89]

While this ninth starts well it ultimately nags 'could do better'. And they have. [May 2023, p.81]

It makes sense with the book on your lap, but otherwise, the album may not convince. The acoustics are peculiar on tracks like Pride and the vocal mic seems compressed, rather than expansive. Something to do with surrender, perhaps. What remains of it, when you give yourself away. [May 2023, p.80]

They revisit a previous concept. ... Floating along on a wave of jazzy good vibes. [Nov 2022, p.75]

Past Lives is a wilfully uncommercial record, made for the sheer love of the tight-knit scene that spawned them. [Dec 2022, p.74]

Where Is The Water twists and meanders hazily before shifting into gear with a riff from the Jack White school of thud, while opener Needles is excitable garage rock with a stiff, post-punk edge. And over in the kaleidoscopic corner, Wheels Within Wheels flips merrily from one psychedelic landscape to the next and includes a wriggling organ solo that sounds as if it's being squeezed from a tube. All in all, it's quite the adventure. [Dec 2022, p.75]

There are many less rewarding experiences than hearing Springsteen thirstily sing his favourite songs, but there’s a sense here that all concerned hope it would catch fire and amount to something more. [Dec 2022, p.76]

The result borders on easy listening with a yacht-pop vibe, before the psychedelic starbursts come out to play. [Nov 2022, p.75]

As displayed by the title track and the pumping Brutalism, Oxymore feels stuck in the 90s rather than the work of two trailblazers, though at least Epica’s hands-in-the-air dynamics feels fresher. [Nov 2022, p.71]

It's been effectively produced to death. A cold, clinical experience. [Oct 2022, p.77]

Despite a handful of anodyne plodders, it is difficult to dislike Simple Minds in this nostalgic late-career mode, elder statesmen with nothing left to prove. [Nov 2022, p.71]

This album feels like something of a transitional one for Starcrawler, as they find themselves torn between their residual instinct to rock and a desire to roll into new creative areas. [Sep 2022, p.76]

This fifth edition's half-hour documents their second collaboration with Nurse With Wound and never fully recovers. [Sep 2022, p.83]

Classy but strangely sterile. [Sep 2022, p.77]

It would be exhausting to list all the crimes these two commit in the name of rock'n'roll on this record. ... Risible. [Sep 2022, p.75]

It's a roguish enough distillation of Aussie rock's most okish corners. [Sep 2022, p.73]

Kasabian's USP has always been a cocky straddling of indie rock and rave. It's a shame they pretty much discard it here. [Aug 2022, p.68]

A fun album, but one in need of trimming and extra heft. [Aug 2022, p.69]

Sweet-voiced grrrl-angst vocals meet grunge dynamics; non-committal Veruca Salt do post-Nirvana loud bit/miserable bit. I Mean, it's fine, but... meh. [Summer 2022, p.79]

The album was written on the hop, Newcombe spilling his brains right onto tape, and it shows – imperfections are made into a positive, the songs allowed to just naturally come into being.

He delves into lesser-known parts, like Wheel, a 1973 song about tragic, rural cycles, and he sings Old Road, as a sparse holler, akin to the original. Other songs celebrate the ‘gonzo country’ aims of Jerry Jeff, but Mr Bojangles and his worn-out shoes is still best in show.

The title track about wanting to know more about your partner, is strong enough to rise above the clichés, but some others are not so fortunate. [Jun 2022, p.79]

Nothing here is as good as their Sweet Jane, but it'll do. [May 2022, p.87]

It's all getting a bit too formulaic. [Apr 2022, p.83]

The majority of this all star tribute treads an inappropriately conformist path. [Apr 2022, p.83]

Meld[s] jangles, loops, fuzzes, plucks and floaty introspections. Heavy on shoe-gaze, light on Gallagher swagger. [Apr 2022, p.83]

C91 is an overstuffed hit-and-miss banquet of bittersweet popstalgia, great in parts but far from definitive. [Feb 2022, p.86]

Each song title is followed by a reference to specific verses from the Bible that have spurred Anderson into lyrical action. The connection is not always easy to make, and sometimes you’re better off just going with his words, although they can take some unravelling at times. But that’s all part of the plan.

There awaits a winning collaboration between band and singer, but this isn't it. [Feb 2022, p.79]

The album emerging as willfully lo-fi, bouncing along on cheery electronica while McTrusty's almost spoken-word panic attack showcases his rich Glaswegian vocals. [Feb 2022, p.79]

While it does start to get a little repetitive, it's good to hear a band straying off the beaten track too play timeless music just for the sheer hell of it. [Dec 2021, p.72]

The rest of the album is all over the map, from electro-rocker Let’s Get The Party Started (featuring Oli Sykes of Bring Me The Horizon) to Charmed I’m Sure’s dub-step metal. It’s fun hearing Morello stretch out, though all but the most broadminded RATM fans are unlikely to feel the same way.

[A] blend of instrumental moods, torpid 80s indie and self-regarding songs that never entirely clear their launchpad. [Oct 2021, p.79]

Despite lofty ambitions to write a letter 'from God to humanity' on Restless Souls, these are counter-attacked by Rebel Girl, an overstuffed, over-sweetened, male gaze-heavy, lovelorn confection that completely overrides the potential of its title. ... nevertheless, Lifeforms is beautifully produced and catchy as hell, earning itself a spot on any intergalactic playlist. [Oct 2021, p.73]

Overall these Merseyside extreme-metal veterans sound a little unfocused and uninspired on this record, falling back on tired retro-metal tropes. [Oct 2021, p.72]

Quiet Town and Runaway Horses exhibit tender lyrical themes, and there's brief respite in the dreamy haze of Sleepwalker and Pressure Machine. However, nostalgia and the shattering of childhood idylls reoccur through In the Car Outside and In Another Life. [Oct 2021, p.78]

An album full of lo-fi pop-tinged melodies sugarcoating a bitter centre. [Summer 2021, p.86]

It's not exactly in Rikki's nadir, but neither is it exactly rock. [Jul 2021, p.87]

The sloganeering surfs in on a wave of ultra-catchy punk melodies, dragging the listener along in its wake. [Jul 2021, p.85]

Finds their former highs trapped behind glass, blurred and beclouded like the past year has been for all of us. [Jul 2021, p.86]

This slender exercise in flimsy whimsy boasts plenty f charm but few substantial songs. [Jun 2021, p.78]

Not a great comeback, but just good enough. [Jun 2021, p.81]

They need just a little more musical and emotional grit to avoid fully surrendering to pastel-shaded midlife mellowness. [Jun 2021, p.76]

The ultra-catchy pop-punk of old is there in spades, but they're taking a cold hard look at America on This Is Not Utopia. ... Not all gambles pay off. ... A fun romp with a serious undercurrent. [May 2021, p.91]

A game of two halves. ... Could please all. Or none. [Apr 2021, p.89]