A masterful companion piece to Lanegan's unflinching memoir. [Jun 2020, p.88]

It's surprisingly excellent. [Oct 2021, p.79]

These now achingly familiar songs never sounded so good. ... An immaculately packaged, multi-format tribute.

A break from the band’s soundtrack work, ironically, Every Country’s Sun sounds, like a brilliant soundtrack in its own right. To what is up to you.

The outtakes – live performances drawn from CBGBs (of course!), mighty raging debut single Love -> Building On Fire, various acoustic and alternate versions of familiar numbers – are damn near indispensable. [Dec 2024, p.85]

All the songs get the live treatment from an already available concert recorded in Montreal. Work tapes and a live Sweet Jane and Walk On The Wild Side add heft, but the main work is the thing here.

While everything here echoes its maker's past, it all sounds new. ... The Boy Named If (And Other Children's Stories) is excellent. [Feb 2022, p.78]

Really it should get 10 but nobody’s perfect.

It's senses-batteringly wonderful. [Aug 2024, p.70]

Hard to find fault with, and much to find pleasure with.

All 10 songs – here remastered by Andy Pearce and Matt Wortham, also credited on re-issues by Deep Purple, Rory Gallagher et al – sound rich and timeless. ... The fourth CD (discs four and five on vinyl) re-sequences live performances from the March 1973 UK tourheard previously as Live At Last (1980) and part of Past Lives (2002) – but former Free engineer Richard Digby Smith’s new mix proves third time lucky and outshines even the glorious 60-page booklet.

The songs are great. ... This is a collection of brilliant, swinging rockers. [Jun 2023, p.76]

Like all great albums, it reminds you of everything that made you fall in love with this crazy thing called rock’n’roll in the first place.

This is much more raw Manic Street Preachers, fuelled by despair as usual but also simplicity. .... Critical Thinking shows that with the Manics, rage never sleeps. [Feb 2025, p.72]

Rack is one of the most fascinating records you'll hear this year, and it's up there with their best. [Sep 2024, p.74]

It’s all cracking stuff. The early Motown song Money (That’s What I Want) and Muddy Waters’ Rock Me, Baby add soul, and the studio chatter is worth hearing if only to catch Morrison calling out for Kentucky Fried Chicken and announcing that The Doors’ next album will be called Ride Out.

If you've followed his career the evolution makes perfect sense. .... Roll on Vol.3. [Nov 2023, p.79]

A triumph. [Dec 2023, p.76]

It’s a beautifully compiled set that shows what was really going on in 1967 and how subsequent years translated the aftershock. The guitars rock like a motherfucker throughout.

Divine Symmetry for once does what it promises to do, which is track Bowie's progression in one extraordinary year. ... This is a comprehensive trawl through 1971 - and an extraordinary one. [Dec 2022, p.84]

It is an embarrassment of riches, not least the variety of exceptional live material. [Nov 2023, p.87]

Wonderfully cohesive hour of vein-popping indignation. [Sep 2019, p.82]

It’s a 21st-century record for a 21st-century audience that, with an old-school 48-minute duration, only ever leaves the listener hungry for more.

Beautiful in style and intent, The Myth Of The Happily Ever After has magic written into every note. [Nov 2021, p.70]

An extraordinary 11-track distillation of raw urban vitality that recaptures and resets the dizzying conversational street energy of 1972's On The Corner at the cutting edge of 80s soul. [Sep 2019, p.90]

Future Soul is sublime, and one of America's great bands just got a little bit greater. [May 2026, p.72]

This is a remarkable album from a band that still has plenty to say and to offer. Its high point, Death Of The Celts, a fruity 10-minute-plus guitar showcase for the Three Amigos that could be the Iron Maiden equivalent of Thin Lizzy’s celebrated Róisín Dubh (Black Rose): A Rock Legend, is little short of jaw-dropping.

Trademark intimate ballads shine again on startling subway tragedy The Third Rail, Beck uncurling dramatic punctuation, and What Would I Do Without You reaffirming Hunter’s love for wife Trudi with Williams’s counter vocal, closing the set with Hope’s widescreen optimism. [Jun 2024, p.76]

The 1LP version is heaven-sent hitsville. .... The 3LP version is where things loosen up, as (relative) deep cuts strut their stuff. [Dec 2025, p.83]

And Nothing Hurt is like a seasoned mountaineer flying up K2 on one leg. [Sep 2018, p.87]

Corsicana Lemonade flips through a crateful of classic rock tropes, yet sounds spankingly "now." This extraordinary foursome just go from strength to strength. [Dec 2013, p.98]

Originally rejected by Reprise Records executives as being nothing more than a bunch of demos, the entire set is spun with some strange, surreal and beautiful magic.

Flaming Pie sounded excellent then and it sounds excellent now. [Sep 2020, p.92]

This is no pure nostalgia trip, though. Both House Of A Thousand Guitars and Rainmaker take shots at the ‘criminal clown’ in the White House, and Letter To You is as young at heart as any of Springsteen’s proudest moments, a sign that we’re some way off the credits yet.

On the evidence of this quite brilliant record, brighter days lie ahead for one young American at least. [Dec 2013, p.103]

This jubilant, ritzy resurrection offers a Poundland paradise. [Mar 2019, p.95]

As if his glorious slipping of the blues genre's straitjacket wasn't brave enough, Son Little's latest album is also an excavation of some pretty heavy-duty personal trauma. ... Consider our minds expanded. [Oct 2022, p.71]

A CD of unreleased outtakes, which doesn’t just bring the creation of the songs to life, it brings the people behind them to life too. .... More than just a celebration of an album, Queen I provides a vivid snapshot of a moment in time. [Nov 2024, p.82]

This 1986 Morrissey-Marr career peak proves enduringly rich and rewarding in its punchy, remastered, expanded form.

It's the zippiest Foos album to date. ... As a modern rock melting pot, Medicine certainly sounds like a spirit rediscovered. [Mar 2021, p.84]

A murky modern masterpiece. [Oct 2019, p.87]

In Another World is a remarkable album and another marvellous continuation: power and pop. [May 2021, p.88]

The instrumental How To Disappear Into Strings adds a stentorian dimension to How To Disappear Completely, while Fog ascends to a whole new level of mystery in its Again Again version. Radiohead’s loving tending of their back catalogue wins out again.

A highly more-ish record with real soul and class. [Mar 2015, p.88]

Their creative studio peak might have (just) been behind them, but for a taste of the Stones at their down-and-dirtiest, Goats Head Soup will always be the dish of the day.

If that’s code for giving the people what they want, he’s delivered. From the moment Edin opens proceedings with 83 seconds of fearless fretwork, there’s guitar everywhere. Sighommi gallops like Iron Maiden taking on Black Sabbath, Goeth The Fall overflows with cascading hooks, and 999 is a reminder that Smashing Pumpkins were always masters of a slow-burner. [Oct 2024, p.74]

[Beautiful People (Stay High) is] a tearaway slice of white-boy soul, so immediate that you'll join the cast-of-thousands vocal by the second chorus. the rest of Ohio Players is almost as good. [May 2024, p.75]

This album is a heart-breaking but jubilant exploration of joy, honesty, fragility and expression as our most powerful means of human resistance. [Sep 2018, p.88]

Blue & Lonesome captures the Rolling Stones--The Greatest Urban Blues Band In The World--in their element, doing what they do best. You’ll only wish they did it more.

90 minutes of sensitive, surreal lyrics and wailing wig-outs which make J Mascis sound like Julian Bream. ... You'll enjoy it. [Feb 2019, p.90]

Arguably the most exuberant guitar pop alum of 2020. [Mar 2021, p.87]

His masterful combination of feel and technique reaches frequent peaks, with rousing, Jimi Hendrix-inspired rocker Death Of Me and slow burner I Found Her showcasing his fluid, emotive playing at its best.

LTB’s woes have been rewarded with something remarkable: their best record yet.

Tracks like Horns Below Her Halo and the title one are some of the best in their class. [Summer 2023, p.77]

Songs is a doozy. [Sep 2014, p.93]

The singer and guitarist's seventh album is a sparkling gem in its own right. [Jan 2024, p.78]

The allure and immediacy of the songs is remarkable, the stuff that translates into an instant classic. [Sep 2014, p.94]

Choice cuts from an incomparable half century. [Oct 2025, p.87]

It's a pleasure just to amble alongside him, being blissfully glazed in honey by that extraordinary voice. [May 2020, p.81]

This is an album on which Muse master the wider range of future rock and pop sonics they've been toying with for the past decade and refine and define their current sound as neatly as Black Holes & Revelations did for their 2000s period. [Sep 2022, p.74]

This is a beautiful record, a reflection on an extraordinary 50-year career that's more a memory of life than a memento mori. [Mar 2019, p.89]

Psychic Warfare remains in the same succinct and bullish territory that made Earth Rocker such a straightforward joy.

It is a wonderful life-affirming masterpiece. [Nov 2025, p.74]

It never lags. [Sep 2014, p.95]

With a disc including live outtakes and priceless B-sides, this is an essential collection.

If Bowie gave Hunter the confidence to steer Mott through the hits that started with Honaloochie Boogie and opened up his solo career, the trials and tribulations of the subsequent 42 years have put him in a solid position to dish out sage advice and put cockier elements in their place, which he does on the opening That’s When The Trouble Starts and closing Long Time.

Forty years on, these are still songs and performances few have equaled, let alone bettered. [Sep 2014, p.99]

Every carefully arranged song is packed with indelible hooks, melodic invention and heavenly multi-layered harmonies - all recorded in analogue. [Jul 2024, p.80]

The plastic punk with the cartoon sneer has made his grown-up masterpiece. [Nov 2014, p.90]

A sombre treatise on disaffection and alienation grown old, Songs From A Lost World starkly expresses the post-punk generation’s hallmark traits of malaise and anxiety. Art reflects its era and that’s exactly what this album conveys. [Dec 2024, p.74]

The Hives Forever Forever The Hives is vibrant, loud and sure to destroy dance floors worldwide. [Sep 2025, p.76]

[J Spaceman's] rare communications (this is just his second album in a decade) are generally breathtaking events, and Everything Was Beautiful is no different. [Mar 2022, p.82]

Futurology isn't just the best album the Manic Street Preachers have made this century, it's arguably the best album of the year. [Aug 2014, p. 206]

All nine studio albums are covered, although the sequencing defies logic. [Dec 2023, p.85]

A bona fide, big, stadium-pleasing epic. [Mar 2013, p.95]

These eclectic make-overs [on NEU! Tribute] are pleasingly irreverent and mostly excellent. ... Also worth a fresh listen is NEU! 86. [Oct 2022, p.83]

As a close-quarters portrait of a singer-songwriter at a relatively early stage of his ascension to true greatness, it's hard to beat. [Feb 2014, p.97]

Gritty, punchy and hooky. [Aug 2022, p.67]

This is no hasty cash-in. The music is exemplary: rock'n'roll, southern gothic, serious stuff and downright fun tunes. ... There are 63 examples of Petty's art in total and they illustrate that his range was far wider than some think. [Oct 2018, p.92]

Alone In The Universe is a triumph of songcraft and studio invention, one that trounces notions of soft rock and guilty pleasures. He might be a man alone, but he’s got the whole world, potentially, in his hands. Again.

Even in the late autumn of his career, Neil Young can still turn in something as vital and musically catholic as Worl Record. [Jan 2023, p.78]

A beautifully constructed, artful and imaginative debut. [Jan 2014, p.116]

Not only have the Bad Seeds delivered another healthy baby, but perhaps the most gracefully beautiful of the whole brood. [Mar 2013, p.98]

All the albums, and the odds-and-sods presented on this 11-CD collection are remastered, but only Lodger, in a move approved by Bowie before his death, is given a Tony Visconti 2017 remix. This new mix illuminates the giddy mood of experimentalism abroad, a contrast to the intensity of its precursor’s, and a band fresh from the tour captured on the exemplary Stage (also here), in fine, resourceful fettle.

There’s no denying the lustre and passion in these songs. A case in point is the blistering call-to-arms, preacher-man fire-and-brimstone sermon True Black. Elsewhere, Tumbleweeds leans towards a darker Ryan Adams or brooding Jason Isbell setting. [Mar 2026, p.79]

By making new albums like this, the band sidestep the entire revival punk circuit ethos and create something new, again. [Summer 2014, p.88]

The whole show is masterfully orchestrated. The first 25 minutes is all bangers. [Summer 2022, p.78]

It's up there with the very best records they've released. [Sep 2018, p.86]

An instant classic. [Apr 2013, p.94]

This might well be the finest example of the genre since My Bloody Valentine perforated their first eardrum. [Summer 2014, p.91]

An excellent remaster accentuates the nuances and stresses the space in a mix that’s by turns claustrophobic and widescreen, crisps hi-hats, sharpens ice-pick guitar shards and further fattens bass subsonics. There are extra tracks, B-sides, Peel sessions, a live ‘rehearsal’ set from Manchester’s Factory, and it’s only a joy.

A more polished and less primal prospect. ... Nichols' dusty acoustic fingerstyle and burnished voice shares little of Eric Bibb's barbed eloquence, and the album grows angrier as it unfolds. [Nov 2021, p.75]

Birchwood is still making rowdy brand of blues, seemingly unlikely to suit up or slow down any time soon. [Apr 2021, p.87]

Dark, desperate and full of great tunes, this is rock'n'roll at its black-hearted best. [Nov 2013, p.90]

She has made her masterpiece; remarkable at any age. [Oct 2014, p.91]

Invigorating results. ... It's refreshing, comforting even, to have Green Day back in their exuberant element, unburdened by message or morality. [Mar 2020, p.86]

Thoroughly anti-social and wonderfully obnoxious throughout, this is kick-arse psych’n’roll as it should be.

One of those rare and precious rock records: instantly bewitching but oozing with moments to feat on time after time. [Dec 2025, p.76]