From the fourth set of bonus tracks, Fantastic is a swelling resolution to see in a new century. Strummer commits to a ‘ramshackle parade’, but sadly he would see little of it. Nevertheless, the music seems to resonate more than ever.

This is primarily a curio, but a fascinating one as it indicates directions Young could have taken if the weather had been different that day. [Oct 2023, p.91]

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

There is enough fire-breathing mania and lusty exaltation on Live God to make it a reliably thorough document of the Bad Seeds in full autumnal glory. [Feb 2026, p.78]

The gritty stomp of Where The Devil Don't Stay and the anthemic thrust of Carl Perkins' Cadillac and Day John Henry Died still resonate. .... The restored extras also hit home. [Summer 2023, p.84]

To Be Kind is evidence that they continue to grow and may not have reached their peak yet. It's superb for now, though. [Summer 2014, p.90]

The USA in the year of Trump, though, has inspired Drive-By Truckers to make this lacerating denunciation of the state of their nation, which stands right up there with Springsteen’s Wrecking Ball and their own best work.

There are 55 unreleased tracks here to tempt owners of the many previous Fairport box sets, and 2010’s Sandy Denny monument. What becomes clear, as Denny wanders in and out of the picture, is how she and Fairport defined each other.

It may not match the mind-melting complexity or bold inventiveness of their finest hour, but War Music solidly demonstrates that Refused's passion remains undimmed. [Nov 2019, p.82]

A fearsome riffstorm of therapeutic venting. [Summer 2021, p.87]

Sporadically great but decidedly patchy, A Moon Shaped Pool is not the sound of a great band dying, more a great band spreading themselves too thinly.

An essential album that gets better with every listen. [Nov 2020, p.86]

While it's not all ace material, it's still an atmospheric cocktail of pain, hope, despair and romance. [Jun 2018, p.91]

With That’s The Spirit, they’ve hit a new direction and a creative peak that finally matches their thirst for fame and fortune.

Such is Taylor’s bristling conviction, and the mastery of his sparse instrumentation, that he holds you transfixed.

The whole thing sounds like a great lost album. Which of course it is. [Summer 2019, p.93]

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]

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.

Relentlessly experimental ear bashers, just an infectious childlike excitement in the exhilarating combined power of mangled pop and apocalyptic noise. [Sep 2024, p.68]

Nine albums and 12 years into their journey, Hey Colossus have never sounded better.

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

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]

A wall of noise delivered with cinematic intent. [Nov 2018, p.83]

There won't be a better record released this month, and very few this year. This is one for the ages. [Nov 2018, p.84]

Seething with anxiety and frontman Jesse Lacey’s trademark sarcastic self‑flagellation, and with a gorgeous production that gives the music space to breathe, it’s an emotional, intelligent work of grace and beauty.

Homegrown was strong enough to have been released in 1975 and Young is right to exhume it now. But that doesn’t mean he was necessarily wrong then. He may have been baring his soul, but he was smart enough to know just how rotten that soul had fleetingly become.

This is simply stunning. [Jun 2023, p.79]

An album that exudes warmth pretty much at every turn. [Feb 2025, p.72]

Gabriel’s most consistent and cohesive post-80s record and the most philosophical of his life. [Jan 2024, p.78]

An absolute must. [Nov 2021, p.83]

The sound that would soon seduce millions was already here. There's Buckingham's unique Flamenco-tinged guitar sound, evident throughout, for a start, as well as Nicks' already assured songwriting. [Oct 2025, p.87]

Even more than The Next Day, these seven tracks suggest the sounds inside his head are in sync with his long-time soul brother Scott Walker, though thankfully he remains on warmer terms with old-fashioned melody and emotion.

MBV is no great leap forward, though it's still aeons ahead of its 21st century competition. [Apr 2013, p.98]

A Pound Of Feathers is not quite as immediate, then, as Happiness Bastards, but repeated listens pay off. Its relationship to that record is similar to the way recently re-released Amorica sits alongside The Southern Harmony. The Crowes’ blessed resurrection keeps rolling. [Apr 2026, p.74]

With Life Is But A Dream… Avenged Sevenfold haven’t just transcended their metal peers for good, they’ve also created their definitive artistic statement. And it’s bloody fantastic. [Jul 2023, p.80]

This time around it's less epic overload and more barebones, twitching drum machines and sparse, discordant guitars, [Apr 2026, p.76]

If this is a weird nightmare its one that no one will be in a rush to wake up from. [Jun 2026, p.71]

Producers Andy Zax and Steve Woolard have considerably expanded available sets by Richie Havens, Sha Na Na, Janis Joplin, Mountain and dying-a-death Incredible String Band; but analysis reveals more often just adding one extra track, albiet good ones. [Aug 2019, p.90]

Dawson's heavily mannered delivery and maximalist verbosity requires patience at times, but Silene is one of the most straightforwardly beautiful songs he has ever recorded. [Jan 2022, p.83]

Michael Brauer’s interpretation – same songs, different mix – alters the texture of familiar songs like Love Sick, the spectral Cold Irons Bound and Make You Feel My Love, now something of a standard thanks to Adele, Michael Bublé and, er, Nick Knowles. ... The live pieces are more informative, with songs performed between 1998 and 2001.

Don't be intimidated by the heft; this is a tremendous thing. [Oct 2013, p.97]

Daughters have never sounded so strong and they've never got it so right. [Dec 2018, p.86]

Weighing in at 133 tracks, Feel Flows' bulk may be harder to validate than existing sets for the Pet Sounds/Smile era, but as a locked-down summer's soundtrack its mellifluous existential musings are hard to fault. [Aug 2021, p.86]

Live At The Hollywood Bowl is back, with new mixes by Giles Martin that sharpen the sound but don’t ditch the screams, plus extra tracks, including a wonderful I Want To Hold Your Hand. The great lost Beatles album just became the essential new Beatles album.

This is a fine monument to Sonic Youth's undimmed, anarchic, arthouse rock'n'roll fury. [Oct 2023, p.82]

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.

A gift for completists, music historians and obsessives. Even for them, approaching it in one sitting is a challenge. Instead it’s better to savour it episodically, because each segment ends on something of a cliffhanger: you can hear her evolve from gamine coffee-shop folkie into a masterful, angel-voiced singer-songwriter as the collection develops.

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

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.

It's McClain's show, with writing as young as yesterday. [Oct 2022, p.71]

Art Dealers hums with life, its garage rock'n'soul bolstered by female backing vocals straight from the Phil Spector school. [Nov 2023, p.79]

Although lacking the shock of the new, Birthing is a far more thematic and aurally darning meditation than most. [Aug 2025, p.74]

Crucially, radioactive classics such as Blood Red River, Weird Love, Atom Bomb Baby, Swampland and their psychobilly spray-job on Jonathan Richman’s She Cracked still sound vital and audaciously genre-crushing. The Scientists well deserve this Mount Rushmore of a set.

Ohms is instantly familiar without replicating anything they’ve done before.

The 2LP set sacrifices the live cuts, which, while so competent they're not exactly bristling with edge, possess a different air to the out-takes. [May 2023, p.87]

Perrett sings like a man possessed on songs that manage to sound helplessly romantic and deal with everyday realities simultaneously, his expression undiminished by the ravages of time. .... His best-ever album? Could well be. [Nov 2024, p.73]

Now And Then, the last Beatles song has finally arrived, and it’s more than worth the wait.

It can, by nature, feel like drowning in melted marshmallow over 55 minutes, but great moments stick out like ice sculptures in a snowdrift. [Dec 2020, p.80]

This is shiny modern rock with a scuffed heart and a sense of constant restlessness of spirit. [Jun 2019, p.89]

It's probably the Rolling Stones' best album ever. ... Slim pickings of the expanded vinyl package border on the insulting. [Dec 2018, p.94]

The CD gives you the uninterrupted concert, the most focused of the lot. [Mar 2020, p.92]

V combines expansive arena-rock sonics with a heavy dose of lush electronics. Indeed, the stern synths and metal-bashing percussion of Hologram sound like vintage Tubeway Army, while the robo-riffing thunder of Machine falls between Suede and the Sisters Of Mercy.

Springsteen On Broadway is best when he tackles his fractured relationship with his father, whose boozy presence he credits with forging his tenacity, and by extension that of his own children, his sisters and his mother (“with Alzheimer’s these past seven years”) to whom he’s gloriously devoted. ... Equal parts communion and catharsis--an immaculate deception. [Jan 2019, p.86]

At times the effect is mildly schizophrenic, and Linda's personal lyric give the songs a feeling of listening to a diary, but overall it works, even if, as with the Thompson family's 2014 album Family, it seems a bit self-referential. [Aug 2024, p.75]

Harder, heavier and more cohesive than their Manifest Decimation debut, Nightmare Logic is precise and snappy enough to win over hardcore fans too.

The energy and buoyancy never sacrifice Elbow's innate knack for emotional impact, as Garvey sings with poetic accuracy of the abyss, various hallelujahs and the meaning of love. [Apr 2024, p.82]

Diehards will thrill to the inclusion of hitherto unreleased versions of Some Kinda Love, Sweet Jane and After Hours, though perhaps baulk at having to shell out for material they already own. Still, this is historical, compelling fare.

Cue nuggets of advice from someone who’s had his own share of knocks, self-inflicted and otherwise, as Simpson and the band tackle brassy R&B, Memphis soul and swampy country, augmented by semi-orchestral strings and bound together by his extraordinary baritone.

Outstanding. [Summer 2021, p.82]

The quartet's explosive indignation is undeniably thrilling, as is their deft mastery of the genre's roaring dynamics. [Sep 2013, p.91]

Whether on a squelchy analogue wig-out or swaying in the breeze of apocalyptic desert rock, this is a Brit-psych absolute peach.

If their debut was dependent on painkillers, Reiðl is the sound of a band beginning to heal.

Dazzling, daring stuff. [Summer 2019, p.86]

A rewarding journey that delights in a celebration of friendship, inclusivity and 'this crazy dream of our utopia'. [Apr 2023, p.79]

That The Church remain so vigorous and vibrant is a delightful surprise indeed. [Jun 2023, p.75]

This album's exploration of very type of human relationship is more Blood On The Tracks than Love Actually. [Sep 2024, p.71]

The most thrilling of everything here is a newly discovered BC radio recording from 1964 that fizzes with the thrill of making music and being alive. [Oct 2013, p.92]

It’s a package that’s pretty hard to improve on but this anniversary edition tries its damnedest to turn things up to eleven.

As albums go, But Here We Are might be the Foos’ most cathartic, but it’s also one of their best, and a fitting tribute to the late, great Taylor Hawkins. [Jul 2023, p.82]

Dillinger remain a proudly unique proposition, and Dissociation is a thrilling, and apparently final, fuck you to the status quo.

Every song is a standout.

At three hours-plus, it’s a lot of breadline bluster, but it’s life-affirming nonetheless.

These songs are well worth revisiting for turn-of-the-century emo kids reminiscing on their misspent youth. [Apr 2019, p.95]

This fourth album from them is special. [Apr 2026, p.79]

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]

Every second feels vital, vicious and vastly more exciting than a band approaching their fortieth anniversary has any right to be. [Oct 2020, p.84]

A handful sprawl and meander a little because, hey, who would dare edit two revered avant-rock overlords? But otherwise quality levels are reliably high. ... This is the best Radiohead album in over a decade.

It's a great way of refreshing an often overly familiar catalogue. [Jan 2015, p.124]

James Hunter's scuffed, sepia-toned soul holler remains something to here on this latest release. [Feb 2026, p.81]

Confirm[s] that not only is this one of Gorillaz's best albums, but also that there's plenty of life in this cartoon outfit yet. [Apr 2026, p.76]

The result is an autumnal masterpiece to rank alongside anything by Bob Dylan or Johnny Cash. [Nov 2014, p.92]

Plant's journey continues ever on, and it's one worth falling in step with. [Oct 2025, p.72]

A brilliantly put-together collection from one of popular music’s most important cities.

A bleak album for the times, but a refreshing one. [Aug 2024, p.70]

The star of this set is Michael Karoli, whose freak-out guitar solos are the epitome of what 1977 claimed to be killing off. 1977 failed, but Can in 1977 were, in their own little big world, on fire. [Dec 2024, p.86]

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]

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.

Singer Britt Daniel still knows less is more, though, and the tracks are lean and pared, every stab counting. [Mar 2022, p.83]