The pace of Duets Special is slow and steady, so inevitably there are moments where it drags a little, but to hear one of the great rock voices of her era in her element, sharing the music she loves with musicians she respects and complements, is a quiet, low-key joy to behold. [Nov 2025, p.80]

It all makes for a varied, sophisticated and somewhat restrained listen, as the Wakefield trio's bawling attack is tempered to allow subtler flavours to seep through. [Apr 2026, p.75]

This is a record to cherish, driven by bright acoustics, gently overdriven electrics, the occasional pedal steel and fiddle, and, above it all, Taylor's voice and exceptional songwriting nous. [Jun 2026, p.73]

[The band] sound like they’re grabbing at big choruses like an alcoholic scrabbling for a bedside breakfast whisky. But on The Feelers, the motoric Spices and Me & Magdalena, Craig Finn’s sneered diatribe about a manipulative rock junkie, they nonetheless stumble across a rich, National-like lustre of dark grooves and opiated euphoria.

Thunder, bottled. [Feb 2014, p.95]

On the evidence of Painkillers, Fallon doesn’t really need the backup of a regular band. With this debut he’s placed his stake as an American singer-songwriter of style and substance.

Two plays in, as with this utterly endearing tenth, you will overlook its flaws and follies and fall for their gentle angst massages and relentless power pop melodies. [Nov 2019, p.84]

Six inessential demos added to the original album hardly warrant the ‘deluxe edition’ tag. But as a document of a musical sea change, Ultramega OK is indispensable.

Their best record since the last one you liked. [Jun 2020, p.88]

At last, a Mew album as essential as it is deeply odd. [Jun 2015, p.97]

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

While nothing quite matches the brutalist stomps of your youth, there’s a savage intensity at work here.

A twelfth album that comes off the ropes swinging. ... His vocals are gleeful and feline, and these 11 songs are full of purpose. [Apr 2020, p.82]

A good chunk of this Comet is heaven-bound. [Summer 2018, p.92]

It's Tripp's devotion to short, snappy expression that lends this album mist character. [Apr 2026, p.77]

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]

A spectacular squall of uber-MBV sungaze dream-pop propels indigenous Swinowish/Inupiaq woman Katherine Paul's jouney. [Apr 2023, p.79]

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]

Six albums in, The Horrors sound fresher than ever. [May 2025, p.75]

There are sonic surprises: The Prodigal is sheer orchestral euphoria, Sad White Reggae should be called ‘Electrofunk Strutrock, Actually’ and Hugz comes on like RATM raging against the metaverse. But it’s the themes that most intrigue.

Dan Auerbach's production is warmly intimate, LaMontangne's singing a quiet marvel. [Jul 2014, p.95]

After 30 years behind the mic, Hersh's vocals have gained extra grit and lost none of their eerie magic. [Oct 2018, p.89]

It's a brimming grab-bag of brilliance and a total joy. [Oct 2022, p.77]

There's no faking this kind of quality. [Nov 2014, p.93]

The 14 tracks add up to a brilliant work full of confidence and ideas, all laid out on a massive canvas of invention and variety.

It finds him in a reflective mood. It's a smart musical move, because Storm Damage showcases what a good lyricist he is. [Mar 2020, p.86]

Gone is any trace of the searing vitality that drove their earlier records; in its place a winsome urge to recreate all of the waftiest, wimpiest moments from pop history. [Mar 2019, p.91]

It has stood time's ravages well, both as an indicator of the band's capacity for change and as a great album in its own right. [Jan 2019, 2018, p.93]

For their fans accustomed to the clattering joyride only Mastodon provide, this will suffice for now. [Summer 2014, p.92]

Earle's narrative is compellingly singular, and the musical variety feeding his fiery and thoughtful tunes well measured. [May 2013, p.85]

There are passages of experimentation around this album’s edges, such as the post-nuclear drones of Roots Remain, and electronic effects that suggest prolonged exposure to mid-period Tangerine Dream. But Mastodon never really develop these intriguing tendencies.

When it's good, it's very good. [Jun 2015, p.91]

If you won and love other recent Bonamassa records you know what to expect and won't be disappointed. But for more casual listeners, the big-band approach may grow a bit overwrought and leave you hankering for those no-frills Rory Gallagher albums. [Oct 2014, p.90]

Scratch the surface and nothing really shines. This nod to the past feels more like regression than a return to former glories.

Dr. John sounds in tip-top form here. [Oct 2022, p.73]

Young's voice is plaintive and cracked, the guitars whip up a veritable thunderstorm, nd the mood is stormy and reflective. Another treasure. [Jun 2023, p.82]

It’s enchanting rock’n’roll that might well tempt you into selling your soul – if only for one night of sweet soft-metal abandon. [Jun 2025, p.72]

There are no dubstep breaks, string quartets or bursts of yodeling. But this is also the best Motorhead album for many years. [Nov 2013, p.92]

An atmospheric yet strutting cocktail of dark romance, louche sax lines and bluesy grit. [Apr 2019, p.89]

They’re a light-footed prospect, made still more intriguing by Erika Wennerstrom’s curiously detached vocal.

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

Carlene Carter duets on five of the 13 songs, notably What Kind Of Man Am I (sung by Sheryl Crow in Ghost Brothers...) and the light-hearted Sugar Hill Mountain (from Ithaca), while elsewhere Mellencamp shines alone--particularly on Sad Clowns (where his voice and lyric hurtles into Tom Waits territory) and All Night Talk Radio.

Lucero's honest, gritty Americana feels like a welcome dose of the real stuff. [Aug 2018, p.91]

Their fifth album, their first in just shy of a decade, is perhaps their most purely enjoyable, eschewing the furrow-browed genre-jumbling of earlier work. [Apr 2022, p.80]

The songs are deceptive, displaying a rare sense of craft and erudition. [Oct 2014, p.94]

Songs such as the rolling The Devil Is In Her Eyes and the carefully layered Isabel’s Daughter are the work of a group who have absorbed much of what’s great about rock’n’roll and turned it loose in the present.

It's a fine line between hypnotic and soporific, but he's usually on the right side. [Nov 2018, p.83]

They'll never completely escape the past, but it sounds like they're finally at ease with it. [Apr 2020, p.82]

Suitably weathered by age and experience, [Dion's voice] hardly gathered rust and has retained its lustrous power and soulful richness. Co-producer/multi-instrumentalist Wayne Hood wisely pins that voice to the centre of this fabulous record, with A-listers very much in supporting roles. [Summer 2020, p.86]

Exposes his long-standing flaws: lyrics with the depth and insight of an astrology column, and songwriting that flashes on brilliance. .... Tracks are redeemed, though, by some spectacularly muscular riffing from guitarist Liam Tyson. [Apr 2023, p.83]

A must for serious Velvet-heads. .... Something of a mixed bag. [Nov 2024, p.87]

Satirising the music industry itself as impressively as The Fall, The Sherlock Holmes... is classic Headcoats. [Dec 2025, p.77]

It's still awesome, of course, just don't expect to enjoy it. [May 2013, p.85]

It's built to be savoured, not rushed. [Sep 2014, p.94]

Sometimes, as on Domina, the mood is almost singalong, but much of the album, including the title track is sublime. [May 2013, p.84]

Fans will already know that this is a strong, alert Dave album, as Dave albums go. [Aug 2013, p.86]

It cuts and blazes and works well live in all its kinetic abandon but, if Shining really want to lay claim to a new genre, they need to integrate their progressive elements into the mix rather than add them as a side option.

72 Seasons isn't an easy listen; it demands work. ... Metallica's only concern is making the best Metallica album possible irrespective of what's going on around them. On that score, 72 Seasons is a ringing success. [May 2023, p.76]

The Charlatans of this 14th album have evolved into a far richer and more reflective band, as much concerned with inner as outer spaces. [Dec 2025, p.75]

Furious first single Cast The First Stone sets the pace for an album that’s utterly relentless in its intensity. There are the now-expected acoustic interludes so you can catch your breath here and there, but as face-melters like Wolf Named Crow and Forgive Me will attest to, this is Corrosion Of Conformity with their amps and their snarls turned up to 11. Thank Christ.

Plenty of pallid indie math-rock imitators--from Godspeed! downwards--have attempted to do what Boris do here, and all have failed. Boris abide.

Swampy southern sounds are their stock-in-trade but it’s a soulful brew with all the authentic trappings you’d expect of a recording from Woodland Studios, Nashville.

Marlowe’s Revenge proves that his creative well is far from dry.

The punk energy remains, frontman Davy Havok’s vocal delivery dripping with drama and passion, but with a glorious, gilded production job from guitarist Jade Puget, AFI (The Blood Album) luxuriates in a velvety richness that makes it a sumptuous listen.

Sacred picks up where they left off with 1994’s The Church Within, ramping up the grinding riffs and Wino’s tortured Ozzy-esque wail.

There’s little ground they haven’t covered before, whether that’s the old school Steve Harris gallop of The Seductiveness Of Decay or the choral interlude of Achingly Beautiful, but no one does it quite like them.

This third album finds the Los Angeleans aided and abetted once more by the late Neal Casal to transformative effect. [Nov 2019, p.85]

Dream Nails are the 21st-century Mambo Taxi. Who? Exactly. [May 2020, p.83]

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]

The title and lyrics may scream apocalyptic gloom - Living is Killing Us, Doomscrolling, Born Again Pessimist - but there is an increasingly bright, infectious, power-glam polish to the band's sound. [Dec 2022, p.74]

Sublime harmonies rule on You Don't Have TO Cry and The Lee Shor, both featuring guest Daid Crosby. But once the Memphis horns kick in during the show's second half, Stills seems to be fighting for pace, resulting in an overwrought For What It's Worth and Bluebird Revisited. [Jul 2023, p.92]

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]

A charming history emerges from Young's immerse archive. [Apr 2025, p.70]

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

Hynde may not win over many new converts with this old-school collection, but the rich soil of classic Americana is a fine place for one of our greatest rock voices to find fresh inspiration.

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

There is a desperation here, a helpless wonder and dread that lifts Pond above their alt.pop and psych-trance peers. [Apr 2019, p.87]

Unique and, indeed, endlessly fantastic, this album is the work of a man committed to his own vision, both for his music and for the troubled and broken world around him.

While the album still has the overall feel of being in a flotation tank while listening to Gerry Rafferty, James experiments beyond his tendency to jaw off occasionally into psych jazz interludes, tackling dark future fink on Magic Bullet and Godspell gospel blues on Wasted. [Sep 2020, p.89]

1976’s Presence was both the nearest Zeppelin ever got to recreating their live power in a studio setting, and the album that bears closest inspection and repeated listening when the familiarity of earlier high spots has been exhausted.

Play The Goddamned Part sounds like an annihilated sci-fi war zone haunted by the ghosts of nightclubs and patrolled by warbots constructed from the shrapnel of jazz saxophones. The more ambient I’m Not From This World feels like sticking your head into an alien death race’s knackered fusion drive and getting a face full of proton beam. Elsewhere, remnants of rock’n’roll survive the sonic desecration. ... It all reflects the corrosion of the millennial age, personal, political and ecological.

Frontman Stu Mackenzie nails a Hetfield-esque gurgle from the galloping, squiddle-spattered opener Planet B, and it’s hard to resist the rat-a-tat riff and stuttering vocal of Self-immolate or the insistent turbo-Sabbath churn of Mars For The Rich.

To The Bone is arguably his best and most complete solo album yet.

This knuckle-biting howler ["The Season's Upon Us"] aside, SASIB raises the roof with good vibes and memorable songs. [Mar 2013, p.96]

Cohesive, diverse and swollen with hidden depths. [Jul 2020, p.88]

Supple but robust at 50, Bowie's power glows undimmed. [Jul 2020, p.93]

A collection created purely for dancing to, a millennial disco that leaves the troubles of the world outside its spiky bubble. [Apr 2022, p.86]

With a golden voice at work, this is luscious sunshine-filled Californian rock with storm clouds on the horizons. [Oct 2014, p.91]

Once the album stops yelling and stamping for attention, the strong suits of this outfit come through, and dark, sinister atmospheres trademarked by Depeche Mode and The Banshees are allowed to thrive. [Jul 2021, p.81]

A droll, tender-hearted and richly rewarding album.

The London post-punkers keep the pigeonholing hack on their toes throughout this third album. [Apr 2019, p.85]

Encapsulates shoegaze, garage, grunge, self-analytical Gen Z catharsis and off-the-leash, anything-goes, fourth-album-itch experimentation, yet still retains its key pop core. [Nov 2023, p.81]

A carefree antidote to worrying times. [Summer 2018, p.91]

Hynde's fire is undimmed as she tackles love's drug-like addiction, tears up a roughshod storm on the rockers and delves into surf-guitar reggae on Lightning Man. [Jun 2020, p.88]

Neither a work of nostalgia nor a move away from the blueprint that made them so special in the first place, this album demonstrates that artistic quality cannot be confined to a specific place in time.

There’s much to enjoy about Pylon, not least on the punitive, jet-black musical side of things.

Not essential, then, but well worth a peek through the window. [Nov 2019, p.84]

Home In Another Life may have sadness running through it, but it's also very cool indeed. [Sep 2024, p.69]