It all makes for an entrancing half hour. [Summer 20219, p.86]

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

This thirteenth album finds them starting to sound like a band who deserve the billing [at Alexandra Palace]. [Jun 2019, p.85]

More highly flammable melodic buzz-punk, now with added flecks of Stranglers atmospherics. [Oct 2021, p.72]

III mostly avoids the genre's penchant for endless navel gazing and just delivers the ear-shattering goods. [Dec 2020, p.83]

An intense, emotional soundscape rising gently from the chiming sun bath Sun Is A Hole Sun Is Vapors. [Dec 2024, p.74]

Singer Izzy Baxter Phillips brings a rich, seductive lustre to spacey nu-grunge songs of lust, addiction, sexual assault, neuro-divergence and emotional exhaustion. [Oct 2025, p.76]

Collection of coldly beautiful electronica. [Dec 2020, p.83]

Some of the lengthier behemoths among the seven tracks here, though, particularly the sprawling Flamethrower are a little overblown and tend to lose their way at times. Despite that, PetroDragonic Apocalypse is another worthy entry into King Gizzard's avalanche of ever-changing albums. [Summer 2023, p.77]

A Violent Femmes album is always a treat; witty, lucid, self-deprecating, beat-up but ever-reliable. ... Hotel Last Resort is all of that. [Aug 2019, p.95]

AmeriKKKant feels like a measured response to the times.

From the ‘na-na-na’s of Telegraph Avenue to the fist-in-the-air anthem Make It Out Alive and the arena-sized chorus of Farewell Lola Blue, this album is a solid reminder of what Rancid are capable of.

A fitting coda for one of rock's great outsider voices. [Jan 2026, p.80]

More of the same, then, but for bleak Scandinavian beauty, Katatonia are still hard to beat.

If you want progression, look elsewhere. Here is ‘just’ another routinely radiant TFC album.

Climaxes with a haunting 20-minute prog epic complete with a musique concrete middle section. It's by far the most powerful piece of music they've ever made. The rest of the album is a mixed bag. .... But it's the scattered highlights you'll remember. [Summer 2024, p.76]

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.

Serf's Up!'s sonic exploration heralds a more colourful new dawn for the Fat White Family. [Jun 2019, p.89]

The album is most revealing when Knopfler bares autobiographical teeth. [Jan 2019, p.87]

Overwhelmingly, Weller's songs are durable enough to bear their new setting. [Jan 2022, p.81]

The APD grooves, jazzes and lover's rocks, but only delivers total post-punk Apocalypse on Panzer Dub and Full Metal Dub. [Apr 2020, p.89]

An elegant set of sweeping rock anthems, not a rough edge to be found, and yet there' soul amid the aural perfection. [Jul 2021, p.85]

Crisp, strident, brutal. [Nov 2024, p.79]

Ringo has given us expertly produced and pensive meditations on the bigger pictures. [May 2021, p.87]

They’re not world beaters yet, but Starcrawler’s creepy appeal shouldn’t be underestimated.

As elegiac, brutally minimalist, silent and hymnal, disturbingly open and ultimately rewarding as before. [Oct 2021, p.77]

Three CDS of ace JA sides (Culture, Dillinger) and some plucky punky stabs at the genre (Clash, Ruts et al). [Aug 2024, p.83]

They lose their way when they amble in pub-rock fashion on the gormless Hard Case, but for the most part they’re as focused as they’re inspired.

Even when Fallon does resort to simply weeping into the sawdust – You Have Stolen My Heart and When You’re Ready – it’s over the sort of gorgeous and poignant love letters to his family that make homeliness feel close to Godliness. Such saccharine succour.

This Melbourne trio blaze undeniably with desperate Saints thuggery, causal swagger and an occasionally skronking No Wave sax. [Aug 2022, p.71]

An ambitious concept work based in the 15th century's Hundred Years War. [Nov 2019, p.85]

4 lovers of gloriously degraded punk pop. [May 2021, p.88]

The album concludes with Nicky Wire’s grainy lead vocal on The Left Behind, a charmingly offbeat detour into 1980s indie-rock. More of these eccentric tonal variations would have been welcome on an album that emerges as a solid exercise in arena-sized anthemics, majestic in parts but not a career peak.

Eat The Elephant gradually gains heft while staying intriguingly unpredictable.

Cutting their teeth in New York’s surviving venues, the quintet (first signings to Daptone’s new Wick offshoot) arrive like a most welcome anachronism.

"No Hope", "Everybody Dies" and "Care Less" all sound like phrases scratched on a teenager's notebooks, but The majesty of their songwriting craft - imagine The Byrds if Evan Dando had sat in for the session - makes even the darkest of days feel like a new dawn. [Sep 2025, p.81]

For much of it they elect to look backwards, to formative times in their music story. [Jul 2022, p.82]

Wolf Parade sound alert, ready for a bruising. [Feb 2020, p.88]

The record oozes confidence and spunky attitude--a far cry from her more recent country records thanks to the partnership with past collaborators Jeff Trott and Tchad Blake.

His debut solo album edges away from Korn's clattering, downtuned noise. What is unexpected is just how far from the mothership he's travelled--and how good the result is. [Jun 2018, p.88]

A stunning stripped-to-the-bone reinvention. [Nov 2021, p.83]

Nobody will pretend this album is among the most inventive you’ll hear in 2015. But Buckcherry just wanna pump up the volume and get the groin shifting. And they do it well enough to put some zest in the tank.

They don't go for the jugular of the tune as rabidly as they once did, although Wu-tang, the French-language Je N'en Ai Pas and several galloping new-wave track certainly do the business. [Jun 2026, p.77]

Friar Tuck is a humorous and bewildered look at the modern world from a man who has never quite seemed a part of it. [Feb 2025, p.75]

Two or three weaker numbers drag quality levels down, but Pollinator contains enough vintage Blondie spirit to get the old juices flowing again.

Moore, along with My Bloody Valentine’s Deb Goodge (bass) and guitarist James Sedwards (Chrome Hoof) and the aforementioned Shelley, is displaying a fine linear growth with Rock N Roll Consciousness.

Cerebral and discomforting. [Aug 2020, p.89]

Sweet, potent vignettes of American folk storytelling. [Jun 2019, p.89]

There’s a warm, fuzzy familiarity to Goatsnake’s doomy, bluesy sound, with Stahl’s stirring, soulful vocals always elevating these southern gothic rumbles above the mundane, not least on the striking and rather beautiful seven-minute closer A Killing Blues.

Rich in reference to Greek mythology, teeming with restless spirits in various stages of rapture and sorrow. All this might suggest heaviness, but the music is unfailingly rhythmic and melodic, often sophisticated. [Apr 2026, p.79]

Uncompromisingly creative, it's an album designed with the absence of neighbours in mind. [Jun 2019, p.87]

Albatross is a step up, sailing closer to the crunch and proggy intelligence of their 1997 debut, with songs that manage to be both smart and visceral. [May 2013, p.91]

The Brighton metalcore band turn their attention both outwards and inwards: ferocious, barely contained rage directed towards global dysfunction and the looming, ever-increasing threats to mankind and the notion of personal responsibility, taking control of destiny. [Apr 2021, p.86]

Predictable as this dynamic may be, EITS are never ponderous, never less than beautiful. [Oct 2023, p.84]

Taken as a whole, it’s a pretty patchwork affair, but so are all Alice Cooper albums, even the great ones. And while this isn’t one of the great ones, it also doesn’t sound like the work of a washed-up has-been who’s out of time and ideas.

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

Easily the best since their debut, but there's still a way to go before they produce an LP as fine as that again. [Oct 2023, p.87]

There's a lot to enjoy here, the constant changes in mood keeping you guessing, but because it's so dense and so very long it becomes a bit of an endurance test. [Sep 2022, p.77]

A stylish lo-fi gumbo of grunge, punk and indie. [May 2019, p.89]

As a set of songs it works fine. [May 2015, p.105]

settle back, we'll be here a while. [Jan 2022, p.85]

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.

Cable Ties are invariably at their best when teetering on the very brink. [Summer 2023, p.79]

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.

It's an album that rewards repeated immersion within its layers of acoustic guitar, questing strings and Mellotron. [Oct 2023, p.87]

It makes for a lustrous, laid-back return that will frustrate those pining for Costello's brutal youth, but it befits his gracious age beautifully. [Oct 2018, p.85]

The Boston boozers’ tenth album is a triple shot of euphoria with a Guinness chaser.

It's a joy to discover that not only is he refusing to mellow with age, but also the output from this trio is so heavy. [Apr 2015, p.95]

It's an incredibly busy, dense record, with few moments to come up for air from the maelstrom. [Nov 2021, p.73]

They can still craft the odd pop-rock banger. [Jul 2023, p.87]

Borrell tiptoes his trademark line between the wry and the ridiculous. U Can Call Me is a slice of Bowie-esque sass pop about how much he hates cocaine, Empire Service a slab of buzzsaw rock that argues with itself about what is and is not the ocean. [Nov 2024, p.76]

Lightning Bolt could do with a bit more of that hot-wired sound. But its brutally hard-won optimism is satisfying enough. [Nov 2013, p.88]

It's a slow-burn of an album, sounding more layered with each listen, the strain of a pedal steel woven into the fabric of the songs. [Oct 2021, p.79]

They approach this fourth album with typical irreverence. [Jan 2019, p.89]

The band venture away from their own back yard for the first time, recording this new album in El Paso. It results in a pleasingly broader palette, from the redneck power pop of Sandlot, to the melodic and bouncy Madness-like closer We’ll Meet Again.

He might be a slippery customer, but his music couldn’t be more reliable.

Skunk Anansie find their groove in the album’s latter half with arena-sized anthems like Bullets, a gnarly funk-rock bruiser which erupts into a landslide of guitars and voices.

Decidedly queasy listening throughout. [Apr 2015, p.98]

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

Add one of 2015’s swooniest ballads in Trouble and you’ve got an album that’s not exactly pretty, but is definitely a keeper.

If this is the last resurrected Hendrix studio material the world will see, then it’s a creditable send-off, yet we doubt it’s the last gasp it occasionally resembles.

A couple of other unremarkable tracks leave this album just short of being a stunner, but for the most part Blackberry Smoke have done Georgia proud once again. [Jul 2021, p.80]

His vocal range and tone might now haunt the hinterlands often visited by Tom Waits and Bob Dylan, but the rasp from those hard-lived years adds a wonderful lustre to the songs and subjects he’s addressing and the things he’s chosen to write about now. [Jul 2023, p.82]

Glossy arrangements sometimes owe more to Foreigner than to Focus, but this is a prog affair. [Mar 2014, p.100]

Still scuzzy, still weird, long may Jon Spencer walk his own unique path. [Nov 2018, p.82]

Stripped of the sonic chaos of Mastodon and ATD-I, the rhythm section are free to just let go and pummel, proving a perfect foil for Sanders’ caveman roar. Meanwhile, the frequent quieter, more considered moments, such as the creeping, ghostly Dublin, have an underlying sense of spaced-out dread.

It's Biffy Clyro producer Dan Austin, who adds lustre to YMAS's lonely bones. [Apr 2021, p.89]

Historically priceless, but intrinsically one for the fans. [May 2019, p.94]

God knows what genre it is, but Fairytale Codex is an arty trip into the unknown well worth making. [Summer 2025, p.77]

Couldn’t Love You More begins like Blackbird and has McCartneyish vocals, with Ringo on drums. Rock guitar royalty includes Brian May on Floating In Heaven, Hank Marvin on When You Find Love, and Albert Lee pops up on an Everlys-inspired number. [Summer 2024, p.73]

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.

Nothing is rushed, nothing hasty, very little upbeat - as befits a band with such a rep for beautiful misery. [Summer 2025, p.76]

It’s mood music for people who have not been taking their prescriptions (all of us, I reckon), and it’s full of bruised beauty.

Across 70 minutes, the band return in their heavier style. [Jul 2022, p.80]

Resist is more an evolution than a revolution in the band's sound, which tightens up and augments everything that was great about 2014's Hydra. [Feb 2019, p.91]

Thematically it’s a steady path, although musically Dream Into It is fairly erratic and offers quite a disjointed listening experience as it jumps from style to style. [Jun 2025, p.70]

Gabbard played all the instruments himself, which is admirable but limiting. He needs a band to break up the somewhat metronomic feel. And a producer who can bring a radio-friendly flourish. [Jan 2025, p.82]

On Fear Of The Dawn his foot spends plenty of time flat on the fuzz pedal. [Jul 2022, p.80]