Accessibly challenging, this isn't Moore's very best day, but it's up there. [Nov 2014, p.95]

The Menzingers deliver an energetic strain of melodic rock and bare their souls on aging, alcohol and angst. [Dec 2019, p.85]

Gravity Stairs is not an easy listen, but it is worth sticking with. [Jul 2024, p.76]

Love Triangles Hate Squares is a forceful blast of passion-fired pastiche, but never quite escapes feeling like a cheap holiday in other people's history. [May 2013, p.87]

A curious curt selection with no obvious crowd-pleasers, but doubtless KC fans will rise to the challenge. [May 2015, p.107]

Despite the inclusion of unreleased material and early versions of Crime In The City and Ordinary People, there’s little here to entice anyone but the hardcore fan.

It’s well-meant but well-trodden, rarely exciting ground.

The guitar tones and drum sounds are worthy of a review in themselves, micro-nuanced even within a track, and set in a 3D space that both breathes and is right up in your face at the same time.

Everyone has done their bit to honour the music and the man. The result is a record that hums with excitement and does Miller proud.

A loose concept album that charts the lows, highs and subsequent recovery of its protagonist, sonically it’s punchier, angrier even, than previous records.

Almost comically explosive and full of exhilarating moments. [Nov 2018, p.81]

Grounded by explorations into dark electronica and swathes of cascading guitars. ... A coherent journey. [Mar 2020, p.88]

Taylor hasn’t reinvented the wheel here, but he has reinvented himself.

The best thing about Royal Tea is that every track could easily drop into Bonamassa’s live show – which is more than you can say for Redemption. Back on track in every sense.

Not just faster, but harder, too. ... Best of the lot is Loud. [Nov 2021, p.75]

Musically Caravan excel on the thick space-jam soup of Wishing You Were Here. [Nov 2021, p.76]

Guitarist Dan Hyndman's Marmite vocal could be a stylisation too far, but there's plenty else t love on this assured third album. [Summer 2022, p.79]

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]

Sharp, bright, brilliant. [Summer 2023, p.79]

This is a cavalcade of curiosities, a den of delight, a whole other world where grunge stayed open-hearted and open to misinterpretation. [Aug 2023, p.75]

This compelling tenth from the weary-voiced Texan finds him in deeply reflective mode. [Aug 2025, p.77]

That it's as listenable as it is intelligent sweetens the deal. [Sep 2025, p.80]

The duo's genre-mashing tracks remain reliably omnivorous an exhilarating. [Sep 2025, p.79

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

Dream Nails are evolving with grace and wit, trading the splenetic feminist rants of their early career for more musically and emotionally nuanced terrain. [Mar 2026, p.81]

Much of it's lovely, from the relaxed, melodic strumalong title track to ... well, the relaxed strumalong of just about everything else. It's the kind of album that makes you think there's nothing wrong with the world. [Dec 2018, p.84]

Actually, You Can is business as usual, which translates into a 'gloriously unusual racket'. [Jan 2022, p.83]

It’s all smart stuff, but presented with tunes that hook into your brain. They’ve lost none of their spark in the 34 years since their debut, and have the edge on bands half their age.

Death Song (their first album in four years and one whose title neatly appends their name to the VU classic that first inspired them) is their heaviest to date, a toxic draught of garage-rock and booming psychedelia that buzzes with echo and reverb.

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.

The New Abnormal is less new big bang, more engrossing sizzle. [May 2020, p.76]

Despite its nonlinear creation, the album is one of their tightest and most consistent in years. [Sep 2019, p.83]

An unlikely masterpiece. [Apr 2021, p.89]

Rock Or Bust is actually a very lean piece of work. [Jan 2015, p.114]

Love Chant is a wonderful and surprisingly vital return to the fray. [Nov 2025, p,75]

[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]

He's dancing to the beat of his own drum, and it's hard not to want to join him. [Jul 2018, p.86]

Social Cues feels like the sound of a great band in desperate need of some down time. [Jun 2019, p.88]

The Mule's taste and experience largely wins the day. [Oct 2013, p.87]

Cartoony, authentic, moving and daft, and the true heirs to the Ramones, Shonen Knife are just great.

Anyone who spends their weekends lurking in the more pungent corners of sci-fi/horror/comic-book shops will lap it up; for everyone else it's less Star Wars, more Space Balls. [Oct 2018, p.85]

Earns its place. [Jul 2023, p.87]

Idlewild remain as dependable as ever. [Nov 2025, p.78]

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

Strip away all the sumptuous studio texture and these lyrics--about savage love, violence and revolution--are sodden with adolescent gothpunk cliché. But this scarcely matters when the future arena anthems Magnetized and We Never Tell hit their stride: lusty, energised and refreshingly shallow.

Too much of Big Music seems to be reaching for a gravitas it can't back up with emotional or musical substance. [Dec 2014, p.104]

It's a perfect kind of insanity, and it gets the old adrenalin pumping nicely. [Summer 2014, p.91]

The post-hardcore foundations are here, complete with drama-fuelled, singalong choruses, but what The Used have built upon them opens up a new world of creative opportunities for them.

An album balanced precariously at the tipping point between disillusion and creative rebirth, and all the better for it. [May 2019, p.88]

There’s nothing novel or exciting here, but at least they seem to be having a ball.

Plentiful showstopping melodies and an authentic dedication to their influences--Todd Rundgren even plays Shane's dad--will see Go To School run and run. [Oct 2018, p.86]

The result is a direct, delicious assortment. [May 2015, p.104]

The first half of the album is a collection of unfiltered, no-frills hardcore. ... A pitch shift in the middle demonstrates just how much more there is going on here. [Sep 2021, p.77]

He barrels unrepentantly into a sixth Gogol Bordello album that once again sounds like the traditional house band in Urals bear-meat restaurant going berserk on Green Day covers. [Aug 2013, p.85]

This alt.bluegrass band remain in a field of their own, dragging old-times instrumentation into fresh relevance.

When You Found Me combines top-notch musicianship and expert songcraft with bags of brooding atmosphere, with Lucero clearly at the top of their southern-rocking game.

It's all as disorientating and scary and unwholesome and - near unbelievably - heavy as fuck as you'd expect. [Nov 2021, p.74]

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]

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

In other hands, this would make for a frustrating listen, but there's a melodic warmth to mainman Stu Mackenzie's cosmic musings. [Jan 2015, p.120]

It's hard to resist. [Apr 2015, p.99]

Pe'ahi sounds like their strongest gallery of timeless anthems so far. [Aug 2014, p. 204]

It may all be a little too polished and tasteful for some palates, but for others this is 15 togs of pure aural comfort to wrap yourself in.

Cronin's produced an engaging gem. [Nov 2019, p.85]

The Afterman: Descension is both a thoughtful and thought-provoking album, and one that works on several levels. [Feb 2013, p.94]

By returning to their sonic roots, The Black Keys sound revitalised, urgent and gloriously unrefined once again. [Jun 2026, p.72]

Destroyer may shake and shudder but it never falls apart. [Jul 2019, p.81]

The pair celebrate the (literal) tracks that made America, but also lament the railroad’s decline with tenderness on Jean Ritchie’s The L&N Don’t Stop Here Anymore.

It's an insider's wink, an unchallenging throwback to a more challenging time. [Apr 2015, p.100]

A torrid tumble of greatness. [Summer 2020, p.89]

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

Concise, clever and at war with everything from alienation to greed and loss, it's a rallying cry in a world that's lost its voice. [Mar 2013, p.97]

A 70s classic rock party, then, but one with a few new guests.

Needless to say, this is irresistible stuff that demands to be listened to while twerking in a 70s style (Steve Priest pout on your face; mock-surprise eyes à la the disgraced Gary Glitter).

Raw, explosive and edgy. [May 2020, p.83]

A meaty, starry affair.

This is a very good album. There might be darkness outside, but the barn is lit up by the old men playing country and rock inside. [Jan 2022, p.82]

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

Wordy, evocative, Pete's absinthe-flavoured fantasy Life fits its cliched template extraordinarily well. [May 2022, p.87]

It's instantly accessible. [Jun 2022, p.78]

Compulsive melodic momentum is the band's blood, but Hammond's experimental leanings keep it rich, surprising and deeply rewarding. [Summer 2023, p.74]

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]

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]

This overdue follow up to debut What Is? proves that years of touring a live show described as an "aural orgasm" hasn't blunted their sense of humour. [Sep 2013, p.92]

As first albums go, Honora is a risky play, but it's one that just about manages to pay off. [May 2026, p.75]

A gentle watercolour portrait of the artist as a young man.

Atmospheric, cinematic, dramatic, evocative. [Summer 2019, p.87]

We get charismatic wagon wheels of delta stomp’n’roll, conjuring images of high-class horror scenes in rugged Westerns.

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

Tracks on Luminal such as Hopelessly At Ease are almost unsettling seductive, while Wolfe's every sung syllable on Shhh looms large and expansive. [Summer 2025, p.76]

Goat have built a minor cult around their progressive, globe-straddling psychedelic world music, and this third album will only lengthen the Kool-Aid queue.

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]

Produced by Deap Vally and Yeah Yeah Yeah’s guitarist Nick Zinner, Femjism drags the band forward into a brave new future while keeping their mean, sexy, muscle-bound rock’n’roll snarl fully intact. A real blazer.

They manage to skillfully maintain the the same semblance of being perennially on the verge of collapsing in a heap of broken guitar strings, trashed drum kit and feedback, while retaining the visceral gut-punch of the tightest, heaviest metal badasses. [Jul 2014, p.95]

Powerful and thought-provoking, if depressing, The Future Bites ultimately asks you to take a good hard look at what the hell you’re doing with your life.

The band's heart-grabbing riff hooks found on Into The Blue and sultry Siouxsie Farrago are in short supply, but as closer Left Too Soon grows from astral acoustic ballad to customary cataclysm, there's no let-up in their seductive assault. [Nov 2021, p.70]

For all its psychedelic abstraction, King's Mouth is often melodic and warmly accessible. [Aug 2019, p.80]

It's every bit as sprawling and dramatic as you'd expect from something set to be followed by a four-part comic book expanding on the story within the songs. [May 2013, p.86]