A surprisingly vibrant, bright-side kind of album it is too. [Sep 2025, p.78]

Free is easily Iggy's most ambitiously left-field album since Zombie Birdhouse in 1982. [Oct 2019, p.90]

McCauley strains a little too hard for unpolished authenticity over originality, but he still hits the emotional bullseye half the time. [Oct 2013, p.86]

The music on Dove finds a band not only reinvigorated, but also taking enormous pleasure in its activities. [Jun 2018, p.91]

Some nifty tricks - mashing their own Lonely In Your Nightmare into Rick James's Super Freak, for example - but not enough treat. [Dec 2023, p.74]

[Producer Glyn Johns] has given this album a shape and purpose, bringing out the full range of Clapton’s guitar tones. Recording the album on analogue equipment probably helped too.

On third album Double Vanity it seems the wide-open spaces of their Oklahoma home have inspired something rather beautiful to zone out to.

Steadily onwards through a flawless second side worth of classic, never-more-accessible Libertines in excelsis, before Songs They Never Play On The Radio causally encapsulates everything The Libertines were and, thankfully, still very much are. [Apr 2024, p.79]

There are echoes here of The Fall in their Brix-era imperial phase, a clobbering garage-rock physicality spiked with dry wit and subversively sweet melody.

This is the first time she has really let go and experimented, and she's pulled it off with aplomb. [Jul 2014, p.97]

Tasty, raunchy and mind-expanding stuff. [Jul 2022, p.82]

An incendiary cocktail of muscular grooves, designed to delight and thrill the metallic faithful. [Aug 2013, p.88]

Detroit Stories is his most concise bolt of precision-tooled heavy rock in 50 years, enhanced by Ezrin’s robust production and Alice on lethal form, vocally and lyric-wise.

There’s a charming vulnerability to it all, and although they still amp up the rock when necessary – a riff at the heart of Brambles is fittingly prickly – Dark Rainbows is a brooding, subtle, ballad-stuffed affair from a band that refuses to be hemmed in by their own history. [Apr 2024, p.76]

Continues to make some of the sweetest and most self-assured AOR-inflected power-pop going. [Aug 2021, p.82]

Turn It On! is the rock'n'roll equivalent of a dazzling ray of sunshine. [May 2022, p.84]

Eric Burdon's flame still burns brighter than that of most bands half his age. [May 2013, p.91]

For all of its freshness, there are clear influences at play here, most notably The Banshees or Yeah Yeah Yeahs. [Summer 2013, p.95]

They ramp up the melodicism and play with all the gusto of musicians who have been separated for far too long.

The vibe remains constant and satisfying. [Oct 2013, p.86]

Excellent, noisy stuff. [Jul 2013, p.87]

Always Ascending is a class act, polished, honed, several cuts above the mewling herd. New guitarist or not, Franz Ferdinand abide.

Red Fang might not take themselves too seriously, but thankfully Arrows rocks pleasingly hard indeed.

Unatoned isn't the best Machine Head alum, but it's a top-tier one for sure. [Jun 2025, p.75]

This album drops its bombs with honed precision, the band's experience evident as both the key musical genres - loud and quiet - are deployed with scorching smarts. [Nov 2024, p.77]

What The World Needs Now... continues where 2012’s This Is PiL left off.

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.

She's at her best and most fiery in default-setting rock-chick mode. [Dec 2019, p.81]

The engrossing full-album reprise Forever Now gives an insight into frontman Billie Joe Armstrong’s booze and pills-induced 2012 meltdown, but otherwise Revolution Radio is more melodic air-punching about guns, gas and the American nightmare. File under: Ain’t Broke.

The funk is solid in this one.

Throughout, Morrison makes old songs sound new and brings the enthusiasm of a teenager to an old man’s record. [Dec 2023, p.78]

This is bigger, bolder, and better in every respect. [Mar 2014, p.97]

No, 13 isn't as good as their first six albums--what is?--but it's a million times better than most of what followed. [Summer 2013, p.86]

Almost every song plods along for six minutes or more. It’s punishing. The beauty of middleaged Overkill is that they weren’t middle-aged Metallica. Sigh.

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

Maintains In//Parallel's intrinsic style and pan-genre forward momentum, a seamless, pop-literate/prog-friendly fusion positively peppered with an abundance of barbed hooks. [Dec 2023, p.74]

Yes aging is difficult but Elton and Bernie seem to be making a good job of it. [Oct 2013, p.91]

Ultimately, there's little on offer to snare a neutral. For the zealot, however, new heights of melody and assurance await. [Sep 2014, p.93]

Right now, though, they’ve rediscovered themselves, and there’s no reason why a new audience can’t discover them.

The melodies are sweet and the lyrics still bear his adult-child cartoon whimsy, but there's a dark optimism beneath it all. [Dec 2020, p.81]

Chuck is Berry’s last inimitable flare, delivered in the nick of time.

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

This factory runs on goodwill. In less cataclysmic times the exercise might be mawkish, and while a cover of Lean On Me is well-meant it feels a little like eating too much cake icing.

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]

Manson’s nihilistic take on 2017 is interwoven with glimpses of personal darkness, wrapped up in mutually constrictive and damaging relationships on epic dirge Blood Honey and the closing Threats Of Romance, ordering a partner to do his murderous bidding on the Muse disco blues Kill4Me, and mourning the loss of his father on the seven-minute centrepiece Saturnalia. But even here there’s a renewed crackle to Manson’s attack--a viper regaining its bite.

These are not so much conventional songs but something much looser and akin to sun-parched jams.

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

There’s plenty here to keep their hard-core fans transfixed until the Jonestowners return with the next full albumy walbum.

Revisits Gotham-based hits and Lou's timeless Wild Side. [Jun 2020, p.89]

They've mastered the marriage of swagger and sensitivity, guts and grace. [Mar 2023, p.76]

While a valuable document for nostalgic attendees, is, unsurprisingly, a hit-and-miss affair. [Summer 2023, p.74]

The sound of a very classy singer, and her smokin' band, having a fabulous time. [Aug 2014, p. 209]

A measured, but unwaveringly honest, portrait of middle age with all its elation and tribulations. [Aug 2020, p.82]

It takes a few listens to hook in its claws, but when it does they're fixed forever. [Feb 2015, p.98]

It may not quite give you the sheer electric shock jolt of their classic Meantime and Betty albums, but Helmet are still capable of bloodying your nose from 100 paces.

It's a record modernised, ironically, by its more timeless moments. .... The Mysterines deepen. [Jul 2024, p.78]

The Chilis are back together, having fun. And it feels good. [May 2022, p.80]

Past Lives is a wilfully uncommercial record, made for the sheer love of the tight-knit scene that spawned them. [Dec 2022, p.74]

Dream-folkies will be transported back to the gauzy early days of Genesis or the Byrds, indie heads will be transported back to the most powerful skunk spliff they ever smoked along to Pond, Grandaddy or Neutral Milk Hotel.

Some fans may miss the hobo simplicity of yore. [Summer 2013, p.92]

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

Echo is a lustrous cosmic echo of Walk On The Wild Side, while the Doorsy atmospherics and celestial hooks of Ninth Configuration and Question Of Faith shroud personal and religious soul-searching that suggest Wrong Creatures is actually a conversation with their younger, wronger selves. Certainly the dark carnival of Circus Bazooko and stirring postrock finale All Rise prove they’re tackling their crippling Psychocandy addiction, making Wrong Creatures something of a colourful rebirth.

That search for perfection, his own predilection, goes on, gorgeously lit by this. [Feb 2015, p.99]

While you may never be able to fully forget that Berry's tongue is in his cheek, the love, attention to detail and panache of Kill The Wolf make it a trip worth taking. [Summer 2013, p.95]

From tension-riddled songs like Two Places to the instrumental Outromistra (EM Forster with guitars), this is a confident and exciting high for the band, at a time when most bands of their era are looking for their reading glasses.

It’s all great if you’re willing to strap on some cowboy boots and hop on the nearest hayride, but hardcore rockers are gonna wanna sit this one out.

For its place in his canon, the 4 1⁄2 album is a relatively scant 37 minutes of sessions created around the recording of Hand..., and it’s easy to see where the songs might have fitted into the conceptual jigsaw of the original work.

[Rise] sounds like it’s been designed solely with American radio very much in mind. Things pick up quickly from there though, You Have Come To The Right Place, puts things very much back on track, wilfully over-the-top, a grand façade covering the band’s broken veneer.

Motorik psychedelia at its finest, The Lucid Dream have stepped up.

As with their nine albums before it, Get Rollin’ is crafted to satisfy their fan base rather than to pick up new but casual admirers. And they’ve succeeded completely. [Dec 2022, p.74]

This is the maturing of cute metal, and it's still nuts. [Apr 2023, p.76]

Johnny Cash starts with Johnny 99, the title track of his 1983 album released just a year after Springsteen's Nebraska, with his own distinctive drawl and guitar twang, demonstrating that the Boss's songs have all the necessary country ingredients. The more traditional Travis Tritt then employs an arsenal of cliches on Tougher Than The Rest. .... [Steve Earle] delivers a brooding, almost menacing live version of State Trooper. [Jul 2025, p.86]

He now sounds much calmer, serene even, on Shearwater's tenth, which floats where 2016's Jet Plane And Oxbow raged. This never means it's predictable. [Summer 2022, p.78]

Dense, rich and deeply rewarding.

Gloriously unpolished--and it feels very one-take--this is vintage American indie rock from experts in the field. [Oct 2013, p.90]

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

Kane's appeal remains in relishing the retro. [Mar 2022, p.80]

Some pretty satisfying final testaments, then, but you also get the impression that Kramer in particular spent his final years having more fun than most septuagenarians can reasonably expect. [Nov 2024, p.72]

Universe Room continues the indie-prog leanings of last year's Strut Of Kings, as though R.E.M were dipping into the less coherent corners of Tommy and Nursery Cryme, but across its 17 tracks finds time for plenty of lo-fi diversion too. [Apr 2025, p.72]

While Wayne, Lucid Nightmare and the 50s mirrorball romance of Crystal Night maintain the crisp retro spark of old, the rest of this somewhat inspired 55-minute mess smacks of the Fat Whites’ sticky-trousered narco-country.

Post-pop indie rock at its drabbest. [Jun 2020, p.89]

An elegant and accomplished treasure from experts in their field. [Jul 2022, p.80]

Inviting famous friends to help him give the songs a fresh coat of paint doesn't, for the most part, make any real impact. [Summer 2013, p.91]

They revisit a previous concept. ... Floating along on a wave of jazzy good vibes. [Nov 2022, p.75]

It's the album's embrace of retro-futurist video arcade electronica on The Doctor and Hooked, verging at times on a lascivious indie Prodigy, that keeps Franz Ferdinand surprising 20 years in. [Feb 2025, p.72]

This odd, understated record is both strange and affecting. [Feb 2014, p.94]

Thanks to Mark Lambert’s overly ostentatious and frequently intrusive production, Russell occasionally sounds lost within his own material.

The streak of familiarity that runs through the album is down to the way songwriters Wesley Schultz and Jeremiah Fraites construct their folk-pop melodies and arrangements, but they've given their sound a fresh impetus. [Apr 2025, p.70]

A gentle fleshing-out of tracks might’ve boosted it, but this is as close as the ever-youthful 74-year-old has yet come to doing an American Recordings. Autumnal, rather than valedictory.

Viewed as a whole, this set cements Harrison's reputation, not as a huge 60s phenomenon but as a human. [Nov 2014, p.104]

This is feeble stuff, more Benny Hill than Russell Brand. When they hit the target, The Darkness are untouchable, but too much of Pinewood Smile feels like a half-hearted wank when it should have been a mighty ear-shafting.

This record pumps Royal Blood forward without diluting their strengths. They might have to tweak something next time around, but by then they could well be the biggest young rock band in the world. Two boys making true noise. It’s in their veins.

Atmospheric to the hilt, you can almost smell the campfire. [Apr 2022, p.76]

These lost gems from the garage are given great care and attention by a band that clearly holds them close to their heart. [Aug 2021, p.80]

Pretty fine on record, this kinetic quartet sound like they would probably be explosively exciting live. [Aug 2020, p.87]

Walks For Motorists cascades, scalds, oozes ectoplasmically and revisits the rusting futures of rock past. [Jun 2015, p.92]

If there’s a disappointment about Genexus it’s that it only really delivers to hardened FF fans, that it’s essentially more of the same winning formula.

The weirdly comforting sound of an oddball genius proffering words of hope as the word burns all around us. [Summer 2025, p.78]