Tasteful and eloquent. ... minus the killer tunes. [Nov 2018, p.85]

Like their 60s albums, it’s a hodgepodge of self-penned songs and songs written by others, with a few vintage rave-ups thrown into the mix--‘mix’ being the operative word for this patchy affair.

King monkey contemplates his navel. [Apr 2019, p.89]

This slick trio from Dripping Springs, Texas add cloying twang to yacht-rock tropes to asset-stripping effect. [Sep 2019, p.87]

This House Is Not For Sale is no masterpiece, and while the punchy title track sonically nods to their heyday, most of it is made up of by-numbers pop.

[The Fratellis] still lack an identity beyond the decent Glaswegian doggedness that has got them this far.

There’s no pretense of indie cool here. Drive Me Wild features a blaring sax for an 80s viewed through a prism of nostalgia for a decade they never knew, and a towering, phones-in-the-air chorus, while ballad Cry ups the overblown ante even further.

If you’re a fan of the more raucous, high-octane twang-stompers this band are best known for, you might find this a strangely sedate, mid-tempo affair.

Longtime fans of the band's intense, neck vein-popping hardcore rock'n'roll have to hunt and peck their way through this album to find the good stuff. [Jun 2019, p.89]

Padded out with uneven live albums, indifferent remixes and anodyne film soundtrack songs, this 120-track package makes for depressingly arid listening in places. That said, no anthology that includes the heart-soaring Absolute Beginners or the high-gloss Let’s Dance can be considered a total wash-out.

The results sound thin, contrived and ultimately laborious. [Aug 2020, p.89]

Quiet Town and Runaway Horses exhibit tender lyrical themes, and there's brief respite in the dreamy haze of Sleepwalker and Pressure Machine. However, nostalgia and the shattering of childhood idylls reoccur through In the Car Outside and In Another Life. [Oct 2021, p.78]

An album full of lo-fi pop-tinged melodies sugarcoating a bitter centre. [Summer 2021, p.86]

There's little subtlety displayed in their mission, and not much in the way of memorable tunes either. [Sep 2018, p.90]

The nagging sense remains that way too much effort has been put into reinterpreting other artists’ material instead of writing their own. [Nov 2024, p.76]

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.

The drunken waltz of Bad Reputation offers a few minutes of interest, but the album fails to adequately raise the temperature. [Nov 2025, p.81]

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

Strange Fruit is a nervy choice, respectfully done. Like most of the record, it's also pretty redundant. [Summer 2013, p.92]

A haunted, husky-voiced cover of the Lennon/McCartney classic And I Love Her is another highlight, invoking the naked beauty of Nirvana’s 1993 Unplugged session. But these are rare meaty morsels in a musical slop bucket of scraps. At best, Montage Of Heck is an ideal Christmas present for the most undemanding of Cobain completists. At worst, a barrel-scraping cash-in that demeans his legacy.

Dud tracks are unfortunate, as Come Ahead does contain some pretty decent music when everyone involved puts their minds to it. But even the album’s title - an old Glasgow colloquialism that basically translates as ‘Yes, I would like to fight you’ – fails to measure up to its intent as a triumphant comeback. Primal Scream: don’t remember them this way. [Nov 2024, p.74]

A rather predictable record. [May 2015, p.107]

'Zingers exhibit a whole lotta heart. But sometimes heart alone's not enough. [Dec 2023, p.79]

Meld[s] jangles, loops, fuzzes, plucks and floaty introspections. Heavy on shoe-gaze, light on Gallagher swagger. [Apr 2022, p.83]

A competently executed, if indulgent. [Jul 2019, p.85]

It's been effectively produced to death. A cold, clinical experience. [Oct 2022, p.77]

Bush are far from the abomination of media repute, but Black And White Rainbows won’t convert the long-term haters, and seems too torpid to mobilise a fresh generation of fans.

There awaits a winning collaboration between band and singer, but this isn't it. [Feb 2022, p.79]

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

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.

Ghost hammers Merseybeat into grotesque new shapes and closer Easily Misbled, an elegant mariachi acoustic noir, is a refreshing respite. But too much here is sub-Dinosaur Pile-Up slush, dredged, ironically, from Britrock’s bottom end.

There is the occasional flash of pop brilliance - notably desert-rock nugget Arabesque - but for non-fans Coldplay this dose of Everyday Life will be one they can easily do without. [Jan 2019, p.87]

At best, for a former superstar, returning to the creative fray, the record is mediocre. [Jul 2013, p.88]

Mayhem are restrained by an obsession with their past. [Jan 2020, p.85]

We’re All Somebody From Somewhere sounds like an album conceived as a therapy project, one in which all the interesting corners of Tyler’s persona have been neatly rounded off. There’s no pizazz, very little spirit, not much sparkle and no sex.

As mood music it’s a stunner, the perfect complement to a lost weekend plotting your next Ubermensch moves in a haze of opium. But you can’t dance to it, that much is for sure.

Plodding, overwrought gospel epics like Shine and Tempted are the order of the day, pale passionless shadows of the Mode’s mighty, desperate Condemnation.... Things improve on the starker latter half.

The songs are wrought elaborately enough.... Yet this album seems carefully calibrated not to disappoint the conservative fan.

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

A handful of tracks shoot for the anthemic uplift of vintage U2, but fall short. The only real left-field beauty here is Love Is All We Have Left, a token reminder of the Dublin quartet’s shimmering ambient avant-rock period.

Clapton's guitar work [is] sizzling and defiant where elsewhere it merely simmers. [May 2013, p.88]

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]

This is a set of unlistenable, wigged-out, repetitive, directionless grooves in the main, but we love ’em anyway.

Musically, it's so tried and tested it's almost frictionless. [Jul 2013, p.92]

Things take a kitschy turn for the sickly sweet. [Dec 2024, p.79]

Apologists will see it as a paranoic update of the doom-rock blueprint laid down by King Crimson and Amon Düül. Anyone else will be reaching for the paracetamol.

There’s a theme, numbered from 14; dramatic, cinematic, dark but (disappointingly) modern-dancey. 18 hits an ambient spot, though, and 20 is the big ole cosmic epic we really crave.

A dilution of creativity has occurred, and it makes for dull listening. [Aug 2014, p. 208]

They’re presented raw, ragged and (if you wanna believe the hype) completely unrehearsed. It’s kind of a mess, but that’s pretty much the point.

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]

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

Finds their former highs trapped behind glass, blurred and beclouded like the past year has been for all of us. [Jul 2021, p.86]

It begins promisingly, with weighty guitar and measured vocals, before losing the plot completely, descending into a kitchen sink of confusion and ending up sounding like an incomplete demo. [Jan 2014, p.112]

Intriguing stuff, but Stereophonics are incapable of shredding the trad rock rule book for an entire album. So the rest of Graffiti is pitched firmly in their beige rock comfort zone. [Apr 2013, p.93]

A sultry, smouldering, non-committal vocal meanders over bass-heavy backdrops. [Apr 2021, p.89]

What's missing from these pastiches is a sense of Walrus's own identity. [Jan 2020, p.88]

Produced by Youth, it’s a routeone volley of loud guitar riffs and peripatetic punk energy, railing at the establishment. It’s our world, they roar, and it’s on fire, so let’s not go gently.

A Brock-sung acoustic setting of We Took The Wrong Step Years Ago is a highlight, but the less said about how the massed saxes treat Down Through The Night the better. [Sep 2018, p.91]

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]

Kasabian's USP has always been a cocky straddling of indie rock and rave. It's a shame they pretty much discard it here. [Aug 2022, p.68]

For The Sake Of Bethel Woods confirmed that they are not the band they once were but A Bridge To Far flows directly on from there with many of the songs more theoretical in nature. [Dec 2025, p.78]

The title track about wanting to know more about your partner, is strong enough to rise above the clichés, but some others are not so fortunate. [Jun 2022, p.79]

It's mainly chirpy, dance-floor stuff. [Jul 2014, p.92]

A collection of songs so sugar-coated it should probably have been packaged with insulin. [Oct 2025, p.72]

Stockdale’s magpie career continues to show not an inkling of musical mutation. Let’s call it treadmill rock--one man putting a lot of effort into going absolutely nowhere.

The predictable impression of a rich man's plaything cast with superior company remains. [Aug 2013, p.84]

The lyrics are packed with so many trite clichés that you can’t help but wince, whether he’s wishing for world peace on Make Love Not War (which manages to make room for the Trump-supporting Love to thank the USA ‘and all the folks protecting us very day’), dredging up seafaring love metaphors on Too Cruel or fashioning sappy eco ballads like Only One Earth.

It would be exhausting to list all the crimes these two commit in the name of rock'n'roll on this record. ... Risible. [Sep 2022, p.75]

The worst thing is, for all the nauseating country-rock-lite choruses, this is agonisingly catchy. [Summer 2013, p.89]

The Kids Are coming (To Take You Down) is the one highlight of the album, a thundering radio anthem redolent of Cheap Trick. Its carefree joy is notably absent pretty much everywhere else. [Nov 2019, p.81]

At times recalling the impressive yet aimless psych squalls of early Verve, Ride or Tame Impala, and at others of Can trying to make sense of 1980s pop radio. [Aug 2018, p.91]

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

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]

The songs themselves are among Lennon's worst. .... This reissue comes in a box full of new mixes - several CDs or vinyl LPs of Raw Mixes, Ultimate mixes and Out-Takes, none of which add anything much other than a sense that one's ears have been syringed for no good reason. [Summer 2024, p.83]

The majority is syncopated lightweight pop, as if selected by algorithms for mass consumption. [Aug 2024, p.72]

Some reasonably good live music (Elephant’s Memory bring to Lennon’s music a bluesy heaviness that sometimes suits it and sometimes doesn’t), some intriguing demos (arguably the best material here, whether it be rare Lennon originals or decent rock’n’roll covers) and most of Some Time In New York City, an album that suffers from: a) being terrible, especially The Luck Of The Irish, a song that makes Ed Sheeran’s Galway Girl sound like The Chieftains), and b) the omission of its one great song, whose title means it has been excised from the album. One for the history buffs. [Nov 2025, p.84]

For all the loving homages to past recording techniques, they sound laboured and bored. [May 2013, p.84]

A great version of The Fugs' Carpe Diem aside, Everybody Loves Sausages feels like an in-joke that was never funny to begin with. [May 2013, p.87]

One of the most musically interesting things he's done in years. ... However, a bitter aftertaste lingers long after the final notes. [May 2020, p.79]

A classical version of a rock album only reveals how tonally conservative rock is (formally, Quadrophenia’s compositions would have sounded hidebound in the late 19th century), while at the same time revealing classical music’s inability to convey the electric volatility and the spine-tingling, physical frisson that’s unique to rock.

As it is, there’s a certain Wagnerian tweeness about the record, its changes predictable, it’s progressions too easily resolved, his tunings over-familiar. The whole thing feels like drinking several pints of spring water.

Snapshot consists largely of new material written to ape the 50s and 60s standards they've been covering live since puberty. And that's it's downfall. [Nov 2013, p.95]

As a compendium of rock styles, it’s hard to beat--maybe that’s what they mean by Little Victories. But it’s all quite characterless.

All flutes and bubbles, A Jammed Exit could be a Jethro Tull B-side, and only dedicated lovers of the eight-minute free-form scree solo need apply to Nervous Tech (Nah John), which is essentially Frank Zappa having a fit. Run for the exits.

Papa Roach's not entirely convincing attempt to music in on the action. [Feb 2019, p.88]

From the manically undistinguished soloing of The Tempter Push to the leaden progressions of Walk Alone, it is uniquely generic, extraordinarily ordinary.

As a trad dad pastiche it isn’t funny enough, and as a parallel career it’s a painful vanity project. Either way, avoid.

All the emo-rooted, posthardcore stylistic hallmarks are present and correct, embellished with a load of electronic arsing about on top, but the almost constant use of the same soaring ‘wo-ah’ pop hooks will soon have you wanting to hack your ears off with a pair of blunt scissors.

A disappointing mess. [Apr 2019, p.89]

Four 11-minute "Improvised modal drones." [Nov 2019, p.85]

A parade of beige pop numbers that even Taylor Swift would turn down for being too generic. [May 2013, 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]

Songs Of Innocence is stricken with lethargy, with a level of aspiration that extends as far as Coldplay and never explores further. [Nov 2014, p.93]

Maybe hilariously, considering the video-friendly drama being aimed at, First You Break It conjures images of Justin Bieber when he makes that inevitable nasty rock album, cavorting in a black puddle. [Summer 2013, p.89]

They’re aiming for a rockier sound--Walking The Wire has a guitar solo that could conceivably be influenced by U2 if you stick your head under a pillow before hitting play – but, as one listen to opener I Don’t Know Why amply demonstrates, it just comes off like Michael Bolton dad-dancing to Justin Timberlake at a family wedding. Pop deserves better. Rock deserves better. We all deserve better.

They’ve stripped away the guitars to the point where only trace elements remain. ... The whole thing makes Ed Sheeran sound like Extreme Noise Terror.