Guitarist Russell Lissack counters the intoxicating synthetics with some of his most powerful work yet. ... Elemental. [May 2022, p.80]

It gets a touch ploddy in the middle, but the motorik of Shanty and electric pulse of Chained To A Cloud channel sanguine sunshine. Thriving. [Oct 2023, p.85]

Only the plodding White Lightning and an unadventurous 20th century Boy drag, but they're easily outweighed by the new-wave buzz of Youth Quake and Parachute's godlike glam Beatles chorus. [May 2015, p.102]

They continue to show a maverick character of their own while sharing Parker’s ear for a heady, swirling prog-pop soundscape.

As you'd expect, musically they're full-tilt melodic punk rallying cries, with the warmth of Greg Graffin's vocals contrasting beautifully against Brett Gurewitz's barbed riffs to suggest there's still a chance for redemption if we stand up and fight. [Jun 2019, p.86]

A brilliantly put-together collection from one of popular music’s most important cities.

It's to Gill's credit that the band have retained their venom, spitting out terse rhythms and thick squirts of electronica. [Apr 2015, p.95]

This fine album could have been recorded at any time in the past 60 years, yet also could only have been recorded by this particular man at this particular stage of his career. [May 2015, p.107]

From Metal Box faves Public Image and Socialist to themes from Midnight Cowboy and Get Carter, it’s an utter cheek-tonguing joy from start to finish.

Punchy, confident debut. [Nov 2021, p.76]

Blood On The Tracks is rightly considered to be one of Dylan's masterpieces, and this exhaustive collection shows why. [Jan 2019, p.95]

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

Regardless of the personnel on it, this album sounds like the Stranglers: both nice and sleazy. [Sep 2021, p.81]

Repetitive chants and moments of unfettered melodic joy further bolster or confuse the situation, depending on your mindset. [Jun 2013, p.93]

There's a sort of crazy idealism to their music which brings them tantalizingly close to such sources, while becoming increasingly indomitably themselves. [Apr 2019, p.84]

Marred only slightly by a couple of scrappy tunes, the album feels like a life-affirming reminder of anarchist Emma Goldman's celebrated maxim that the only worthwhile revolution is one you can dance to. [Apr 2015, p.96]

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.

Coathangers drives home the prevailing sense of compositional attitude meeting musical affirmation. Bravo! [Nov 2013, p.88]

Their interactions will turn understatement into seductiveness, as Paul Banks's voice and Daniel Kessler's guitars weave sorrow and hope through the shuffling Toni, the keening Fables, and Passenger, which feels like a sequel to their classic NYC. [Summer 2022, p.74]

Watford's finest are still very much the real deal. [May 2015, p.103]

A glorious return to form for one of the world's most peculiarly successful bands. [Jun 2013, p.92]

On this fifth album they do sound like a country band who like to rock sometimes, rather than southern rockers who do country, but their versatility makes such distinctions academic.

Springsteen On Broadway is best when he tackles his fractured relationship with his father, whose boozy presence he credits with forging his tenacity, and by extension that of his own children, his sisters and his mother (“with Alzheimer’s these past seven years”) to whom he’s gloriously devoted. ... Equal parts communion and catharsis--an immaculate deception. [Jan 2019, p.86]

It’s the nearest Strummer has had to a ‘greatest hits’, replicating six tracks from 001, bolstered for diehards by a previously unreleased acoustic demo of Junco Partner, and 2001 Brixton Academy versions of The Clash’s I Fought The Law and Rudie Can’t Fail that so faithfully replicate Mick Jones’s complex arrangements it sounds like Joe giving it some welly over a well-drilled tribute band.

A sequel that first celebrates the blooming of a relationship, then self-flagellates for ruining it. [Aug 2020, p.87]

Craft's previous work suggested he might have an album in him which is as wry as it is earnestly heroic. This is it. [Aug 2019, p.80]

The Gospel according to Water hovers in a mystical space between country, folk and jazz, his literate lyrics providing the thread which holds it all together. [Dec 2019, p.85]

A fine tribute to a timeless songwriter of our times. [Apr 2015, p.95]

If you do like a bit of in-depth rock luxury in your life, In Cauda Venenum delivers by the caseload.

The Crystals, Ramones, Blondie, Television, The Strokes, The Walkmen and the Friends theme all feed into Never Enough, their suave, glitter-ball garage pop debut, full of synapse-shagging surf punk melodies like Summertime, In Our Blood and I Don’t Wanna Live In California.

Every aspect of the band's sound coalesce on a series of stunning songs that have massive melodic grace and power. [Aug 2019, p.84]

Mind Control may occasionally lack the outright mania of its predecessor but this is music made in a puff of red smoke, heady and hypnotic. [Jun 2013, p.90]

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

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]

Ready To Die suggests Iggy is anything but. [Jun 2013, p.90]

An ambient suite based on a two-note motif, as if homing in on a detail on Luminal, dwelling on it, tenderly bleeding it dry. [Summer 2025, p.76]

All things considered, Lady In Gold is a more satisfying listen than its predecessor, with a host of truly great moments.

Although Donald Fagen's vocals have mellowed, there's no decline in quality. [Dec 2021, p.73]

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]

Aside from this one minor flaw [rapping in the title track], Gibbons has totally nailed it with Perfectamundo. It’s what a solo project should be: a new adventure.

Its 10 songs are bombastic, unabashed boogies, each one stacked with layer upon layer of symphonic volume. [Summer 2025, p.73]

The Darkness’ return to form is a welcome surprise in these apocalyptically drab times.

The album gets better with every play. [Jun 2013, p.89]

A modest masterpiece. [Oct 2023, p.86]

Much of We Can Do Anything, their first album since 2000 and following on from last year’s Happy New Year EP, is a breezy return to what they do best: acoustic folk-punk with ragged edges, held together by Gano’s ear for a ringing melody and delivered like a peculiarly skittish Lou Reed.

The most focused, challenging singer-songwriter record in some years.

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.

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

The 10 tracks here prove that the trio truly feel the Dog under their fingernails. [Sep 2021, p.77]

A brilliant record, combining as it does the herky-jerky, febrile near-hysterical wit of Sparks with that of Franz Ferdinand.

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

Overall this album is Hynde's most adventurous experiment to date, opening new autumnal terrain for one of rock's greatest voices. [Sep 2019, p.85]

Clutch are getting better with age. [Jun 2013, p.88]

Relentlessly experimental ear bashers, just an infectious childlike excitement in the exhilarating combined power of mangled pop and apocalyptic noise. [Sep 2024, p.68]

Nadine Shah has deftly channelled her fury and disbelief at it all into a record that’s both fiercely intelligent and, with its tense Krautrock rhythms, deliciously dark, gothic melodies and gorgeous, strident vocals, moreishly listenable.

This fourth album sounds like a broken man writing himself better, Tolchin weaving beautifully sparse folk-blues fingerwork around autumnal organs. [Nov 2019, p.81]

While on first listen Perida will surprise some STP fans and disappoint others. It’s an album that with repeated listens could well come to be seen by many as being among the band’s best.

Swamp certainly has a knack for the genre's heartbreak. [Apr 2020, p.89]

Like the best Stones songs, there’s never any dating Keith’s immortal spirit, and Talk Is Cheap holds its head high as it relentlessly reaffirms that that was indeed some knife.

Predictably, there are strong shades of Buck’s old band too, not least amid the arpeggios of Any Kind Of Crowd (an R.E.M. track in all but Stipe). Elsewhere the greasy chug of Come Back Shelley carries fuzz-filled echoes of T.Rex in their prime.

Affecting rather than affected, Grinning Streak sees cerebral craftsmen who've always refused to take music too seriously drop the winking and discover the pleasure of passion. [Summer 2013, p.90]

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.

Sprawling four-CD, 64-track (11 previously unreleased) retrospective. ... Overwhelmingly, it’s Cornell’s voice that wins through--a star-burst of a scream, a full-throated delight.

Blank Realm thrash expertly between raucousness and beauty, culminating in the tremulous Gold. This really is a very fine album indeed.

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.

McBride is no Ritchie Blackmore facsimile, although the chunky opening riff to Lazy Sod momentarily suggests otherwise. Instead he brings relatively youthful energy, and when he lets loose on I’ll Catch You and sizzles his way through A Bit On The Side it’s clear he’s both his own man and the right man. Alongside McBride, the other band members are reinvigorated too. Gillan’s voice is richer than it’s sounded in years. [Summer 2024, p.72]

The truth is that Carry Fire is about as good an album as we could reasonably expect from him in 2017.

It's good to hear an artist who shuffles through the undergrowth. [Summer 2021, p.81]

The roaring 20s has finally arrived. [Dec 2023, p.79]

A clearly more reflective Springsteen emerged on tracks such as Tougher Than The Rest and One Step Up, the songs’ minimal backing placing emotions front and centre. It was a more scatter-gun Springsteen on Human Touch and Lucky Town, released on the same day in 1992, his hired studio hands struggling to provide the same heft as their predecessors, but the likes of Better Days and If I Should Fall Behind from the latter album shone like diamonds in the rubble.

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

It’s not often anyone has the (albeit heartbreaking) luxury of being able to map out their own memorial, and Allman leaves us with his head held high and a record of rare beauty.

With Total Depravity, though, they’ve stepped up a level--with co-producer El-P ushering in psych synth squelches and creepy gospel (the epically titled Do Your Bones Glow At Night) and on the magnificent Low Lays The Devil a vintage blues squal equal to the Black Keys.

This music doesn't so much rock as lurch, convulse and blister the paint off your toenails. [May 2026, p.75]

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]

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.

Much of the record is set to a reflective key--providing a flexible canvas for subtle mood changes, sassy alt-rock grooves and space to cultivate retro but relevant, non-cliche rock. [Summer 2013, p.91]

Sleeping Through The War apparently has some kind of political undercurrent, but its (thankfully) obfuscated by Charlie Michael Parks Jr’s unhurried drawl and the layers of fuzzy atmospherics that, hopefully, point to the shape of stoner rock to come.

Overall this is worthy addition to the Cale catalogue. [Jun 2019, p.85]

A full-on rager, this one. Devour You knows what's up. [Nov 2019, p.82]

Hooks hook, riffs riff, senses smoulder, resistance is futile. [May 2022, p.87]

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

The Feelies’ grip of melody remains very much in place throughout, as do their love of jangling intertwining guitars and a strict sense of rhythm.

Mayall’s never going to dislodge Beano, but it’s ridiculous for an 83-year old to sound this relevant.

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

The real surprise is how graceful this lockdown-inspired album is. [Oct 2021, p.74]

With High Water I, The Magpie Salute have hit on a warm, rich vein of inspiration that might well sustain them for some time. [Aug 2018, p.88]

Sartain ramraids rinky-dink 80s US radio teen romps on the frenetic Black Party. His rare sense of mischief deserves to be encouraged.

Heavy yet eloquent, full tilt yet considered, it’s a record that is incandescent with rage, and clever too.

It's not just the most svelte, direct and immediate Pumpkins album ever, it's the most misleadingly titled. [Feb 2015, p.94]

Powers is a confident and welcome comeback. [Sep 2019, p.86]

Their self-titled ninth studio album find them, if anything, in even finer fettle. [Summer 2024, p.74]

As the rest of rock scurries to condense its charms into sync-friendly Shazamable nuggets, Britpop pioneers and eternal outsiders Suede slice gloriously against the grain once more with a grandiose semi-concept seventh album that demands to be consumed as a complete piece of art.

A successful continuation of the Babymetal mission. [Sep 2025, p.74]

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

This is beyond immersive; this is music to suffer a cleansing obliteration to.

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

The band’s rambunctious twentieth studio set stomps and shakes like an irreverent collision between Sam The Sham and The Stooges on Morphine Drip, Big As My Balls and Wah Wah Power. Druggy mantra Come On Everybody Getting High With You Baby Tonight evokes 60s Bay Area psych, The Hearse classic surf instrumentals. [Nov 2024, p.74]