His love for the music shines throughout. [Apr 2023, p.75]

None of the 17 songs waste any time getting where they're ultimately going. ... Seriously, it's time to believe. [Apr 2023, p.74]

A proper ripper. [Mar 2023, p.76]

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

The single Mixed Emotions (I Didn't Know How To Tell You What I Was Going Through) is the album's manifesto, the chiming opening riff breaking into a wall of sound while singer Josh Franceschi howls his failure to communicate into the gale. And the onslaught rarely falters. [Mar 2023, p.78]

Paramore have successfully remoulded the cornerstones of their music not only for the new times we find ourselves in, but also for a personal evolution, and maturity evident across This Is Why. [Mar 2023, p.76]

Gloriously raucous, with memorable tunes that bury themselves deep in the psyche, Bass Drum Of Death encapsulate the spirit of garage rock'n'roll. [Mar 2023, p.79]

Uplifting and lovely. [Mar 2023, p.78]

Yo La Tengo have only intensified rather than showed signs of abating. [Mar 2023, p.77]

10 short, snappy songs, with as much melodic finesse as there is coruscating noise. [Mar 2023, p.77]

Michael Brauer’s interpretation – same songs, different mix – alters the texture of familiar songs like Love Sick, the spectral Cold Irons Bound and Make You Feel My Love, now something of a standard thanks to Adele, Michael Bublé and, er, Nick Knowles. ... The live pieces are more informative, with songs performed between 1998 and 2001.

Visconti spent weeks polishing Live And Dangerous into a masterpiece. This box set suggests that all we ever needed was around 80 minutes, including encores. Seven additional, yet equally dazzling, versions prove that and give us Thin Lizzy in their prime: live, raw and dangerous. [Feb 2023, p.84]

Ryder is at his best when riffing through the 70s piano-pop playbook. [Feb 2023, p.78]

Every Loser captures an Iggy Pop never more ready to be himself and never better equipped to deliver a stone-cold classic. [Feb 2023, p.78]

Rundgren is possibly the only musician for whom a lack of any thematic coherency across a record doesn’t result in total disaster. It works - don’t ask me how.

Even in the late autumn of his career, Neil Young can still turn in something as vital and musically catholic as Worl Record. [Jan 2023, p.78]

If you've been yearning for the days when David Draiman shrieked like a nu-metal chimpanzee-cum-wolverine, then Divisive is the album for you. [Dec 2022, p.75]

Among the out-takes, acoustic sketches, etc here, it's the a-capella versions of various tracks that touch the most, displays of harmonic unity in the midst of disharmony. [Dec 2022, p.83]

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]

The band's evident love for the material floods the performances, even though they can overdo the jamming when they get a groove going and reverence dampens Hooker's guest spot. But Petty's own songs, deployed sparingly, sound infinitely fresher and tighter. [Dec 2022, p.85]

If not a classic tour de force, this pressure-cooker set remains an era-capturing document of the social turmoil and pressures Hendrix faced as the world's greatest rock guitarist. [Dec 2022, p.81]

Divine Symmetry for once does what it promises to do, which is track Bowie's progression in one extraordinary year. ... This is a comprehensive trawl through 1971 - and an extraordinary one. [Dec 2022, p.84]

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

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

Where Is The Water twists and meanders hazily before shifting into gear with a riff from the Jack White school of thud, while opener Needles is excitable garage rock with a stiff, post-punk edge. And over in the kaleidoscopic corner, Wheels Within Wheels flips merrily from one psychedelic landscape to the next and includes a wriggling organ solo that sounds as if it's being squeezed from a tube. All in all, it's quite the adventure. [Dec 2022, p.75]

There are many less rewarding experiences than hearing Springsteen thirstily sing his favourite songs, but there’s a sense here that all concerned hope it would catch fire and amount to something more. [Dec 2022, p.76]

It perfects every element of the band’s sound and ensures everything is top-of-the-line. ... This is the Rolls-Royce of Alter Bridge records, and a high-water mark to which all rock hopefuls should aspire.

A bunker-born double (their second) that keeps on giving. [Nov 2022, p.74]

The result borders on easy listening with a yacht-pop vibe, before the psychedelic starbursts come out to play. [Nov 2022, p.75]

Safe to say, the album's 14 tracks are confirmed to be nothing less than brilliant (it wasn't consistently voted the best album of all time back in the 90s for nothing), with Martin's beautifully burnished, respectful restorations of For No One, Here There And Everywhere and the enduringly magnificent Tomorrow Never Knows packing particular emotional punch.

Mykki Blanco pops up on Midnight Legend, but the highlights break out elsewhere when Alli Logout furiously punks the shit out of post-disco. [Nov 2022, p.75]

A tangibly effervescent romp. [Sep 2022, p.77]

As displayed by the title track and the pumping Brutalism, Oxymore feels stuck in the 90s rather than the work of two trailblazers, though at least Epica’s hands-in-the-air dynamics feels fresher. [Nov 2022, p.71]

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

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]

The title and lyrics may scream apocalyptic gloom - Living is Killing Us, Doomscrolling, Born Again Pessimist - but there is an increasingly bright, infectious, power-glam polish to the band's sound. [Dec 2022, p.74]

Goat's best album. [Nov 2022, p.70]

This is a return they can be proud of. [Nov 2022, p.70]

At first you think, "Meh, more generic LA stuntcore." then realise you're loving it. [Nov 2022, p.75]

The styles eclectic but generally harking back to the architecture of 60s pop. [Nov 2022, p.71]

Where once they would gallop, here they lope, they slide, giving themselves all the time in the world. Hardcore fans of the weird stuff are going to hate it. ... This is clearly the right music for this stage in their musical evolution. [Nov 2022, p.70]

Behind all the autumnal rumination and elder-statesmen tastefulness, thankfully, Eno's experimental ethos endures. [Nov 2022, p.75]

The Lips are clearly huge fans of the retro-kitsch pop culture that they pillage and parody on this love letter to junkshop Americana. [Nov 2022, p.74]

A way more fun prospect than it seems. [Nov 2022, p.75]

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

A fine album by any standards, not least the Chili Peppers' own. [Oct 2022, p.70]

This is a good record mostly because the two men at the heart of it all sound like they’re actually enjoying being The Cult again.

Like all Bush albums this is really Rossdale’s. When they take a breather on Creatures Of The Fire, his Eddie Vedder-esque croon seizes the moment, and on the outstanding Identity he deals with paranoia (‘Please keep your kids indoors’) and loss of status (‘We used to be someone, now we’re nobody’) in swashbuckling fashion.

This album will leave you so wobbly and weak-kneed, you might have to take a few days off work to recover. Headphone melter of the year so far, for sure.

It's the sound of a band returning to the apex of their creative potency. [Oct 2022, p.71]

These eclectic make-overs [on NEU! Tribute] are pleasingly irreverent and mostly excellent. ... Also worth a fresh listen is NEU! 86. [Oct 2022, p.83]

It's McClain's show, with writing as young as yesterday. [Oct 2022, p.71]

After all this time, Pixies can still surprise and intrigue. [Oct 2022, p.72]

This is one helluva return. [Oct 2022, p.77]

It's a brimming grab-bag of brilliance and a total joy. [Oct 2022, p.77]

First High and Born Tough seek out her adolescence, while the title track and Black Widow stress her continuing defiance. This girl is not just following the satnav. She's older, but wilfully no wiser. [Oct 2022, 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.

Restored and mixed by Giles Martin and Sam Okell – who worked wonders with The Beatles’ Get Back footage – it’s a pristine listening experience, with little between-song chat. It showcases Creedence Clearwater Revival’s many strengths.

Dr. John sounds in tip-top form here. [Oct 2022, p.73]

As if his glorious slipping of the blues genre's straitjacket wasn't brave enough, Son Little's latest album is also an excavation of some pretty heavy-duty personal trauma. ... Consider our minds expanded. [Oct 2022, p.71]

The end result is a sweet and thoughtful set from one of the genre's lifers. [Oct 2022, p.70]

There's a remarkable sense of interplay, open space, hard rock and ambition that suggests other bands might as well pack up their tents and think about heading home. It's hard to pick gems from a sea of diamonds. [Oct 2022, p.72]

This album feels like something of a transitional one for Starcrawler, as they find themselves torn between their residual instinct to rock and a desire to roll into new creative areas. [Sep 2022, p.76]

Suede’s ninth album is a back-to-basics ‘punk’ affair utilising their raw alt.rock thrust to deliver some equally unvarnished personal truths.

How does it burn? Darkly, but with sparks.

When not recycling hand-me-down Gallagher-by-numbers, has his moments. [Sep 2022, p.77]

While perhaps not as emotionally loaded as Ordinary Man, Patient Number 9 better captures the mischievous, defiant energy of heavy metal's original madman. [Sep 2022, p.72]

A clutch of powerful original songs. [Sep 2022, p.76]

This fifth edition's half-hour documents their second collaboration with Nurse With Wound and never fully recovers. [Sep 2022, p.83]

Occasionally things are wide of the mark, such as with the ponderous Junkie, but that's mostly an anomaly in a record full of snarky, sneering metal that has the punky energy of a new band on the block. [Sep 2022, p.77]

A fascinating and entirely listenable record of an imminently great talent. [Sep 2022, p.80]

Classy but strangely sterile. [Sep 2022, p.77]

Gritty, punchy and hooky. [Aug 2022, p.67]

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]

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

First pleasure-shock come with previously unknown 1974 demos of the Shangri-La's Out In The Street, The Disco Song (Heart of Glass) and Labelle-like Sexy Ida. ... First impression on hearing this much remastered Blondie is how perfectly Harry unleashed beautifully nuanced sexualised dynamite over the band's tightly crafted power-pop bombs and genre diversion on what remains one of the last century's finest bodies of work. [Sep 2022, p.80]

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]

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 odd latter-half song gets lost in the sonics, but mostly Kiwi's stew hasn't lost its taste. [Sep 2022, p.73]

It's a roguish enough distillation of Aussie rock's most okish corners. [Sep 2022, p.73]

A lockdown album like no other. ... From full-blown fuzz-pedal rock monster to drones and shimmering interplay, highs and stupefying lows. [Aug 2022, p.66]

An evocative semi-concept work based in the 1890s. [Jun 2022, p.83]

The result is a compact and highly combustible album that packs 10 songs into just 22 minutes. [Aug 2022, p.86]

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]

Eschewing Young’s work recorded with Promise Of The Real – or indeed anything written this side of 1995 – Noise & Flowers’ nine crowd pleasers offer exactly what that brilliant title suggests.

The good-natured, twangsome results prefigure Costello's more angsty work with Clover on Nick Lowe-produced My Aim Is True. [Aug 2022, p.71]

A mostly exhilarating, agreeably disagreeable racket. [Aug 2022, p.71]

A fun album, but one in need of trimming and extra heft. [Aug 2022, p.69]

Ironically, without really trying, ZZ sound more soulful and vital here than they have for years. [Summer 2022, p.74]

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]

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]

The whole show is masterfully orchestrated. The first 25 minutes is all bangers. [Summer 2022, p.78]

Atmospheric, evocative, the psychedelic soul concept work you never knew you needed. [Summer 2022, p.79]

Sweet-voiced grrrl-angst vocals meet grunge dynamics; non-committal Veruca Salt do post-Nirvana loud bit/miserable bit. I Mean, it's fine, but... meh. [Summer 2022, p.79]

Anti-glory's an easy in, but you'll need to retune your ears to Horsegirl's particular frequency before this debut reveals its full brilliance. [Summer 2022, p.79]

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]

Otherness is a grand return from a gang of proud outsiders.

The album was written on the hop, Newcombe spilling his brains right onto tape, and it shows – imperfections are made into a positive, the songs allowed to just naturally come into being.