Musically the album is AB's heaviest so far, but it's never heavy handed. [Oct 2013, p.90]

It may not be as glorious as some would have had us believe first time round; it's still a great album, but here it's packaged with the extra components that could have made it a better one. [Oct 2014, p.101]

It's highly agreeable background music for those who prefer to keep the curtains closed. [Nov 2014, p.91]

His [Brian Henneman's] Tom Petty-tinged voice and bursts of Rickenbacker guitar reinforce the familiar sound. Unfortunately he doesn’t always move with the times.

Retains naive charm while delivering occasional brilliance. [Feb 2021, p.87]

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.

The cumulative result is an album accessible enough to provide an entry point for the curious, while having just the right amount of wiggy to satisfy paid-up members of the Motorpsycho cult.

Preaching positivity, the woozy dream-pop melodies flutter and float on the air like the butterfly the record takes its name from. [Summer 2021, p.80]

He delves into lesser-known parts, like Wheel, a 1973 song about tragic, rural cycles, and he sings Old Road, as a sparse holler, akin to the original. Other songs celebrate the ‘gonzo country’ aims of Jerry Jeff, but Mr Bojangles and his worn-out shoes is still best in show.

Utterly charming album, with Prophet’s ear for a keening melody still intact – the lovely Red Sky Night, the gentle rhythm of First Came The Thunder -and suffused with a lilting Latin charm. [Nov 2024, p.77]

While this largely live covers set doesn't necessarily flex the Welsh guitarist's creative muscles, it confirms him as a musician who has the genre under his fingernails. [Mar 2025, p.75]

Singer Izzy Baxter Phillips brings a rich, seductive lustre to spacey nu-grunge songs of lust, addiction, sexual assault, neuro-divergence and emotional exhaustion. [Oct 2025, p.76]

There’s no denying the lustre and passion in these songs. A case in point is the blistering call-to-arms, preacher-man fire-and-brimstone sermon True Black. Elsewhere, Tumbleweeds leans towards a darker Ryan Adams or brooding Jason Isbell setting. [Mar 2026, p.79]

Hums Of The Lovin' Spoonful ('66) and Everything Playing ('67) include the odd classic, such as Nashville Cats, but don't gel so well, despite Yanovsky's flamboyant playing. The constant style shifting suits the soundtracks for What's Up, Tiger Lily? and You're A Big Boy Now, with groovy themes a-go-go. [May 2026, p.85]

A weirdly uncomfortable and exhilarating listening from start to finish. [Jan 2021, p.85]

Abstract and startling, listen to the hefty groove of Prayers/Triangles or the slow blooming Phantom Bride and feel the earth move beneath your feet.

My Dying Bride remain steadfastly rooted in gloom. It's a nuanced gloom, though. [Apr 2020, p.87]

Envisioning sci-fi detective themes (Chasing The Tail Of A Dream), mariachi manhunts (It’s You) and Wall-E Of Arabia (Connector), it’s an imaginative if one-level album, animating only for the scuzzy motorik blues pop of Million Eyes, Fear Machine and Holy Revelation or the crisp, catchy psych-pop of Miss Fortune.

Luciel Brown's deadpan helps fuel the no-wave madness. [Jun 2024, p.81]

This is glorious stuff: the punchy, thin lipped Church & State; the affecting wonderfully harmonies of A Woman Oversees; the slowly uncoiling storytelling bound up in the lingering A Long Goodbye. [Nov 2025, p.77]

It's invariably over-punctuated by hyperactive prog-metallic drumming and paradiddly percussion that leaves little space for their ideas to breath, while memorable hooks or riffs get buried in the chaos. [Sep 2023, p.79]

This line-up’s chemistry has reached peak levels here, however, leading to astonishingly wild, lysergic adventures in dynamic sound like sprawling opener Cloud Of Forgetting and the bleak, amorphous 21 minutes of Frankie M.

He doesn't disappoint as he smatters the bulk of this new record with orchestral strings. The pick of the tracks here are the pulsating Pretty Boy, the string-laden I'm Not Giving Up Tonight and the soaring Open The Dorr, See What You Find. [Jul 2023, p.84]

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.

Opener Up All Night moves through the formulaic pop gears as smoothly as Don Henley cruising along the Pacific Coast Highway, while Holding On is a slickly realised mid-tempo foot tapper. However, shorn of the novelty factor, such middle-of-the-road material remains better suited to balmy summer nights and drivetime radio than to repeated home listening.

Overall, this is their most eclectic album yet and, despite a couple of lightweight generic tracks, their most end-to-end enjoyable too.

Delivering the goods with considerably more venom than you might expect at this stage in the game, Lamb of God remain hard to b(l)eat. [Jun 2020, p.89]

Hearing Southern Man played on a single acoustic guitar as opposed to the thrash of the album is one epiphany, while the windswept Don’t Let It Bring You Down is cataclysmic. ... Magnificent.

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

Nobody is allowed to dominate the sound of the album, which is haunting and imperial at the same time. [May 2023, p.76]

Villains, this deep and danceable delight, ends with two searing six minute tracks: the razor-blade blues of the White Stripes-ish The Evil Has Landed, and a sunrise-of-the-ancients pop finalé called Villains Of Circumstance.

III mostly avoids the genre's penchant for endless navel gazing and just delivers the ear-shattering goods. [Dec 2020, p.83]

It's music to glue your arse to a Barclays to. [Sep 2019, p.84]

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

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.

At times, like on Hero, King's healing process leads him into R&B slushies that make you miss the crunch of old cuts like Hard Working Man. But this record is real, raw and often beautiful. [Jun 2024, p.75]

The most motley of crews manage to bring out the best in McCaughey's songs and he's on peak form here. [Summer 2025, p.72]

Outtakes or no outtakes, this reissue manages to pull off the considerable trick of feeling like a complete whole – the first iteration of the classic line-up after Motörhead’s formation in 1975. [Summer 2025, p.85]

Some early Talking Heads fans would say something was lost when the band lost their preppy soul edge and went down the Byrne and Eno art-school alleyway with their next pair of albums. Others might say More Songs About Buildings And Food suffers from being a halfway house between the band’s early sound and what it would become under Eno and Byrne’s constrictive guiding hand. But even as a transitional record More Songs About Buildings And Food is extraordinary. [Aug 2025, p.83]

Though their trademark dynamics of rise and fall, and tension and release are firmly in evidence, there remains a mesmerising sheen throughout that’s utterly hypnotic.

At 72 Gordon is still smarter, more experimental and more inventive than just about anyone else in the art-rock sphere. [Apr 2026, p.78]

As ever, they paint from the broadest of palettes to create a portrait of a city rich in cultural and musical diversity. [Aug 2021, p.80]

Not just vast in musical scope, The Astonishing offers an entire Dystopian world of its own, not to mention exhibiting the potential to be an overblown Broadway rock opera, eye-frazzling sci-fi movie and nerd-delighting video game into the bargain.

An engaging blend of slowcore, drone, post-rock and dub. [Nov 2021, p.77]

It’s bashed out in an exuberant blast of piano-stonkin’ late-60s rock’n’soul that occasionally wanders into poppy, kitschy Elton John territory, but owes most of its groove to the lean, mean, stray-cat blues of Beggars Banquet.

Suede sound like Suede again. [Apr 2013, p.97]

It won't change the world, but The No-Hit Wonder makes it a nicer place to live in. [Sep 2014, p.91]

He's done his old boss proud. [May 2019, p.89]

Irritating... in the very best way. [Jun 2026, p.77]

Shiny Happy People still feels like an irritant, while the Turtles-y Near Wild Heaven is pleasant at best. By contrast, the muted baroque of Low and the anguished beauty that seeps from the heart of Country Feedback--so intense in the live arena that Michael Stipe often sang it on his knees, with his back to the audience--are classic examples of the band at their moody, mysterious best.

A fantastic rocket of a record, which adds to the renaissance brilliance of 21st-century Truckers.

A crystalline classic.

Occasionally, as on Fire Storm Hotel, with its shades of an 80s hair metal anthem, he sounds at once energised and enfeebled and you find yourself willing him to reach the velocity of yore. But most of the time, you could play these tracks to an alien and they would struggle to tell them apart from Motörhead’s 90s, or even 70s, work.

Ultimately, Airbourne play honest, no-nonsense, straight-down-the-line classic rock in a manner true to all the basic tenets of the genre.

Jazz standard Lullaby Of The Leaves begins in husky torch song mode, but gains interest with a brassy Bonamassa guitar solo, like a Bond theme played past midnight in a Chicago dive. When these rockers go reggae for Addicted, though, it is, as usual, a step too far.

There are some great songs here, it just that one or two will make you want to look away and not think too hard about the one that got away. [Oct 2020, p.83]

The Brighton metalcore band turn their attention both outwards and inwards: ferocious, barely contained rage directed towards global dysfunction and the looming, ever-increasing threats to mankind and the notion of personal responsibility, taking control of destiny. [Apr 2021, p.86]

While he’s not straying too far from the mothership, nothing here is phoned-in. As befits the craftsman he’s always been, he’s taken the time and trouble to fashion a bunch of songs worthy of standing alongside anything in his catalogue. Hats off.

The Big Decider sees The Zutons back to Their happy clapping playful best. [Jun 2024, p.79]

Halestorm have never sounded more comfortably ‘themselves’ than on album six, so after two decades, it seems that their cage has broken at last. [Aug 2025, p.74]

Genderbender is a born star, charisma dripping from every syllable, while The Melvins’ trademark heaviness complements and contrasts her bohemian, dramatic delivery like sea salt in caramel. This fairy wears boots and is ready to kick ass.

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.

24-track double album of brittle, emotive folk pop and alt.rock.

It’s the pastoral style of Pentangle overlaid with crazed early-70s wah-wah duelling--think a pistols-at-dawn affaire d’honneur between Larry Wallis and Mick Bolton--and it’s very good indeed.

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]

Some of it’s inescapably retro, such as The Times’ I Helped Patrick McGoohan Escape and Firmanent & The Elements’ The Festival Of Frothy Muggament. However, there are plenty of better-known names, sympaticos such as The Monochrome Set and TV Personalities, as well as an early demo from Doctor And The Medics, Barbara Can’t Dance, whose number one single Spirit In The Sky was the commercial highpoint of this movement.

Its shorter, pacier tracks up the dynamism, making for a pummelling - if somewhat relentless - experience as deep-strata hardcore tracks like Detroit and Blackage shift gears into more ponderous interludes. [Jun 2025, p.72]

Songs is a doozy. [Sep 2014, p.93]

His words and sentiments are left deliberately smudged and indefinite in places; sardonic Dylan phrasing sticks to some words, double-tracked Lennon wails on others.

Marvellous album. .... A rock'n'roll record that's funkier than a tramp's kacks, more soulful than a gospel convention, warmer than a mother's love and groovier than the Grand Canyon. [Apr 2024, p.78]

The result: low-key mastery from a songwriting lifer. [Oct 2013, p.86]

Picking up from last year’s Big Bill Broonzy tribute Common Ground, here the Alvins run riot on another covers set.

Wraith wrestles drums, bass, guitars and trumpet into sinister electronic shapes informed by towering noise makers such as terminal Cheesecake and textural experimentalist James Holden. [May 2019, p.87]

She has made her masterpiece; remarkable at any age. [Oct 2014, p.91]

The Book Of Souls will doubtless be celebrated most for its epics, and if you thought Maiden had pulled out all the stops in the past, you may need to strap yourself in and say a quick prayer to Eddie this time round.

Primitive And Deadly is a whole other beast, perhaps the closest that core members Dylan Carlson and Adrienne Davies have ever come to a remotely conventional rock album. [Dec 2014, p.105]

At just 39 minutes, they've packed so much into this entirely mad record, you'll be left happily exhausted by the end of it. [May 2015, p.103]

The best moments here find Thompson more restrained, particularly the sinuous, fingerpicked beauty of Beatnik Walking and the rueful, all-acoustic Josephine.

The thick fuzz of guitars is at the metal end of grunge, impact and volume kept almost oppressively in the red. But once you settle into Kentucky’s MO, the band’s songwriting strengths and musical reach are still here.

Although micro-melody whimsy is at its heart, there’s a Tangs/Radiophonic Workshop slant that gives tracks such as Midwinter Rites a spooky Kill List/Children Of The Stones edge.

For all the grim despondency, this is an album steeped in the acrid stench of beauty. [Mar 2019, p.88]

Simms certainly knows how to deliver Wire energy - compact, disciplined, no waste, no spray, as on Primed And Ready. There are also lovely moments of Wire pop here. [Mar 2020, p.87]

Tail-chasing indie adequacy. [Summer 2020, p.89]

The music hits hard enough on its own. [Dec 2020, p.82]

Solo piano pieces drag, but with a floating line-up in intuitive complementary support his trademark guitar tones soar. [Sep 2021, p.81]

Full of infectious, summery pop melodies, acoustic guitars and abrasion. [Apr 2022, p.77]

It bursts with the wide-eyed, childlike wonder that has underpinned so much of his work, interwoven with his uniquely kind, gentle and spiritual voice of wisdom. [Summer 2023, p.79]

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

This eighteenth album, continuing the sophisticated air of their second era with its merger of plush future-rock, graceful gospel folk and organic electro-pop. [May 2024, p.74]

New remastering bolsters the album’s strengths, adding warmth and definition to King Of Pain, Wrapped Around Your Finger and Every Breath You Take. .... With an album’s worth of period B-sides and bonus tracks, the set’s two discs of unreleased material strike gold with Sting’s brisk, electro-pop demo of Murder By Numbers, and a slinkier, horn-driven funk arrangement of O My God from the Synchronicity sessions, both infinitely more enjoyable than the bland album versions. [Aug 2024, p.81]

The obscurities provide the real delight. [Aug 2024, p.81]

Arctic Moon is an album that works for both the long haulers and the novices. [Oct 2025, p.79]

With Childish's standard acerbic lyrics, antagonistic vocals and bluebottle guitar buzz, House On Fire is Medway Delta blues-meets-psychedelic desert rock with a southern gothic vibe. [May 2026, p.74]

A consolidation of their strengths--muscular guitars that alternate from hardcore styling to more sensitive deliver--and a greater sense of melody. [Feb 2020, p.90]

Together they craft a devastatingly detailed fictional portrait of a married couple falling apart in a maelstrom of drugs, regret and the sort of silence that "murders the heart." [Summer 2021, p.87]

The news is good though: Davies is in terrific, matchless voice, his storied career standing up to a sprawling treatment without too much drag.

This album feels like musicians bouncing ideas off of each other in the same room. [Jun 2023, p.75]

Cable Ties are invariably at their best when teetering on the very brink. [Summer 2023, p.79]