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.