Cockily adventurous, By Default is a plasma grenade lobbed out of the blues rock trenches.

He enlists a pan-generational wish list and lets them shine. [Apr 2024, p.81]

As this once-fabled recording attests, the Family Stone's chops and their leader's startlingly innovative tropes (including scat singing and testifying) were already in place that March. [Sep 2025, p.85]

The original album, remastered by a team co-headed by George Martin's son Giles, is presented with a freshness and immediacy that makes a mockery of the passage of half a century. ... The two CDs of sessions and demos are a revealing trove. [Nov 2019, p.88]

They have directly inspired some truly dire pretenders to the throne in the intervening years, but Dark Matter sees them sweep those bands away, and reset and reclaim their own signature sound. [May 2024, p.72]

Coda itself a contractual hotchpotch of career-spanning outtakes, is the only reissue given the three-disc treatment, with a total of 15 extras as disparate as the album itself.

Mayall endures, and keeps exploring, with his best originals - Got To Find A Better Way and Deep Blue Sea - bent happily out of shape by screeching violin. [Feb 2022, p.79]

According to Paul, the new mix is intended to reflect the original mono mix, in that all the voices and drums are in the middle, while also being a stereo mix. The result is, as it sounds, a compromise, where everything is not so much in stereo as on steroids. ... The real excitement for fans is of course in the extra tracks. Here there are no massive surprises (I expect--I was sent the double CD, not the full six pack), just some interesting spoken bits and a lot of Anthology-style backing tracks

Thanks to the band’s own accumulated expertise and the masterly stitching qualities of Danger Mouse, it’s a tightly woven affair, never messy or maudlin or self-indulgent; a dreamcoat of many colours, a marble rye of genres.

It's been expertly manicured so you can either lie back and float up, up and away on a breeze of pedal steel, or get up close to the speakers and check the references. [Jun 2024, p.80]

By The Fire is a massive antidote to our age. [Oct 2020, p.87]

You could spend hours ticking off the references (which obviously extend beyond Abbey Road), but what gives the album its identity is their own sense of style.

Crucially, radioactive classics such as Blood Red River, Weird Love, Atom Bomb Baby, Swampland and their psychobilly spray-job on Jonathan Richman’s She Cracked still sound vital and audaciously genre-crushing. The Scientists well deserve this Mount Rushmore of a set.

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

Diggin’ A Hole is scratchy blues; Almost Always could have graced Harvest Moon; Stand Tall and Children Of Destiny are earworms; but if you want beauty, you’ve got it on Carnival, once the cackling stops. Neil Young is reborn, yet again.

The record ends with a burst of Velvets fuzz-rock titled Hey Lou Reid - but it's only fitting on a record that burnishes their legend with such sizzling acid. [Apr 2024, p.76]

A huge welcome throwback. [Oct 2020, p.87]

This is a work of beauty and beastliness in equal measure. [Nov 2021, p.71]

All bets are off, all doors open and consciousness is expanded. [May 2019, p.86]

Bare-chested canyon rock is present and correct, but so too is much introspection, melancholia, hurt and hope. [Dec 2023, p.74]

Recorded in various locations during a 28-day tour in March/April 2016, this album represents the finest work from the Jean Hervé- Péron/Zappi Diermaier version of Faust in years.

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

The raging fires of Martyn's talent roar through the mix. [Nov 2013, p.97]

This is Ministry’s best record since we were all young and good-looking. [Apr 2024, p.78]

A breezy, funky prog-ssych knockabout. [Jul 2019, p.83]

They mix things up with restrained, pondering songs like the acoustic-driven Armchair View and the album's jaunty title track. [Nov 2024, p.73]

A maximalist spectacle that ticks every Lamb Of God check-box yet still finds the space to become their most innovative album in years. [May 2026, p.77]

An album that exudes warmth pretty much at every turn. [Feb 2025, p.72]