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.