Blank Realm thrash expertly between raucousness and beauty, culminating in the tremulous Gold. This really is a very fine album indeed.

Some of the retro-crooner murder ballads risk straying into cliché, but there are inspired sound-collage experiments here too.

With a disc including live outtakes and priceless B-sides, this is an essential collection.

As with any compilation, it’s never entirely clear how much clearance from publishers impacts on the criteria for inclusion, but there are rare treats to be mined here.

VDGG’s fourth album since they became a trio in 2007, Do Not Disturb is every bit as strange, angular and unpredictable as anything the band did in the 70s.

In a nutshell: fuzzily fierce.

Big Bad Beautiful Noise is their first album in four or so years, and it’s their best and most consistent since 1988’s seminal Birth School Work Death.

We’re hanging on to them by our fingernails, but this is impressive stuff.

Thomas might have this new album down as the James Gang teaming up with Tangerine Dream, but PU exist in a world their own, one that bears only passing resemblance to reality.

Locating the sweet spot where spontaneity and polish meet, Widdershins swings in all the right directions.

Album number three takes Anna Meredith-style neoclassical and jumbles it with a woozy mix of Broadcast, Hounds of Love and glockenspiel gamelan. [Oct 2018, p.89]

A surprising distillation of longing, memory and loss. [Apr 2019, p.88]

A stylish lo-fi gumbo of grunge, punk and indie. [May 2019, p.89]

Sweet, potent vignettes of American folk storytelling. [Jun 2019, p.89]

A relentless stream of strong, sinewy riffs and blistering solos. ... It's just a shame he doesn't trust his own voice more. [Jul 2019, p.85]

The barrage of noise that results is undeniably epic, oddly stirring and gloriously daft. [Aug 2019, p.81]

This, almost surreally, is only their seventh album and contains not a dull moment. [Sep 2019. p.83]

They're also still some way off leading any packs, but they're making up ground. [Feb 2020, p.90]

Foxx sounds just as vital as he ever was. [Aug 2020, p.89]

It’s all cracking stuff. The early Motown song Money (That’s What I Want) and Muddy Waters’ Rock Me, Baby add soul, and the studio chatter is worth hearing if only to catch Morrison calling out for Kentucky Fried Chicken and announcing that The Doors’ next album will be called Ride Out.

Not a great comeback, but just good enough. [Jun 2021, p.81]

Reason To Live is full of a warmth and pleasure in life that suits his growing maturity as songwriter and raconteur well. [Jul 2021, p.80]

[A] blend of instrumental moods, torpid 80s indie and self-regarding songs that never entirely clear their launchpad. [Oct 2021, p.79]

All told, a crowd-fuelled triumph. [Nov 2021, p.75]

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]

Trower’s guitar playing is deliciously inventive, whether he’s channelling Mark Knopfler on Wither On The Vine or moving closer to Eric Clapton circa 461 Ocean Boulevard on the title track.

It's a delight to hear the fully emergent Young so up and close with such a pantheon of wonder, and the sound is near-perfect. [Jul 2022, p.87]

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.