Johnny Cash starts with Johnny 99, the title track of his 1983 album released just a year after Springsteen's Nebraska, with his own distinctive drawl and guitar twang, demonstrating that the Boss's songs have all the necessary country ingredients. The more traditional Travis Tritt then employs an arsenal of cliches on Tougher Than The Rest. .... [Steve Earle] delivers a brooding, almost menacing live version of State Trooper. [Jul 2025, p.86]

Thankfully, they haven’t abandoned their experimental urges completely, with Apricity striking a deft balance between rushing choruses and free electronic grooves.

While there's nothing radically off-blueprint in the finished article, it's obvious that every note has been pored over with love and respect. [Jan 2019, p.88]

Suffering a little from the transition from live set to bootleg to official release. [Jul 2022, p.87]

If anything on Into The Woods Brock and his merry men (including drummer Richard Chadwick and keyboardist Tim Blake) conjure, not the mellowness but the magic and mystery, even malevolence, of nature.

It's all as disorientating and scary and unwholesome and - near unbelievably - heavy as fuck as you'd expect. [Nov 2021, p.74]

Somehow, his voice remains--a ghostly, spellbinding croon that swims through wastelands of strings and synths, making Noctunes unfold like an alternative soundtrack to Twin Peaks.

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

While nothing here is wrong, very little - unlike the VU themselves - is unexpected or thrilling. [Oct 2021, p.74]

Continue to sound just as fresh as they did when the band first formed 40 years ago. [Jul 2024, p.78]

American Fall is their eleventh studio album since the band formed in 1996, and there’s no compromise, no backing down. The anger keeps churning, the hooks keep building. ... It’s sometimes reminiscent of Green Day, but none the worse for that.

The punk energy remains, frontman Davy Havok’s vocal delivery dripping with drama and passion, but with a glorious, gilded production job from guitarist Jade Puget, AFI (The Blood Album) luxuriates in a velvety richness that makes it a sumptuous listen.

A polished vista rock for anyone in urgent need of a Foos stopgap. [Sep 2019, p.83]

Silence In The Snow is not a classic album, but this puts Trivium firmly back on course.

It's the sound of a band making peace with their own fundamental style, without feeling the need to gild the lily. [Dec 2018, p.84]

[Rise] sounds like it’s been designed solely with American radio very much in mind. Things pick up quickly from there though, You Have Come To The Right Place, puts things very much back on track, wilfully over-the-top, a grand façade covering the band’s broken veneer.

Lyrically this has all been done better before, but it does show that Beck is fully engaged with the world. Moreover, Loud Hailer’s often stunning tapestry of vampy rock, funk, Southern blues and wah-wah wizardry proves that all of his considerable faculties are as sharp as they ever were.

Shades of Dead Moon and The Scientists, US 80s hardcore litter tracks like Plasticity and the monstrous swirl of lead single Almost Everything but Mudhoney remain their own, inherent force of nature. [May 2023, p.77]

Essentially, Chapman is an old-style saloon storyteller whose reflections are enhanced and coloured by his myriad guitar treatments, an old dog not afraid of new tricks.

Its best moments veer away into austere orchestral grandeur: the title track is fittingly climactic and Love From The Other Side resembles a civilisation tunefully collapsing. [May 2023, p.77]

On its own merits, 001 disrupts the notion that Strummer lost his way after The Clash, without wholly overturning it, but there's nothing remotely grubby here. [Oct 2018, p.97]

Several navel-gazing songs about musicianship only cement Eitzel’s reputation as a songwriter’s songwriter, favouring tinkering with classic structures over tugging the low-hanging heartstrings or banging out honking great hooks, but this ferryman will definitely get fans of arch-folk to the other side.

The songs are less varied, however, tending to chug along morosely, based around similar clusters of chords to David Bowie’s Five Years, which suits the apocalyptic foreboding but can make you long for a brightly coiffed alien androgyne to come along and break the monotone gloom. ... Still, for all its solemnity, Waters is clearly in his element, even if his Indian summer might coincide with our nuclear winter.

Down To Earth has drama, poise and energy, but not sure its use in a film about a lonely rubbish-collecting robot in the future adds or subtracts anything, to be honest.

Heaven is an adrenalin-charged barrage of intelligently crafted, hook-heavy material, enlivened with hairpin tempo twists, and impressively free of punk cliches. As Hell surges into action with Rise Up's thrusting fusion of shout-along punk chorus and metallic riffing, it's clear they're not playing their heavy side for laughs, using it instead to inject their characteristic sound with well-suited darker aspects on It's All Me and You Wanted War. [May 2024, p.79]

Despite its nonlinear creation, the album is one of their tightest and most consistent in years. [Sep 2019, p.83]

Bleakness sparkles. [Sep 2024, p.68]

Delving deeper into funk groove and psych textures, this expansive ninth record pays a flying visit to such old haunts, to find its hedonistic crowd now wracked with late-capitalist economic woes and struggling to stay rock'n'roll post-rehab. [May 2023, p.78]