Brilliantly bright-side. [Summer 2024, p.75]

Together, they’ve produced an album of cracking Mac-esque pop, most notably the clipped, catchy Feel About You and the tightly constructed first single In My World.

Their interactions will turn understatement into seductiveness, as Paul Banks's voice and Daniel Kessler's guitars weave sorrow and hope through the shuffling Toni, the keening Fables, and Passenger, which feels like a sequel to their classic NYC. [Summer 2022, p.74]

The concept of nature destroying man-made civilization to a soundtrack of dark, danceable symphonics is chilling. [Sep 2020, p.85]

Still favouring extended excursions (see White Rose), their acquaintance with melody is developing into first-name terms to create a fabulously hypnotic trip.

Thirteen songs, 40 minutes and not a moment wasted. [Nov 2020, p.84]

Chunky, repetitive stun-gun guitars, sore-throat howls, throbbing digital backbeats, check, check, check.

We’ve been here before, but we’re back and it’s great.

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.

Back To Land lets the sun in through the grooves. [Jan 2014, p.116]

Boris are still finding new ways to discomfort, disorient, and discombobulate. [Summer 2014, p.92]

A surprisingly vibrant, bright-side kind of album it is too. [Sep 2025, p.78]

Free is easily Iggy's most ambitiously left-field album since Zombie Birdhouse in 1982. [Oct 2019, p.90]

McCauley strains a little too hard for unpolished authenticity over originality, but he still hits the emotional bullseye half the time. [Oct 2013, p.86]

The music on Dove finds a band not only reinvigorated, but also taking enormous pleasure in its activities. [Jun 2018, p.91]

Some nifty tricks - mashing their own Lonely In Your Nightmare into Rick James's Super Freak, for example - but not enough treat. [Dec 2023, p.74]

[Producer Glyn Johns] has given this album a shape and purpose, bringing out the full range of Clapton’s guitar tones. Recording the album on analogue equipment probably helped too.

On third album Double Vanity it seems the wide-open spaces of their Oklahoma home have inspired something rather beautiful to zone out to.

Steadily onwards through a flawless second side worth of classic, never-more-accessible Libertines in excelsis, before Songs They Never Play On The Radio causally encapsulates everything The Libertines were and, thankfully, still very much are. [Apr 2024, p.79]

There are echoes here of The Fall in their Brix-era imperial phase, a clobbering garage-rock physicality spiked with dry wit and subversively sweet melody.

This is the first time she has really let go and experimented, and she's pulled it off with aplomb. [Jul 2014, p.97]

Tasty, raunchy and mind-expanding stuff. [Jul 2022, p.82]

An incendiary cocktail of muscular grooves, designed to delight and thrill the metallic faithful. [Aug 2013, p.88]

Detroit Stories is his most concise bolt of precision-tooled heavy rock in 50 years, enhanced by Ezrin’s robust production and Alice on lethal form, vocally and lyric-wise.

There’s a charming vulnerability to it all, and although they still amp up the rock when necessary – a riff at the heart of Brambles is fittingly prickly – Dark Rainbows is a brooding, subtle, ballad-stuffed affair from a band that refuses to be hemmed in by their own history. [Apr 2024, p.76]

Continues to make some of the sweetest and most self-assured AOR-inflected power-pop going. [Aug 2021, p.82]

Turn It On! is the rock'n'roll equivalent of a dazzling ray of sunshine. [May 2022, p.84]

Eric Burdon's flame still burns brighter than that of most bands half his age. [May 2013, p.91]