Excellent, noisy stuff. [Jul 2013, p.87]

Always Ascending is a class act, polished, honed, several cuts above the mewling herd. New guitarist or not, Franz Ferdinand abide.

Red Fang might not take themselves too seriously, but thankfully Arrows rocks pleasingly hard indeed.

Unatoned isn't the best Machine Head alum, but it's a top-tier one for sure. [Jun 2025, p.75]

This album drops its bombs with honed precision, the band's experience evident as both the key musical genres - loud and quiet - are deployed with scorching smarts. [Nov 2024, p.77]

What The World Needs Now... continues where 2012’s This Is PiL left off.

Taken as a whole, it’s a pretty patchwork affair, but so are all Alice Cooper albums, even the great ones. And while this isn’t one of the great ones, it also doesn’t sound like the work of a washed-up has-been who’s out of time and ideas.

She's at her best and most fiery in default-setting rock-chick mode. [Dec 2019, p.81]

The engrossing full-album reprise Forever Now gives an insight into frontman Billie Joe Armstrong’s booze and pills-induced 2012 meltdown, but otherwise Revolution Radio is more melodic air-punching about guns, gas and the American nightmare. File under: Ain’t Broke.

The funk is solid in this one.

Throughout, Morrison makes old songs sound new and brings the enthusiasm of a teenager to an old man’s record. [Dec 2023, p.78]

This is bigger, bolder, and better in every respect. [Mar 2014, p.97]

No, 13 isn't as good as their first six albums--what is?--but it's a million times better than most of what followed. [Summer 2013, p.86]

Almost every song plods along for six minutes or more. It’s punishing. The beauty of middleaged Overkill is that they weren’t middle-aged Metallica. Sigh.

If you've followed his career the evolution makes perfect sense. .... Roll on Vol.3. [Nov 2023, p.79]

Maintains In//Parallel's intrinsic style and pan-genre forward momentum, a seamless, pop-literate/prog-friendly fusion positively peppered with an abundance of barbed hooks. [Dec 2023, p.74]

Yes aging is difficult but Elton and Bernie seem to be making a good job of it. [Oct 2013, p.91]

Ultimately, there's little on offer to snare a neutral. For the zealot, however, new heights of melody and assurance await. [Sep 2014, p.93]

Right now, though, they’ve rediscovered themselves, and there’s no reason why a new audience can’t discover them.

The melodies are sweet and the lyrics still bear his adult-child cartoon whimsy, but there's a dark optimism beneath it all. [Dec 2020, p.81]

Chuck is Berry’s last inimitable flare, delivered in the nick of time.

As a set of songs it works fine. [May 2015, p.105]

This factory runs on goodwill. In less cataclysmic times the exercise might be mawkish, and while a cover of Lean On Me is well-meant it feels a little like eating too much cake icing.

This is an album on which Muse master the wider range of future rock and pop sonics they've been toying with for the past decade and refine and define their current sound as neatly as Black Holes & Revelations did for their 2000s period. [Sep 2022, p.74]

Manson’s nihilistic take on 2017 is interwoven with glimpses of personal darkness, wrapped up in mutually constrictive and damaging relationships on epic dirge Blood Honey and the closing Threats Of Romance, ordering a partner to do his murderous bidding on the Muse disco blues Kill4Me, and mourning the loss of his father on the seven-minute centrepiece Saturnalia. But even here there’s a renewed crackle to Manson’s attack--a viper regaining its bite.

These are not so much conventional songs but something much looser and akin to sun-parched jams.

4 lovers of gloriously degraded punk pop. [May 2021, p.88]

There’s plenty here to keep their hard-core fans transfixed until the Jonestowners return with the next full albumy walbum.