The more abiding feeling we're left with, though, is that high-octane hard pop like this needs just a few more piercing hooks to really raise The Dirty Nil above all the other generic good-time rockers that will give you a fun half-hour in a festival tent but rarely capture your imagination. [Feb 2021, p.84]

While something more adventurous might have been the way forward, the singer and his inspirations remain unscathed. [Feb 2021, p.84]

Cool Planet is a messy indie sprawl for the patient faithful. [Aug 2014, p. 204]

Mountains finds the 71-year-old Lofgren railing at a world in which the progressive values of the 60s have been superseded by Trumpian self-interest, all in typically melodic fashion. [Aug 2023, p.75]

[An] agreeable, mildly self-indulgent album. [Nov 2013, p.93]

For all the loving homages to past recording techniques, they sound laboured and bored. [May 2013, p.84]

Diggin’ A Hole is scratchy blues; Almost Always could have graced Harvest Moon; Stand Tall and Children Of Destiny are earworms; but if you want beauty, you’ve got it on Carnival, once the cackling stops. Neil Young is reborn, yet again.

Invigorating results. ... It's refreshing, comforting even, to have Green Day back in their exuberant element, unburdened by message or morality. [Mar 2020, p.86]

Vaselines fans will not be disappointed or surprised by these tunes. [Oct 2014, p.91]

This much MOR anguish does get draining.... Still, wonderfully cathartic for when you need a god cry. [Oct 2013, p.88]

Every aspect of the band's sound coalesce on a series of stunning songs that have massive melodic grace and power. [Aug 2019, p.84]

Twee and tuneful, self-consciously oddball and so indefatigably alt. [Jun 2022, p.83]

As ever, this band find their joie de vivre in jadedness. [May 2026, p.78]

What's missing is just a little more "WTF?" [Sep 2013, p.90]

[It picks] up precisely where they left off in 1990. [Sep 2013, p.88]

As the soundtrack to the black mass ritual of their ardent followers, From the Very Depths more than delivers. [Mar 2015, p.89]

It's an astonishing, tour-de-force performance, ferocious and committed and dripping with confidence. [Jun 2015, p.90]

Resolute if hardly revolutionary form. [Jun 2015, p.96]

Strings stutter and fall, the tone can best be described as lush, gentle and reassuring.

The song titles may be a little lacking this time round (although The Sordid Soliloquy Of Sawborg Destructo makes up for it), but The Blood of Gods is more of the same monstrous bilge.

Resist is more an evolution than a revolution in the band's sound, which tightens up and augments everything that was great about 2014's Hydra. [Feb 2019, p.91]

There awaits a winning collaboration between band and singer, but this isn't it. [Feb 2022, p.79]

The re-inclusion of guitarist Brian ‘Head’ Welch to the band has seen Korn embracing their dense roots and they’re all the better for it.

It has arena-rock attitude, but contained within songs and performances that are a lot more intimate and highly charged than you might expect. Slash’s punchy guitar style complements Kennedy’s passionate vocals, and in doing so brings to mind what Aerosmith achieved in the late 80s. [Sep 2018, p.88]

The Leeds-launched provocateurs still sound sharp and lean. [May 2019, p.88]

Van Weezer is a Lightweight guilty pleasure, but mostly delicious pleasure. [Summer 2021, p.80]

Aside from this one minor flaw [rapping in the title track], Gibbons has totally nailed it with Perfectamundo. It’s what a solo project should be: a new adventure.

By making new albums like this, the band sidestep the entire revival punk circuit ethos and create something new, again. [Summer 2014, p.88]