It's probably the Rolling Stones' best album ever. ... Slim pickings of the expanded vinyl package border on the insulting. [Dec 2018, p.94]

Noise & Romance offers a much more disjointed, disorienting and unpolished experience. [May 2019, p.84]

Another adequate but inessential album.

The stumbling block is that too many songs here never develop pasta dino-stomp riff, and that the vocals can be a little shrill. [Summer 2013, p.89]

While there’s plenty of self-indulgent noodling (God Is In The Rhythm; the final section of Infinite Rise) compensation comes with their adventurous spirit.

Sections within Things Buried In Water 1 and The Stranger’s House suggesting melody, the rest an offbeat, thrumming sound collage.

Employing rhythmic sideswipes, jarring guitar clangour and dub bass frequencies through a production filter marked 'Mud'. [Summer 2025, p.79]

This is certainly a dead weird album; it may improve with time.

Despite a handful of anodyne plodders, it is difficult to dislike Simple Minds in this nostalgic late-career mode, elder statesmen with nothing left to prove. [Nov 2022, p.71]

The album emerging as willfully lo-fi, bouncing along on cheery electronica while McTrusty's almost spoken-word panic attack showcases his rich Glaswegian vocals. [Feb 2022, p.79]

It cuts and blazes and works well live in all its kinetic abandon but, if Shining really want to lay claim to a new genre, they need to integrate their progressive elements into the mix rather than add them as a side option.

Nothing here is as good as their Sweet Jane, but it'll do. [May 2022, p.87]

On 33 Crows he channels his inner Dylan, giving it lots of nasal drawl. Holy Flame brings things up to date, recalling Dandy Warhols. If you fancy some 60s-centric pop-rock, this might work.

Her heart is laid bare in a manner that just manages to avoid becoming cloying.

Inviting famous friends to help him give the songs a fresh coat of paint doesn't, for the most part, make any real impact. [Summer 2013, p.91]

It grows with listens, and at its best (as on Hold On), Clark’s guitar/soul-beat fusion is smooth and stylish. But some of it is just (whisper it) a bit boring.

This is modern life sliced up with the precision of a medical scalpel and then force-fed through a high-density filter of piss and vinegar.

Super-smooth strings, bluesy stomps and immense righteousness are crammed into this varied, if oddly disparate selection. [Feb 2015, p.98]

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

It's basically business as usual here. [Nov 2013, p.91]

Some fans may miss the hobo simplicity of yore. [Summer 2013, p.92]

It’s well-meant but well-trodden, rarely exciting ground.

Sporadically great but decidedly patchy, A Moon Shaped Pool is not the sound of a great band dying, more a great band spreading themselves too thinly.

This, somewhat muted, first album in 20 years lacks much of the Beck-like shuffle and experimental pop lustre of that early era, but boasts a mature earthy seam thanks to Barlow lacing its noirish alt.folk, 80s-inflected crypt rock and melodic drone and dub experiments with touches of Middle Eastern instrumentation. [Summer 2024, p.72]

23 tracks is too many. ... But when it's good - as on Marc Almond's ballady Teenage Dream or David Johansen's R&B stomp through Get It On, it's great. [Oct 2020, p.84]

Hitchcock strips away all the production embellishments of its musical highlights and presents them as they would have been written. The resulting album is a decidedly mixed bag. [Nov 2024, p.73]

There’s a rejuvenated feel to this reunion album of the ‘dream team’, which is themed around the impact of sleep disruption from sleepwalking to nightmares. [Mar 2025, p.77]

This fifth edition's half-hour documents their second collaboration with Nurse With Wound and never fully recovers. [Sep 2022, p.83]