For The Sake Of Bethel Woods confirmed that they are not the band they once were but A Bridge To Far flows directly on from there with many of the songs more theoretical in nature. [Dec 2025, p.78]

The title track about wanting to know more about your partner, is strong enough to rise above the clichés, but some others are not so fortunate. [Jun 2022, p.79]

It's mainly chirpy, dance-floor stuff. [Jul 2014, p.92]

A collection of songs so sugar-coated it should probably have been packaged with insulin. [Oct 2025, p.72]

Stockdale’s magpie career continues to show not an inkling of musical mutation. Let’s call it treadmill rock--one man putting a lot of effort into going absolutely nowhere.

The predictable impression of a rich man's plaything cast with superior company remains. [Aug 2013, p.84]

The lyrics are packed with so many trite clichés that you can’t help but wince, whether he’s wishing for world peace on Make Love Not War (which manages to make room for the Trump-supporting Love to thank the USA ‘and all the folks protecting us very day’), dredging up seafaring love metaphors on Too Cruel or fashioning sappy eco ballads like Only One Earth.

It would be exhausting to list all the crimes these two commit in the name of rock'n'roll on this record. ... Risible. [Sep 2022, p.75]

The worst thing is, for all the nauseating country-rock-lite choruses, this is agonisingly catchy. [Summer 2013, p.89]

The Kids Are coming (To Take You Down) is the one highlight of the album, a thundering radio anthem redolent of Cheap Trick. Its carefree joy is notably absent pretty much everywhere else. [Nov 2019, p.81]

At times recalling the impressive yet aimless psych squalls of early Verve, Ride or Tame Impala, and at others of Can trying to make sense of 1980s pop radio. [Aug 2018, p.91]

Post-pop indie rock at its drabbest. [Jun 2020, p.89]

As a collection, Anthology 4 charts a parallel path through the Beatles’ career, one with a tacky postscript in the 21st century. As a Beatles record, it is not very good, offering nothing exciting in terms of rarities (wow, the “strings only” version of Something from the Abbey Road 50th anniversary edition) or insight. [Dec 2025, p.84]

The songs themselves are among Lennon's worst. .... This reissue comes in a box full of new mixes - several CDs or vinyl LPs of Raw Mixes, Ultimate mixes and Out-Takes, none of which add anything much other than a sense that one's ears have been syringed for no good reason. [Summer 2024, p.83]

The majority is syncopated lightweight pop, as if selected by algorithms for mass consumption. [Aug 2024, p.72]

Some reasonably good live music (Elephant’s Memory bring to Lennon’s music a bluesy heaviness that sometimes suits it and sometimes doesn’t), some intriguing demos (arguably the best material here, whether it be rare Lennon originals or decent rock’n’roll covers) and most of Some Time In New York City, an album that suffers from: a) being terrible, especially The Luck Of The Irish, a song that makes Ed Sheeran’s Galway Girl sound like The Chieftains), and b) the omission of its one great song, whose title means it has been excised from the album. One for the history buffs. [Nov 2025, p.84]

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

A great version of The Fugs' Carpe Diem aside, Everybody Loves Sausages feels like an in-joke that was never funny to begin with. [May 2013, p.87]

One of the most musically interesting things he's done in years. ... However, a bitter aftertaste lingers long after the final notes. [May 2020, p.79]

A classical version of a rock album only reveals how tonally conservative rock is (formally, Quadrophenia’s compositions would have sounded hidebound in the late 19th century), while at the same time revealing classical music’s inability to convey the electric volatility and the spine-tingling, physical frisson that’s unique to rock.

As it is, there’s a certain Wagnerian tweeness about the record, its changes predictable, it’s progressions too easily resolved, his tunings over-familiar. The whole thing feels like drinking several pints of spring water.

Snapshot consists largely of new material written to ape the 50s and 60s standards they've been covering live since puberty. And that's it's downfall. [Nov 2013, p.95]

As a compendium of rock styles, it’s hard to beat--maybe that’s what they mean by Little Victories. But it’s all quite characterless.

All flutes and bubbles, A Jammed Exit could be a Jethro Tull B-side, and only dedicated lovers of the eight-minute free-form scree solo need apply to Nervous Tech (Nah John), which is essentially Frank Zappa having a fit. Run for the exits.

Papa Roach's not entirely convincing attempt to music in on the action. [Feb 2019, p.88]

From the manically undistinguished soloing of The Tempter Push to the leaden progressions of Walk Alone, it is uniquely generic, extraordinarily ordinary.

As a trad dad pastiche it isn’t funny enough, and as a parallel career it’s a painful vanity project. Either way, avoid.

All the emo-rooted, posthardcore stylistic hallmarks are present and correct, embellished with a load of electronic arsing about on top, but the almost constant use of the same soaring ‘wo-ah’ pop hooks will soon have you wanting to hack your ears off with a pair of blunt scissors.