It's wise, but rhythmically, musically, it feels Byrne's age. [May 2018, p.91]

Ninth album Quiet And Peace is roughly one third quiet, peaceful and Chris Stapleton-like. ... elsewhere, All Be Gone and Lonely Fast And Deep recall the lumberjack Lemonheads of '93, but there's forward motion too. [May 2018, p.90]

The music is taut, compressed and, in places, vulnerable and beautifully resonant. [May 2018, p.90]

The histrionic power ballad title track is an undeniable hoot. It's just a shame that so little of the rest of the album makes any lasting impression. [May 2018, p.90]

There are plenty of great songs on here, but no stone-cold classic. [May 2018, p.86]

There’s a surprisingly thoughtful plague-themed concept running throughout, which, if you care to dig deep enough, equates the sins of the medieval church with today’s societal ills. All this elevates Ghost above the herd, placing them in the sacred company of Blue Öyster Cult and Marilyn Manson.

A clearly more reflective Springsteen emerged on tracks such as Tougher Than The Rest and One Step Up, the songs’ minimal backing placing emotions front and centre. It was a more scatter-gun Springsteen on Human Touch and Lucky Town, released on the same day in 1992, his hired studio hands struggling to provide the same heft as their predecessors, but the likes of Better Days and If I Should Fall Behind from the latter album shone like diamonds in the rubble.

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

A loose concept album that charts the lows, highs and subsequent recovery of its protagonist, sonically it’s punchier, angrier even, than previous records.

Eat The Elephant gradually gains heft while staying intriguingly unpredictable.

The album concludes with Nicky Wire’s grainy lead vocal on The Left Behind, a charmingly offbeat detour into 1980s indie-rock. More of these eccentric tonal variations would have been welcome on an album that emerges as a solid exercise in arena-sized anthemics, majestic in parts but not a career peak.

Visconti busies it up, eking out build-ups and layering the ambient sound of a crowd arguing on We’re So Nice, while closer I Don’t Care gets jazzy. Overall, though, this is a well-behaved, orderly Damned: stoic, steady-handed and spirited.

If their debut was dependent on painkillers, Reiðl is the sound of a band beginning to heal.

If this is the last resurrected Hendrix studio material the world will see, then it’s a creditable send-off, yet we doubt it’s the last gasp it occasionally resembles.

AmeriKKKant feels like a measured response to the times.

When You’re Depressed is the jauntiest, most real song about depression since Paint It Black. Zelda’s In The Spotlight recalls genius early Mute made-up childlike electro-pop band Silicon Teens. If you can resist an album that features a glam-stomp titled 12 Knickers On The Line By 3 Chord Fraud you’re a better person than I am.

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.

Just plain beautiful.

They’re not world beaters yet, but Starcrawler’s creepy appeal shouldn’t be underestimated.

There’s no pretense of indie cool here. Drive Me Wild features a blaring sax for an 80s viewed through a prism of nostalgia for a decade they never knew, and a towering, phones-in-the-air chorus, while ballad Cry ups the overblown ante even further.

Each and every one of the songs on Priest’s latest full-length Firepower--and yes, we know Legs Diamond were there first--are three-way collaborations between fellow six-stringer Glenn Tipton, frontman Rob Halford and Faulkner himself. And hell, the latter doesn’t so much step up to the plate on this, the second album of Priest’s BOK (Beyond Our Ken) era, as trample it into tiny little pieces.

Thematically, if previous Andrew WK albums have felt like having entire kegs shotgunned in your face, this one is like being syphon-fed after-dinner brandies.

The rehearsal tapes (appended as ‘Bonus Discs’ for some reason) are a raucous mesh of noise and then stabs of brilliant invention that cut through like a radio signal coming out of white noise. The unpublished photographs, nuanced liner notes and, deliciously, a download code for yet another concert (Hyde Park, 1971) not only reaffirm Fripp’s tenacity to keep creating and doing things in his own way, but to also frame those moments, hold them forever and see them sparkling in the light.

A brilliantly put-together collection from one of popular music’s most important cities.

Legend Of The Seagullmen is inventive, eclectic and gleefully unhinged, but if there are any criticisms to be made it’s that it’s over too soon.

Overall the album comes together in somewhat less cohesive fashion than Ride Out, and listeners may end up wishing for a Seger to take firmer grip on the steering wheel for one final album.

Produced by Youth, it’s a routeone volley of loud guitar riffs and peripatetic punk energy, railing at the establishment. It’s our world, they roar, and it’s on fire, so let’s not go gently.

Echo is a lustrous cosmic echo of Walk On The Wild Side, while the Doorsy atmospherics and celestial hooks of Ninth Configuration and Question Of Faith shroud personal and religious soul-searching that suggest Wrong Creatures is actually a conversation with their younger, wronger selves. Certainly the dark carnival of Circus Bazooko and stirring postrock finale All Rise prove they’re tackling their crippling Psychocandy addiction, making Wrong Creatures something of a colourful rebirth.