The songs are wrought elaborately enough.... Yet this album seems carefully calibrated not to disappoint the conservative fan.

His new album is also self-penned, with mixed results.

A droll, tender-hearted and richly rewarding album.

Plodding, overwrought gospel epics like Shine and Tempted are the order of the day, pale passionless shadows of the Mode’s mighty, desperate Condemnation.... Things improve on the starker latter half.

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.

There’s much to enjoy about Pylon, not least on the punitive, jet-black musical side of things.

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.

Everybody Come To Church is designed to be repellant to the bovine majority, but if the world’s going to burn, it comes as a perfect soundtrack.

After initial queasiness at a moment of amorousness in Eraser (‘I’m just a toy waiting for you to play me’), it quickly becomes business as usual in terms of their shamelessly enormous pop-rock music.

Psychic Warfare remains in the same succinct and bullish territory that made Earth Rocker such a straightforward joy.

This follow-up is, if anything, even more exquisite.

From tension-riddled songs like Two Places to the instrumental Outromistra (EM Forster with guitars), this is a confident and exciting high for the band, at a time when most bands of their era are looking for their reading glasses.

Silence In The Snow is not a classic album, but this puts Trivium firmly back on course.

Somehow, his voice remains--a ghostly, spellbinding croon that swims through wastelands of strings and synths, making Noctunes unfold like an alternative soundtrack to Twin Peaks.

With That’s The Spirit, they’ve hit a new direction and a creative peak that finally matches their thirst for fame and fortune.

Hansard says of his emotional, spiritual and musical journey to complete this record. He’s succeeded. Ramble on, indeed.

The cover of Tift Merritt’s Bramble Rose is affecting too, a stately country shuffle that finds Henley trading verses with Lambert over pedal steel and mandolin, while Jagger blows harmonica and sings like a cat pleading to be let in from the rain. At other times, the album is less successful, particularly when it falls back on weepy honky-tonk tropes.

The band focus on capturing moments rather than arranging songs, interspersing tracks with tone poems including Millenial Prayer.

Nine albums and 12 years into their journey, Hey Colossus have never sounded better.

Highlights are the punchy pop-metal of Got The Power and the greasy glamorama of The Reverend, replete with satisfyingly fuzzy guitar, but Zipper Down misses as much as it hits.

This album takes Graveyard into a new realm, marking them as modern blues-rock craftsmen par excellence.

An assured piece of reach-for-the-stars hard rock, sure to thrive live.

With shades of Tool and Aereogramme, but mainly its own beast, Polaris is pure confidence converted into sound.

With intelligently handled subject matter to stand alongside the likes of Bikini Kill, and sparkling but off-kilter melodic skills that allow comparisons to Yeah Yeah Yeah’s Karen O, Gender Bender has empathy to spare, and is a punk rock poet to believe in.

With all profits going to MusiCares, it’s a worthy effort--if not an entirely worthwhile one.

It’s all a bit glazed over, grungeless, too well finished, lacking the sense of suppurating wounds.

A gentle watercolour portrait of the artist as a young man.

Picking up from last year’s Big Bill Broonzy tribute Common Ground, here the Alvins run riot on another covers set.