The Overview is not so much a return to form (Wilson hasn’t been off it) as a return to full-fat, unskimmed prog from the man whose work with Porcupine Tree gave the genre a good name even before it earned reappraisals in more recent years. [Apr 2025, p.72]

Mature in a good way, this is an excellent album. [Apr 2025, p.77]

It's an album outside its own time, designed to intrigue the dedicated few rather than service the content-consuming many, and if nothing else it's bringing the art of enigmatic charisma back to the world of rock. [Apr 2025, p.74]

It's starkly, scarily beautiful and transcendent in places, chilling yet comforting in others. [Apr 2025, p.75]

An album that equals the original. [Apr 2025, p.77]

He tops it [2021's Blue Hearts] with Here We Go, thanks to a stripped back approach and a more hopeful lyrical tone. [Apr 2025, p.76]

Long on delicately gauzy, seductively shoegazey atmospheric, but short on whup-ass. [Apr 2025, p.77]

Universe Room continues the indie-prog leanings of last year's Strut Of Kings, as though R.E.M were dipping into the less coherent corners of Tommy and Nursery Cryme, but across its 17 tracks finds time for plenty of lo-fi diversion too. [Apr 2025, p.72]

The streak of familiarity that runs through the album is down to the way songwriters Wesley Schultz and Jeremiah Fraites construct their folk-pop melodies and arrangements, but they've given their sound a fresh impetus. [Apr 2025, p.70]

A charming history emerges from Young's immerse archive. [Apr 2025, p.70]

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]

Friar Tuck is a humorous and bewildered look at the modern world from a man who has never quite seemed a part of it. [Feb 2025, p.75]

A good deal more than alreet, for sure [Mar 2025, p.75]

Their second album sets its heart-on-sleeve emoting to some properly sweeping arena-sized tunes. [Mar 2025, p.75]

Iggy is in fine voice throughout, raising a middle finger to both age and doubters. [Mar 2025, p.76]

With Bloom, Larkin Poe prove they’ve got the whole authenticity thing locked down. [Mar 2025, p.76]

This is much more raw Manic Street Preachers, fuelled by despair as usual but also simplicity. .... Critical Thinking shows that with the Manics, rage never sleeps. [Feb 2025, p.72]

Lambrini Girls are political but transgressive, smart but not pretentious (no way!), humourous, but dark - very dark indeed. Subversive, in all the hidden senses of the word. [Feb 2025, p.73]

An album that exudes warmth pretty much at every turn. [Feb 2025, p.72]

It's the album's embrace of retro-futurist video arcade electronica on The Doctor and Hooked, verging at times on a lascivious indie Prodigy, that keeps Franz Ferdinand surprising 20 years in. [Feb 2025, p.72]

Merciless - their eighth - doubles down on that solid breakneck thrash metal/hardcore [heard on 2020's Carnivore]. [Dec 2024, p.76]

Eerie fingerstyle guitar playing decorates Bibb’s checklist for better living (‘Get to know your neighbours, especially the ones who don’t look like you’). [Jan 2025, p.83]

Sensitive and thoughtful doesn’t have to mean a lack of a good time. [Jan 2025, p.78]

Gabbard played all the instruments himself, which is admirable but limiting. He needs a band to break up the somewhat metronomic feel. And a producer who can bring a radio-friendly flourish. [Jan 2025, p.82]

Stephen Lawrie grumbles dutifully over the anticipated Spacemen 3 guitar squalls, and tracks like Shake It All Out and This Train Rolls On do their traditional misery-in-motion thing. Nothing Matters suggests an out-take from Iggy’s The Idiot that was ditched for resembling Dum Dum Boys too closely. [Oct 2024, p.74]

Things take a kitschy turn for the sickly sweet. [Dec 2024, p.79]

A CD of unreleased outtakes, which doesn’t just bring the creation of the songs to life, it brings the people behind them to life too. .... More than just a celebration of an album, Queen I provides a vivid snapshot of a moment in time. [Nov 2024, p.82]

Thanks to some multitrack tapes of exceptional quality, mixed by Young and Stills, we get to hear what all the justified fuss was about. Divided between acoustic and electric sets, this is a joy from start to finish. [Dec 2024, p.85]