There's an undeniable feeling of bile over content. [Nov 2005, p.100]

Generally, the undistinguished R&B pop and trite lyrics he and his long-term bandmates come up with bear no comparison to the salty good cheer of 'It Don't Come Easy' and 'Photograph.' [Feb 2008, p.100]

Satriani, a Hendrix obsessive, is brilliant throughout. But above all, it's the quality of their songs that makes Chickenfoot more than just a rich rock star's hobby. [Jan 2012, p.100]

Surprises include End Of Night, nicely brutish electro-pop where Dido's automaton vocal really works; funked-up raga/calypso Love To Blame; and Sitting On The Roof Of The World.... Otherwise, Musak coming soon to a changing room near you. [May 2013, p.88]

The result is confusing, as with any roots artist messing with synths and beats. Even so, when he doing his familiar stark, keening vocal and raw country-blues thing and sentimental lighters-aloft pop, he's still deeply impressive. [Jul 2016, p.92]

While other Clansmen excel are building intricate metaphors and vivid storytelling, Method Man is all about swaggering confidence and masterflow flows. [Sep 2015, p.93]

She's got soul all right. [Sept. 2011, p. 94]

The blue-collar earnestness is still served in large dollops, but there;s a sense of over-reach about the whole thing. [May 2011, p.100]

The 'Lab's fondness for Latin exotica pushes the music well clear of egghead tedium.

Nothing on The Spine drills into your cerebral cortex and demands to be whistled on public transport like earlier hits, but the tunes are agreeable enough. [Aug 2004, p.99]

This record does not return [Ice Cube] to his early 1990s heyday, but proves he still has sufficient desire to make angry, focused music. [Aug 2006, p.90]

Keep Calm...is a perfectly good album, but it strives for nothing more. [Dec 2009, p. 90]

It's more showbiz than authentic, being knee-deep in the kind of epic balladry that wouldn't be out of place at Eurovision. [Apr 2013, p.91]

Guitar thrashes, mystic excursions, slabs of heavy blues and silvers of electronica. [Sep 2013, p.90]

Further evolution is needed to forge an identity from the shadows of their contemporaries. [Feb 2016, p.98]

It's no instant hit, but some cracking songs like Moths In The Gas Light and Dancing In The Ruin rise to the top and a brilliantly vivid production keeps you riveted. [Dec 2017, p.90]

Though it's certainly refreshing after the murk of 2002's Evil Heat, the results are still variable. [Jul 2006, p.104]

The singer's second solo album is far removed from VR's ass-kicking hard rock. [Feb 2009, p.108]

Post-techno production adds a depth and sheen to these fragile ruminations on the melancholy minutiae of existence. [Aug 2002, p.110]

Though the detail in these blurred vignettes sometimes upstages the foreground, the moments of magic make the odd longueur worth enduring. [Sep 2004, p.95]

Listening eventually becomes a test of endurance for anyone raised on the true country sounds of a Dolly Parton or Emmylou Harris. [Dec 2002, p.115]

On Trapped Animal they bring that approach to bear on a wider range of styles--dancehall, digi-dub, roots reggae, lover's rock - although the title track and Reject stand out as the most originally shaped punky pop songs. [Dec 2009, p. 95]

Coldplay-style ascendance is entirely within reach. [May 2012, p.92]

He sounds as raw and vital as ever. [Feb 2010, p. 105]

Corgan allows a surprisingly vulnerable side to appear. [Jul 2005, p.96]

The overall effect is like being trapped in a lift with McFly on a sugar-rush. [Apr 2011, p.98]

They return with an album that tries hard to please, its brace of ultra-catchy, bubblegum dance-pop tracks constructed from teh same building blocks as Tom Tom Club's playground. [Sept. 2011, p. 98]

Yet if neurosis, despair and paranoia remain his materials, here he uses them well. In as impressive voice as ever been. [Apr 2026, p.84]

It's a curiously dated backdrop that, although sitting well with Smith's occasionally pompous lyrics, does no favours to the singer's foghorn baritone; a problem that might have been saved by some radio-friendly tunes, which are notably thin on the ground this time. [Nov 2009, p.90]

Ultimately though, too much of Echo is over familiar. By the end you find yourself longing for some subtlety or more light and shade.

It's the songs on which she distances herself from that occasionally tiresome persona where she really shines. [Aug 2009, p.94]

It's when Duffy and co stop trying so hard that the album fairs best. [Jan. 2011, p. 100]

When it works, it's genuinely exciting, but too often the brave retro-futuristic collision is neither fish nor fowl. [Jul 2013, p.82]

It makes poetic sense but, like many autobiographical songwriters, he knows the stories so well he fails to tell them. [Feb 2008, p.112]

While it might've been more digestible as a single CD, Black strives for a wide scope that makes the album's elegant songcraft, musical telepathy and poetic unpredictability all the more satisfying. [Aug 2006, p.104]

Sounds like one long mobile phone ad. [Mar 2013, p.98]

It delivers drama in spades. [Jun 2013, p.95]

Sweet, then, but you wouldn't eat a whole one. [Apr 2014, p.98]

The new focus on these songs' lyrics proves deeply powerful, a different and profound kind of high. Consequently, The Dark Side OF The Moon Redux is wholly valid, the unnerving, stirring adjunct Waters was aiming for. [Nov 2023, p.87]

Flamingo is, for all intents and purpose, the next Killers record. [Oct. 2010, p. 106]

Sometimes great, often enchanting, and always disarmingly self-aware portrait of a doomed and wounded hero. [Oct 2013, p.87]

In a nutshell, if you liked the previous stuff, you'll like this... it has as much right to a place in the world as Huey Lewis and the News ever did.

Santana plays gloriously throughout. [Jan 2003, p.97]

Highly listenable and equally danceable, a kind of Pet Shop Boys meet Gary Numan at the gates of Georgio Moroder. (Sep 2000, p.95)

The sneeringly portrentious title and tracks called'Being Bad Feels Pretty Good' or Epic Last Song' would be forgivable--japes, even--if there were a sense of bona fide abandon bubbling beneath the synth squelches, vocoder-shrouded vocals and obligatory cowbell bashing. [Apr 2008, p.114]

For the most part his tribute to Duke Ellington works in the way that should keep purist onside. [Aug 2012, p.96]

2012;s Rhine Gold album leant more on burbling electronica, while Grasque pushes further still, into slow R&B jams, chillwave, even George Michael when Makrigiannis uses his higher register. [Mar 2016, p.95]

Ever constructed around our hero's robust tenor and rattling acoustic, then adorned with A-grade orchestration, it inescapably evokes Urban Hymns. [Nov 2018, p.93]

It's largely horrible, but sometimes impressively so. [Dec 2014, p.94]

Sadly, if you possess any of Embrace's four other albums, you'll have heard it all before. [May 2006, p.98]

It proves to be a violent, uncompromising record throughout...

Legion of Boom is more like the soundtrack to a horror movie than a night of DJ breaks and body shakes. [Feb 2004, p.102]

The formula eventually sags. [Oct 2002, p.92]

They've surpassed most of their contemporaries to climb right to the top of the chill-out tree. [Sep 2004, p.104]

A majorly impressive debut. [Aug. 2011, p. 100]

It's rocky Americana: swaggering and infuriatingly satisfying. [Apr 2011, p.97]

It's a sumptuous collection. [Nov 2014, p.100]

Much of With You Tonight lacks vim and will likely have vacated your memory by tomorrow. [Mar 2017, p.90]

It is mainly a joyous affair, good-timey in a well structured way and often reminiscent of the kind of thing Johnny Rivers used to dispense at the start of the '70s. [Apr 2009, p.101]

Polished and platitude-laden but hugely effective. [May 2015, p.100]

Unfortunately, Afterglow further embraces, and is overshadowed by, his influences. [Jun 2017, p.91]

Much of this album's re-booting of Waits' back pages in an ambient '80s style is fussy and forgettable. [June 2008, p.112]

Glasvegas retain their open-throated passion, anthemicism and the very distinctive Caledonian character of James Allan's voice, but these qualities are now sometimes a little lost in widescreen--like tears in rain, like synths in multi-track. [May 2011, p.105]

John Legend phones it in somewhat, and Ghostface Killah makes little sense, but the brain-pummelling tecno that punctuates the latter's profane offerings certainly makes the best of it. [Jul 2009, p.106]

[Apr 2012, p.88]

Tracks recorded with Cyndi Lauper and Primal Scream suggest some pruning might have made for a more impactful listening experience. [Jun 2016, p.88]

Producers Ron Anielo and Matthew Koma stick to the formula. And it's not enough. [Oct 2017, p.94]

The Endless River is big on atmosphere, just a little light on songs. [Dec 2014, p.88]

A major step up, until Nas fluffs the rhyme ball spouting credulity-testing conspiracies. [Sep 2018, p.96]

The thick strings lead to fumbles, as imagination is constrained by technique. [Sep 2009, p.104]

Love Frequency feels overly polished and not entirely convincing. [Jul 2014, p.91]

Much of Better Living recalls that time when the ugly end of post-Crass anarcho punk segued into the metallic sounds of grindcore... when melody seemed bourgeois and energy was the most valued commodity. [May 2012, p.92]

Twenty-five years after their creative peak, it seems as essential a purchase as a book of new jokes from Bobby Darvo. [Nov 2009, p.91]

Most tracks succumb to unambitious disco stylings. [Sep 2001, p.108]

As fine as anything he's done, but overall Grand Champ makes too many R&B concessions to be a fitting epitaph to his record-breaking career. [Nov 2003, p.129]

At their best, as in 'Sometimes,' they drag you into their circling obsessiveness and measured rhetoric. But, too often, Yoav's cleverness feels calculating--unless it's the reverse that, over-tasked. [May 2008]

Stripped back to vocals, drums and piano not a million miles from Nick Cave's Boatman's Call, of 10 tracks, not one's a duffer. [May 2013, p.87]

The results are hardly raw skiffle, more sophisto-shimmery roots. Best on Fleetwood Mac-ish Butter Flutter but over-long and mawkish (SOS, for Syria). [Dec 2017, p.96]

The World is Yours falls too short. [October 2007, p.102]

Too much of this sounds like recycled plastic pop. [Dec 2024 p.84]

A rare feat: gentle and kind without becoming soppy or daft. [May 2005, p.109]

A charged return. [Mar 2006, p.96]

Much of Supermodel feels alienatingly dense. [May 2014, p.86]

Papa Roch no doubt think there's venom in songs like Hollywood Whore--and they're certainly more visceral heard live here--but these ears just hear the low-IQ goofiness of Motley Crue combined with the stylistic similarities of rockers-by-rote Nickelback. [Sep 2010, p.96]

Packs too many failed experiments. [Dec. 2011 p. 98]

Stragglers carp it's not as good as 1985, fans thrill to the fractal energies. [Dec 2014, p.102]

It's a wholehearted, utopian and irrefutably exciting record. [Nov 2007, p.94]

Godhead take this '80's obsession one step further, crafting a sound so hypnotically synthetic it makes Heaven 17 sound like Robert Johnson. [Feb 2001, p.94]

Worth a listen, but not game-changing. [Apr 2016, p.103]

California five-piece coming soon to a stadium near you. [Sept. 2011, p. 100]

There's a confident, liberated spirit at play. [May 2005, p.95]

The songs are beautifully crafted in that Davies/Weller/Doherty English tradition. [Aug 2008, p.103]

Emotion & Commotion embraces tunes so big you'd think no more could be wrung into them. [May 2010, p. 93]

The hi-gloss but uneven Credo only partially convinces. [Feb 2011, p.100]

What could have been overly esoteric instead recalls Vampire Weekend playfulness, albeit with 4/4 beats. [Jul 2013, p.96]

Of seven swing covers and duets, only the high camp title track with Rufus Wainwright sparkles. [Dec 2013, p.92]

Embrace is schizophrenic stab at modernity, bolting synths and clattering drum patterns to forgettable harmonies, with limp results. [May 2014, p.88]

Intelligent, pan-generation pop you won't mind taking your teenager to the O2 to see. [Jul 2014, p.96]