All this may seem so exhaustive as to verge on the absurd, but fear not. It is the most fascinating document imaginable. [Dec 2016, p.100]

Her reading of Anthem makes Leonard Cohen’s hymn to resilience and resistance feel like a bespoke gift from another writer who knew about life in the shadows. .... It’s as that distant flickering light, illuminating the path to better times, that Staples excels. [Dec 2025, p.76]

[An] alarming intimacy is the bedrock of Devils & Dust. [Jun 2005, p.92]

The quantity and quality of the songs they have unearthed that didn't make it onto Deja Vu is pretty amazing. [Jun 2021, p.99]

Snocaps might plan on melting away as quickly as they formed, but here, at least, they've left an indelible mark. [Jan 2026, p.80]

New stuff for him every bit, from pain to process, and consequently unprecedented in his previous work is the sweet melancholy measure of his voice. His songwriting, too, emerges liberated, lyrics forged, melodies flowing. [Apr 2013, p.86]

Intense, painfully frank, hysterically funny,and in the end, exultant... OSIGTS isn't always an easy listen, but it does offer a fearless experience that invests pop with more theatricality than the form can usually tolerate. [Jul 2012, p.80]

Isolation doesn't get more splendid than this. [June 2008, p.100]

[An] outstanding piece of work. [Feb 2012, p.92]

What's really mind-blowing is the audio quality of that initial 60-year-old performance (and indeed, the box set in general), which is so lucid that it sounds as if Miles is in the room playing right next to you. [Aug 2015, p.106]

All of the new mix’s strengths are writ large here. Ringo is restored. The voices feel ‘properly’ balanced and positioned. And in general, where there was whimsy (the bête noire of most Pepper agnostics) the power of solid drums and central voices irons it out. ... It’s an album--maybe the album.

It's among the best albums ever made. [Nov 2002, p.92]

It still vibrates with Warren Ellis's ominous, cosmic-radiation synthesizers and loops, but Ghosteen is less tightly coiled and knotted. ... Cave finds a way to reach out, and reach through. [Dec 2019, p.87]

It's never just meat and potatoes. It's more like eating bone marrow in a fashionable restaurant - earthy, carnivorous but still beautifully designed and knowingly conceptualized. [Jan 2012, p.88]

Idiot Prayer is extraordinary, breathtakingly varied within its minimal format, and compelling throughout. [Dec 2020, p.84]

This 4-CD box is the monument to both the cult and the art. And it's great. [Oct 2009, p.117]

Seductive, stirring songs about crushed hope and the corruption of beauty and some of their most ambitious arrangements make this their most fully-realised and accomplished album yet. [Mar 2003, p.98]

Their most affecting and cohesive statement to date. [Oct 2001, p.108]

An album of colossal strength and maturity. [Sep 2006, p.104]

An album virtually bereft of fluff and filler. [Album Of The Month] [Oct 2001, p.104]

Their debut, Mono, gave voice to little beyond their frustration, and the distance between that impressively venomous fit of black-hearted flailing and Penance Soiree's stereopathic, multiphonic attack is similar to that between Nirvana's Bleach and Nevermind. [May 2004, p.94]

It's as good as anything in this group's monstrous catalogue. [Dec 2003, p.120]

Greying at the edges, its tremor more pronounced, his voice is sober, honest, defiant. And it turns rock songs into something that sounds as old as the hills.

Here, backed only by guitar or piano, she inhabits other singers' material (including Smog's "Red Apples") with a fierce conviction that's often startling.

This is a great record for and about New Orleans and one of the best the two men have ever made. [Jun 2006, p.96]

Despite a shared Giorgio Moroder influence, they are more DAF meets Soft Cell and early Detroit techno than a 21st century Human League.

Magic.... Its rhapsodies present a portait of an artist at an early height of his powers. [Feb 2005, p.102]

Like [Brian Wilson's] Smile, it extends the language of pop, setting a fearsome standard for anyone equal to the challenge of matching his limitless invention. [Jun 2007, p.98]

An album that sounds effortless, but at times almost dissyingly diverse--imagine The White Album, but made by happy people. [May 2006, p.96]

Holmes is scrabbling throught he ashes of Vegas strip supper-club jazz to craft a decidedly 21st century soundtrack, mourning its passing while happily rifling its pockets. [Album of the Month, Feb 2002, p.90]

The former Talking Head has rarely sounded so vital.

Listen to Frances The Mute without any prog-induced prejudice... and it emerges as the triumphant sound of a band bound only by their imagination. [Apr 2005, p.86]

If you can stick with its synthetic marionette oompah band designs, become immersed in its whirlwind momentum and flint-eyed wit, the chances are you'll fall in love with the album's deep miined reservoirs of charm and sheer eagerness to impress. [Sep 2004, p.90]

Grohl's pounding presence throughout lifts Killing Joke right back to the savage intensity of their early records.... The best punk album in years. [Aug 2003, p.106]

If Yoshimi.... lacks the sheer shock value of Bulletin's panoramic delirium, its peak moments are enough to make it one of 2002's most rewarding releases. [Album of the Month, Aug 2002, p.92]

A seamless, melodic blend of psychedelia and C&W... the songs and instrumentals here hang together beautifully. [Nov 2004, p.95]

Walks the same Cold War-era Bowery streets as Interpol but is not more than a half step away from lysergic brilliance. [May 2005, p.108]

A work of uncommon beauty and torment. [Mar 2004, p.95]

This is classic Cure. Three listens and you'll love it.

So sweet is the harmonic construction that awareness of the ecclesiastical niceties of such as The Transfiguration... is incidental to falling under the divine spell. [May 2004, p.105]

The genius of past Outkast isn't diluted or diminished across these disks, rather it's doubled, expanded and explored. [Sep 2003, p.99]

Could well be her finest yet. [Oct 2001, p.128]

It is Newsom's voice that provides the stunning balm to bind this strange beauty together. [Dec 2006, p.118]

Melds way-out weird with a pop welcome that sounds like no one else around right now. [May 2004, p.105]

This is a raging leviathan of a set, each track a powerful, swaggering anthem. [May 2002, p.97]

If anything, surpasses its illustrious predecessor. [Sep 2001, p.98]

There's a narcotic quality to these drifting ballads, one that perfectly suits these shell shocked, terrorised times. As the world gears up for the Apocalypse, I shall take comfort in Bavarian Fruit Bread -- a very haunting, beautiful record. [Nov 2001]

A drizzly doomsday masterpiece. [Nov 2004, p.108]

[A] sensual, endlessly inventive record. [Aug 2003, p.106]

Arguably the band's most magical record to date. [Nov 2003, p.123]

An extraordinary album. [Aug 2002, p.95]

Beautifully recorded, this is intimate seduction for voice, elegant finger-picked guitar and not much else. [May 2004, p.93]

A masterpiece of controlled electronic violence. [Nov 2004, p.102]

There's no easy niche in which you can place this new statement: like Dylan's Time Out Of Mind, it ventures into a doomy, mythological area, where the directions are muddied and the heartbreak is total. [Jul 2001, p.98]

2006's album of the year may have arrived early. [Mar 2006, p.104]

This is unmistakeably the Arctics, only stronger, harder, sharper, faster.... An extraordinary and fulfilling sequel to their debut. [May 2007, p.100]

As complex, compelling, and at times unsettling a record as Cale has unleashed since 1982's Music For A New Society. [Oct 2003, p.105]

A nearly flawless set of left-field folk. [Jun 2004, p.106]

Those who want their Emmylou full of sweet, sad longing will play a quarter of this album to death.... Elsewhere, there's righteous anger and an assertiveness and sexuality to the love songs. [Nov 2003, p.128]

A stoner's paradise from start to finish. Most pleasurable.

The playing is terrific throughout... [Jan 2001, p.98]

Kissin Time is full with Faithfull's own history: disaster next to glory, next to the overriding feeling that, come what may, she will slide through it all by dint of charisma, wit and, indeed, charm. [Album Of The Month, March 2002, p.98]

A beautiful, fragile, record that demands your full attention, then pays back dividends.

If this is to be Cash's last album, then what a magnificent way he has chosen to say goodbye. [Album of the Month, Dec 2002, p.100]

Hood have crafted a singular meeting of modern electronics, carefully layered arrangements and more conventional rock melancholia. [Dec 2001, p.96]

As one MOJO staffer commented, "This sounds like I'm trapped inside a damaged mechanical brain." Yes, it's that good. [May 2001, p.116]

This is an album of stadium sized melodies and exquisite songwriting, allied with almost too many ideas. [Jun 2003, p.110]

A phenomenal album.... As always, Wire embrace the technology of the day while always sounding somehow out of time. [May 2003, p.91]

This is a truly freeflowing masterpiece that stands shoulder to shoulder with Mos Def's 'Black On Both Sides.'

Like a cookie full of arsenic, Universal Audio's indie sweetness conceals a dark, deathly heart. [Nov 2004, p.114]

A focused tour de force. [Oct 2006, p.100]

Sea Change aches too thoroughly to be mere career shift. It's the kind of album that at times seems too sad for the singer's own good. [Album of the Month, Oct 2002, p.90]

Measuring out grief and resilience with a steady hand, these are the best songs of Low's quiet career. [Feb 2001, p.98]

With The Private Press DJ Shadow ups even his own considerable ante. [May 2002, p.96]

These intimate hushes and lilts would be remarkable even as instrumentals.... Yet it's Nastasia's voice--and the words that it sings--that really sucks the air out of the room. [July 2003, p.102]

This relentlessly engaging album hangs together even better than its illustrious predecessor.

Magnificent. [Jul 2005, p.100]

Breathtaking moments, brilliant tunes, and Breakdown, a genuinely Beatles-league pop hit. [Nov 2004, p.114]

The work of a genuine individualist. [Aug 2001, p.108]

Paul Simon still has it.

Epic, exhilarating, extraordinary. [Feb 2004, p.98]

Often he sings with a richness, depth and conviction worthy of Johnny Cash. [Jan 2001, p.98]

Tender dream-pop which is simulataneously familiar and novel. [Aug 2004, p.96]

The Moon's musical and thematic diversity is glued together by Brooks' ability to instill even the most desolate musical climes with warmth and emotion.... One of the year's most oddly endearing records so far.

Winehouse remains one of modern music's most original voices and is now emerging as arguably the finest soul singer of her generation. [Nov 2006, p.116]

It is quizzical, troubled, socially concerned, compassionate, schizoid, retro-eclectic, strikingly modern, racially mixed--and even likes women. [Apr 2002, p.112]

Stories is a leaner, less experimental-sounding record than 1998's Is This Desire, its chips stacked on visceral power and vitalising vocals.

An astonishing album... a nu soul master that should ride high on any 21st century 'best of' lists. [Dec 2003, p.109]

Where Elephant does differ from what has gone before is in terms of quality. It's just better all round. [Apr 2003, p.88]

Nick Lowe has made the album of his career, a dozen stories of love and loss so beautifully simple that you'll never get to the bottom of them. [Nov 2001, p.12]

A fabulous, strangely soothing listen. [Feb 2004, p.100]

As a singer, the South Dakota-born, Ontario and Illinois-raised Colvin occupies a niche between pensive Sheryl Crow and pre-jazz Joni Mitchell: no histrionics but a telling, often moving restraint.

By putting some warm flesh on her musical bones, Chan Marshall is punching her considerable songwriting weight. [Jan 2006, p.116]

The wily creativity on display here is astonishing. [Jun 2004, p.114]

Every time you think you've got Idlewild figured out, it zips off in a totally unexpected new direction. [Oct 2006, p.97]

Godspeed have taken their by-now familiar elements and rearranged them in often beautiful or surprising ways.

Tender, wise, compassionate and magnanimous, it's a special, special record for anyone who has ever hurt. [Dec 2004, p.114]

A DIY epic whose brief sorties into often spellbinding instrumental territory are pitstops in which to muse upon profound, touching or witty lyrics. [May 2005, p.95]