The first seven tracks are wonderfully lush and mellow, but loses its way on the closing two-song suite, War/Peace. [Feb 2016, p.96]

A Henry Rollins cameo in the title track is tantalising: were he a constant presence, this set would really spark. [Nov 2016, p.96]

At their best melodically, Artificial lopes on Pornography-era Cure beats to a rousing Interpol angst chorus. Further on through, the various '82-91 moves become too familiar and the mood of despond too oppressive. [Apr 2018, p.95]

Joy Division, Suicide and JAMC collide for a post-punk racket: ear-splitting and sublimely desolate. [May 2018, p.98]

Reassuringly autumnal, it drifts by with the grace of a soaring kite. [Jun 2018, p.88]

She's an adept songwriter and lyricist, but the album's immutable modern poo production can start to pale. [Feb 2019, p.93]

Strawbs are clearly not intent on coasting. [Apr 2021, p.81]

“Don’t mind me… I’m a lazy sod,” sings Ian Gillan. Other daft lyrics such as “Mother nature’s keeping her socks on” support his confession, but Deep Purple’s indomitable frontman remains in fine voice and, musically at least, they sound reborn here. [Aug 2024, p.81]

Her alternately husky and tremulous Dolly Parton timbre weaves through a yacht rock/mid-'80s Fleetwood Mac hybrid (Spirit), a Eurovision-worthy almost power-ballad (Right Now) and the quasi-disco, gospel-edged shuffler Baby. [Apr 2025, p.80]

Cobb as a blockbuster album in him, but not quite yet. [Aug 2025, p.79]

Gravity the Seducer aims to be the great leap forward but still falls a little short. [Oct 2011, p.98]

It's full-bodied baroque. [Oct 2008, p.109]

It's over-reliance on Nine Inch Nails atmospherics and Boots's far from distinctive Bowie-lite croon could benefit from further tweaking. [Dec 2015, p.92]

The blueprint's not rewritten, but Something From Nothing and The Feast & The Famine dose the Foos format with steroids, while Grohl's earnest delivery redeems the occasional detour into cliche. [Dec 2014, p.89]

Tankian has created a forward-thinking album that swerves convention. [Dec 2007, p.98]

Simply played, gently sung, graceful, literate, folk rock. [Apr 2006, p.98]

In the end you're left with a creeping sense of missed chances, made more painful by the fact the Babyshambles have so obviously raised their game. [Oct 2007, p.88]

A record that twinkles with a smart electronic pop sheen. [Feb 2014, p.97]

There's some fight in Hard Habit To Break's elastic boxing-ring bravado, or the ambiguous needling bleep of Doing It To Death, but behind the pair's rangy insouciance lies a hollowness that, this time round, doesn't entirely convince as a deliberate artistic position. [Jul 2016, p.92]

This is a thing of deftly understated beauty from pillar to post. [Mar 2002, p.104]

Nurses aren't the undead, but Dracula has staying power. [Nov 2011, p.98]

Songs of promise, resilience and the occasional unpredictable turn. [Jul 2018, p.98]

While reining in the triumphalism, Demonstration suffers from an overbearing sense of its own importance. [Jan 2014, p.97]

The Worlocks remain a superior alloy of Velvets cool and narcotic Spaceman 3/MBV tropes. [Feb 2014, p.98]

More often than not, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that recent Animal Collective albums have loomed large in The Luya's collective subconscious. [May 2011, p.109]

The songs remain sweet and sad, delicately picked folk foregrounding a serene voice. [Aug 2017, p.97]

Indigo Meadow is their first to perfectly balance melody with noise. [Jun 2013, p.94]

Sean Lennon continues to impress. [Nov 2006, p.104]

The hits may well keep rolling in for Years & Years, but next time a bit more adventure wouldn't go amiss. [Sep 2015, p.87]

In catharsis lies energy, and this, ultimately, is a very joyful, uplifting album. [Nov 2008, p.108]

The band make each piece their own on this, their most satisfying set for years. [Dec 2008, p.102]

Foster's extraordinary voice is suited to Dickinson's poignant rhymes, and tracks like They Called Me To the Window and I see Thee Better -- In The Dark, are concentrated, exquisite and oddly moving. [Feb 2010, p. 101]

Much of the airbrushed pop-metal nous that elevated 1983's Pyromania and 1987's Hysteria back in evidence. [Feb 2016, p.92]

Solo he's more ruminative. [Apr 2020, p.91]

A piece of music caught between the human and alien, the reassuring and the uncanny. [May 2020, p.91]

Out There, but inclusive too. [Jan 2022, p.89]

Times feels like a valedictory vista - across time, money, sex and space travel. [May 2025, p.91]

Mike Scott still has something worthwhile to say, but on Out Of All This Blue you wish there was a little less of it. [Out 2017, p.91]

Pearl Jam grungemeister reveals self to be shameless romantic. {July 2011, p. 106]

Pleasant but risk adverse. [Mar 2014, p.88]

This trio's future pop debut is almost synthetically pristine. [Feb 2015, p.96]

Recent world events demand some kind of visceral response, and sonically, musically and emotionally, Hidden City's primal, from-the-heart worldview represents just that, unwittingly or not. [Mar 2016, p.90]

Undeniably grandiose as the Black Angels may be, the unrelenting darkness becomes too claustrophobic; even the Velvets sometimes let the sunshine in. [Aug 2008, p.113]

Drawn to look within, you run into the smart opacity of Reitherman's lyrics. [Sep 2009, p.96]

Although perhaps too much arrangement is thrown at the producer-penned opener Among The Believers, second track Forbidden Nights, written in 2009 by Elvis Costello, has a stronger melody. [Nov 2015, p.92]

Theatrical swishes of piano, mellotron, guitars and percussion back her powerful, red velvet voice. [Feb 2016, p.98]

Seasick's latest is unshakeably him. [Sep 2020, p.91]

While the rip-roaring Love Of A Girl owes much to Jet's Are You Gonna Be My Girl, the straight-down-the-line 2020 Regret is ripe to be covered by a country megastar, and standout Same broken Bones builds from an a cappella opening into keyboards-led gorgeousness. [Jul 2024, p.94]

The orchestral setting tempers the mannered vocal tics of some originals and proves transformative. [Dec 2012, p.96]

Van sounds relaxed and perfectly at ease. [Feb 2018, p.93]

Exotic, deep, unique. [Oct 2002, p.110]

If all you want to do is throw the same funky shapes you threw a decade ago, this long-awaited outing will more than suffice. Otherwise, it's the same old same old. [Jul 2001, p.114]

If the band's 2012 debut for the label, 119, attracted a certain amount of criticism from early-day fans due to its diversity, then No Peace is a more cohesive record. [Jul 2014, p.86]

A psychedelic soft rock treat that peaks with the uncanny, ethereal chord-changes of the sleep-walking Meet Me in The Air, but Poignancy, tunefulness and feeling abound throughout. [Sep 2018, p.94]

There's something rather comforting about finding them wholly unchanged after four decades and nearly 10 million album sales. [Sep 2019, p.89]

While it's debatable whether Empire Of The Sun deliver on a stated aim to make music that's "transcendental," you'll have a lot of fun hearing them try. [Jul 2013, p.85]

The skinny is it's more reminiscent of Led Zeppelin III and late-period Black Crowes. [Nov 2015, p.86]

A relentlessly effervescent electro/dancehall mash-up. [Jun 2013, p.89]

There are sublime moments - International Women Of Leisure, for instance, and Do You Feel, a homage to first ladies of disco songwriting such as Evelyn King and Gwen Guthrie - but other tracks, though taut and tight, become repetitive. [Mar 2020, p.92]

Heartfelt and brilliantly executed, it's a creative peak. [Feb 2013, p.89]

Far from sounding like the future, however, Situation is valiantly old school in its belief that the best rap is cultural commentary, poetic and from the heart--the modern blues basically. [Nov 2007, p.108]

There's a kernal of quality to Goodnight Unknown that renders Barlow's obsessive self-absorption palatable. [Nov 2009, p.102]

If the forward-looking, ever exploratory production just occasionally outguns the songwriting, Daft Punk-ish floor-filler The Last Dance is unimpeachable, a defiant shimmy toward the apocalypse. [Mar 2022, p.82]

More symphonic in structure than Herren's previous work and richer in melody and theme, it eschews loops in favor of fuzzy interference and acoustic vibrations. [Jun 2011, p.97]

She has the voacl talent of a young Alison Moyet, and thankfully this debut lives up to expectations. [Mar 2008, p.112]

This fuzzy psych soul suffers from too many Stones riffs, not enough fresh ideas. [Nov 2015, p.96]

Odd tracks recall Animal Collective, but these immersive 63 minutes mostly ripple with hallucinatory effect, overdubs virtually free of beats. [Sep 2017, p.92]

Polished arrangements in a mix of menacing, reverb-drenched grooves and languid shimmer. [Mar 2013, p.98]

Eighth LP settles into a classic rock groove. [Jan 2016, p.98]

An unusual 35 minutes, then, but Confection makes the perfect background for an evening of sophisticated seduction. [Feb 2014, p.95]

Baenziger takes nothing for granted when it comes to arrangements. where the song demands it, electronic textures are favoured--instincts which bear rich fruit on Willis and Skinnybone. [Apr 2011, p.95]

The results so far, as on 2006's martial piledriver "Empire," have both been levitating and gut-level, as befits a group who count DJ Shadow's "Endtroducing" and Oasis's "Definitely Maybe" among their musical epiphanies. These same virtues are all over "West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum." [Jul 2009, p.93]

Like much of UNKLE's work, the album feels a little bloated and too serious by half, but there are gems among the rubble. [June 2010, p. 97]

Remarkably, the bold, full-on cheese works, because this is an album of classic pop. [Apr 2010, p.93]

Low on polish but high on anything-goes exuberence, in Wavves-world The Beach Boys rub shoulders with Half Japanese, The Shaggs with Guided By Voices and Pavement with JFA, all held together with sneaker laces and stickers to create a bedroom-wall collage as scruffy as it is irresistible. [Aug 2009, p.96]

These stark, sweet confessionals easily rank among the best of his career. [Nov 2004, p.108]

It recollects emotion with a raging tranquillity, artistic objectivity overruling self-pity. [Jul 2003, p.110]

Innovative? No. Impeccable? Yes. [Apr 2004, p.114]

The cleaning up, editing and resequencing has brought out a warmth and depth of colour we've not heard before and allows the album to stand up to scrutiny next to modern records that aim for this kind of down-homeness and simplicity. [Dec 2003, p.134]

Business as usual. [May 2006, p.104]

Simple, repetitive, often unsettling, Sort Of Revolution refuses to succumb to the obvious. [Jul 2009, p.93]

The way a latent power blends with an occasionally slightly gauche drama suggests early Radiohead. And, as with Radiohead, it feels like the second album could be the key event, deciding whether these collegiate English sounds can enrapture the wider world. [Mar 2011, p.98]

A skittering show-reel of outer-space advert indents that flit from dying hard-drive porn disco to sweetly-warped On-U dub lullabies. [May 2012, p.89]

An eclectic gem that namechecks Malcolm Gladwell's social psychological musing as an influence. [Feb 2013, p.91]

Leeds psych-metal quintet sound suitably grinding and progressive. [Dec 2014, p.102]

This highly accomplished album also finds her writing and singing in other registers. [Jul 2015, p.90]

She's assembled an intriguing set of duets. [Nov 2015, p.91]

The album takes the artist to new territory. [Aug 2016, p.92]

Trimming, paring and refocusing has made Frontier Ruckus a far more enticing package, and if Milia isn't quite in the league of similar writers such at The Decemberists' Colin Meloy, he's catching up fast. [Mar 2017, p.93]

A record to welcome the morning light as it seeps through chinks in the curtain. [May 2017, p.91]

The music is charming, if a little simplistic at times. [Aug 2017, p.94]

What follows is like an eccentric, audacious musical collage that somehow hangs together. [Sep 2018, p.93]

The deadpan vocals of Camila De Laborde means that The Knife comparisons are difficult to shake, but they mirror the bold, ethereal quality of the music. [Jan 2019, p.89]

There is room in the world for such quaint records as these, but the world doesn't need another version of the Eagles' Take It Easy. [Mar 2019, p.91]

Occasionally the lyrics are wincingly obvious. ... Emerald Valley is blunt truth for dire times. [Jun 2019, p.88]

The Only Ones reassures concerned fans that all is very well in Camp Milk Carton. [Jan 2020, p.90]

While the guitarist's chops are impeccable and his tone as fiery as ever, the stiff, unyielding charts tend to stifle him, hindering his spontaneity and that of his fellow fine musicians. [Jun 2020, p.95]

A useful document of Crazy Horse in rare, relatively subtle trio form (no Poncho). [Jan 2021, p. 101]