With the excellent Roots backing her, she recasts many of the dominant black music sounds of 30 or so years ago on a set of songs which address concerns that are clearly in the here-and-now. [Aug 2012, p.92]

This is miffed and exemplary metal. [Jul 2003, p.108]

Exudes confidence as it cleverly tweaks harmonic principles and discreetly unveils its dramatic arc. [Nov 2019, p.93]

To dismiss Heroes to Zeroes as a mere exercise in rock homage underestimates The Beta Band's charm. [Apr 2004, p.102]

If Not Now... goes a long way to pinpointing just why Marling, Ryan Adams and Ray LaMontagne, among others, keep calling on his services as both musician and producer. [Mar 2013, p.96]

Reflective but brimming with aching melody. [Nov 2016, p.88]

This darker edge lends substance to some of Vile's best songs to date. [Oct 2015, p.94]

You have to go back to Costello, The Beat or Smiths to find a catalogue simultaneously as hummable and as disturbing as McCabe's. [May 2006, p.102]

This handsome 3-CD box contains both concerts in their entirety for the first time. [Jan 2017, p.104]

A weave of sublimely lysergic folk-pop. [Feb 2017, p.99]

The music is as sharply observed as the writing. [May 2026, p.84]

It's conceived, written and designed for the loud appreciation of sweat-drenched pill-poppers at a 'nitespot' nowhere near you. And as such, it succeeds in magnificently silly style. [Feb 2007, p.100]

Well-crafted and unfussy. [Sep 2023, p.92]

Any band that can record something as impressive as the gently swelling Radiation deserves to be taken on their own merits. Even Elbow may have to doff their hats this time. [Sep 2010, p.106]

Having grown in style and confidence with each album and displayed a flair for charting life's ever-changing weather patterns, here they do so with real, deeply-lived insight and dazzling pop expertise. [May 2021, p.82]

A second album that's brimming with pop hooks and instantly memorable choruses. [Apr 2018, p.96]

Clever and cool, Season High is a career high. [Jun 2017, p.90]

He's walking away on style, delivering a collection of distinctive songs. [Nov 2009, p.97]

Fourteen tracks long, The Road... is almost overwhelming, like overdosing on chocolate truffles, but even after all this time, Philippe's compositions are only getting stronger. [Jun 2025, p.89]

This is a rariety--bright, soulful and (yes) clever pop. [Mar 2009, p.114]

Frank and redemptive, it's a journey of small Texas towns and wide open spaces. [Nov 2022, p.89]

It's a seductive lesson in understated beauty. [Apr 2012, p.86]

While its parent album's themes of grief, ageing and mortality don't naturally transfer themselves to the dancefloor, it's often that juxtaposition that makes these reworkings so effective. [Jul 2024, p.78]

If midlife crisis haunts the 40-year-old Skinner, encroaching mortality is re-energised by juniors like neo-soul sister Greentea Peng's soporific vibrations on I Wish You Loved You As Much As You Love Him. [Aug 2020, p.93]

An unshamedly fun album. [Sep 2009, p.104]

As a triple record, there are tracks that are less necessary than others, but remarkably it all flows as a cohesive whole, and never loses the listener's attention. [Nov 2025, p.80]

A third album bursting with intense energy and sparkling invention. [Nov 2025, p.85]

Whether it improves on 2010's First Four EPs compilation is debateable. But as Morris would doubtless observe, 'progress' is but a bourgeois vanity. [Jul 2012, p.85]