For Carry Fire, Plant has written Lion In Winter love songs. [Nov 2017, p.96]

Heading South On The Great North Road drags, and Pretty Young Soldier, a tale of gender confusion in the military, is slightly laboured. However, most of 57th and 9th has a youthful energy suggesting that Sting hasn't faded yet. [Dec 2016, p.90]

His rueful lyrics are mostly about relationship woes, although Florida Man is more serious, dealing with racism. [Aug 2023, p.82]

Throughout, a twinkly otherworldliness is counterbalanced by rhythmic excursions evoking the passage between one liminal world and another. [Feb 2019, p.92]

Doesn't quite hit home. ... Letting loose more might have benefited the flow. [Mar 2020, p.95]

In a crowded space, The Rakes have a place to call their own. [Apr 2007, p.96]

Rufus Wainwright-goes-to-grad-school lushness dominates, though, and despite Bird's Death Of Marat pose on the cover, My Finest Work is not quite revolutionary. [May 2019, p.93]

No "George Best," perhaps, but a rugged, well-meaning Paul Scholes of a record nonetheless. [July 2008, p.100]

This is a good album, but there's a pull between the commercial and the more left-field. [Dec 2008, p.104]

Small Black are more convincing when they move into sharper focus. [Dec 2010, p.96]

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]

Repo is a brightly coloured series of aural non sequiturs, its lard-legged beat science peaking with distorted synth-funk jam 'Ultra Vomit Craze.' [May 2009, p.109]

Even if elsewhere the electronic elements occasionally err toward the passe, ultimately, this is as spirited as it is an unexpected cavort through altered sonic pastures. [Jun 2016, p.94]

It's hardly a career-defining collection. [Sep 2004, p.98]

Though the results are not always easy to take.... The sense of folk and country pervades each and every performance, saving the day. [Sep 2015, p.90]

An intense, trip-hoppy and orchestral examination of love in all its forms. [Dec 2020, p.88]

Sirens proffers another string to his bow, its nine skittering essays overlaying richly textured, genre-melding electronic sound worlds with liminal song "structures." [Nov 2016, p.81]

This trio's brand of piano-fed luminescence is more traditionally coffee-table. That's no criticism, more acknowledgement of their smooth melodic nous. [Oct 2013, p.87]

This likable debut peaks on Everything Apart's breezy kosmische shuffle, and Lennon-ish I'll Be Alright, but its airiness doesn't always work. [Feb 2019, p.93]

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]

Deceptively simple, Watershed highlights what Lang does best--fulsome ballads sung with precision timing, intelligence and a humourous twist. [Jan 2008, p.100]

Sexsmith's mournful voice and lyrical skills, so admired by the likes of Elvis Costello and Neil Finn, detail a world of love and hopeful expectation. It all makes Exit Staretgy... an almost infinitely rich and subtle album. [Sep 2008, p.98]

A musical sub-genre rebooted. [May 2009, p.104]

The results are as scattershot as the guest list. [Mar 2009, p.106]

His nicotine-gritted , hurt-strained voice finds a honeyed foil in Dave Amels' swirling organ, while rhythm section David Wayne Gay and Lance Willie provide R&B warmth and swinging, bar-band stomp. [Dec 2009, p. 96]

Esteemed guests such as flautist Michael McGoldrick, accordionist Phil Cunningham and fiddler John McCusker ornament the arrangements exquistely, while the Knopf's ever-tactile guitar continues to say more with three notes than most do with 20. [Oct 2009103]

But despite its mining of a bygone age, Cosmic Egg has two clear 21st century counterparts. Far Away and Violence of the Sun are the sort of pristine epics found on Guns N' Roses' Chinese Democracy., while lysergic piledrivers 10,000 Feet and the title track could easily have appeared on Kasabians' West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum. [Dec 2009, p. 96]

Yet for all the invention and undeniably impressive groove control, there are lulls when their meditative update of '70s fusion stars Lonnie Liston Smith, Herbie Hancock and Roy Ayers slicks into something wallpapery, doodly and unselfconsciously by-numbers. [Aug 2018, p.95]