Even in these bare-bones arrangements, the songs are fully formed, particularly the likes of Pleasant Street and Once I Was: as captivating as anything Buckley put to tape.

Though played out across a potentially draining 75 minutes, Going Going... throws a few pleasant curves as it’s presaged by four unexpectedly evocative, scene-setting instrumentals, including the atypically delicate Marblehead.

The only track that leaves you electronically cold is Robot Man, which sounds like OMD by numbers. Saying that, nice to also hear them lashing some decent beats beneath the engine of The Punishment Of Luxury.

The remixes mostly offer lush versions festooned with synths, offering a glimpse of how the album might have sounded had Stevens followed a different path in the studio.

Separate--one of a few songs (along with the slightly annoying sludge march of Beat, the frenetic whimsy of Inquiries and the juddering instrumental Once) that falls just short of those huge expectations. But when this record hits the mark, it’s very good indeed.

The musical departures are oddly interesting. .... Compellingly underpinned by Thompson's precision thunder, Blind Eye and Can't Be Found are easily the most power-packed cuts. If only he could have elevated the whole album. [Nov 2024, p.100]

It’s as capricious and confusing as it sounds, yet the overall result is one of surprising cohesion.

Largely, Right Thoughts is business as usual--a steady, reliable and often invigorating business, but one that constantly, frustratingly hints that it’s capable of more.

The result perhaps misses the conceptual cogency of earlier Tree peaks. But it doesn’t want for controlled reach. Over a tight 48 minutes, C/C weds a reinvigorated affirmation of band identity to expansive energies, all to confident effect: “The sum of all, of new and old,” as Wilson’s lyrics put it.

Each of these 10 songs is a piece in the Feltrinelli puzzle, resulting in an album whose ambition suitably matches its subject’s big ideas.

Serious times call for serious records, which Franz Ferdinand have delivered with their sixth studio album. Well, sort of. Fear in all forms is examined on The Human Fear, but there's still that lightness of touch that marks them out as a band it's fun to dance to. [Jan 2025, p.102]

Banditos light-heartedly plough a furrow of 60s garage-psych, soul, blues and country with a punkish good-time sense of savvy.

With minimal instrumental backing, the pair confidently locate the essence and atmosphere of the original album.

Adamski’s productions have moved with the times, while keeping references to the piano-rave era (though inviting us to Pump Up The Waltz might trigger less happy flashbacks). If there is a key weakness, however, it’s Adamski’s soft spot for a shaky cover.

An instrumental, Pecket’s Well, highlights the beauty and lyricism of his solo guitar, but the real worth here lies in lyrics that offer listeners clear descriptors of Tilston’s concerns, such as the warnings for mankind encompassed in Running Out Of Road.

Russell’s widow says her husband thought the album was his best-ever work; that will forever be open to debate, but what’s certain is that a truly great musician left this world on an undeniable high.

Their gentlest yet. [Feb 2025, p.104]

The faster, rhythmic tracks are less convincing, though they can excite on occasion, but it’s this mish-mash of successes that make the album jar, and not in the way HeCTA would have desired.

Willie’s battered old voice too often sounds strained and strangled on the higher notes. What should soar barely scrabbles to the right pitch.

Spring King might have plenty of bangers, but they should switch up their MO more often.

A well-drilled exercise in slick, sumptuous songwriting.

When it hits it really hits, as on the loved-up Target and the delicately hewn Myself At Last. But when it misses it really misses.

It’s very much a full-band sound, yet the detail in the arrangements proves to be vital.

Beautiful Thing’s blend of ambition and emotion shows that Taylor could genuinely make whatever he wants--sometimes that’s the trouble and sometimes that’s the difference. Our loss, our gain.

After starting with a deathly gripping take on Motherless Child, his supernatural countertenor beautifully holds its own over the luminescent backdrops throughout, showing how charisma, soul and delivery score any time over technique. Pure class.

On new album Daylight, Black’s voice is often less strident than it used to be, though she can still raise the roof in the chorus of songs like Pass The Power. She’s as fearsomely committed as ever, but there’s an agreeably lush sheen over the band’s blend of ska, reggae and pop.

It's introspection with a keen ear for accessible melodies that help sweeten the bitter pills with which he's self-medicating. [Aug 2024, p.105]

It’s an album of unlikely collaborations. Day One features the operatic talents of Dina Ipavic, while Are You Alive, sung by Lily Wolter of Penelope Isles, floats into moodier, more analog territory. Best of all are The New Abnormal (Golden Girls’ Kinetic turned inside out) and the anti-gammon state of the nation rant of Dirty Rats.

The first UNKLE album in seven years regresses towards bad old habits, its patchy pleasures often lacking the cohesive clout needed to sharpen its ambitions.

Across nine one-word titled songs, Barlow finds a kind of peace while dabbling in self-loathing, alongside domesticity and redemption.

Where Rubin as co-producer, threaded some cohesion through the playful instrumental idiosyncrasies of Yiung and his long-running cohorts, Talkin To The Trees is, like the idea of a "chrome heart" itself, an uneasy hybrid. [Jul 2025, p.104]

A classic and classy Browne album that draws on his full repertoire of styles.

This album is pleasant, but not of similar stature. It is, however, an alternative and illuminating vantage point on his music.

Throughout, shimmering walls of guitar give way to echoing, spacey psychedelia; riffery and frantic drumming; tuneful asides and emotional rampage.

Inhaler avoid difficult second album problems by sounding more like they’re on a confident fourth record.

Where sparse electronics appear, they either lend a poppy, Neu!-like sheen to the downbeat 4316 or shroud Take This Poison in menace and foreboding. [Jun 2024, p.101]

These are new songs sung in a familiar voice. [May 2025, p.103]

Zomby’s excellent recent single with grime touchstone Wiley obviously had an influence on the direction, peppering the collection’s R’n’B cut-ups and dubstep-powered techno. Some pieces here, as on previous selections, are miniatures, or riddles filled with strange edits.

While the terrific albums they’ve released along the way have continued to describe that lo-fi fuzz and keyboard driven journey, in reaching this album’s sunshine warmth ‘Ripley’ Johnson and Sanae Yamada have elevated their project to a new level.

Banks forsakes "overthinking" on this slick, sensuous mix of seductions and aggressions. [Mar 2025, p.102]

Musically there’s nothing new here, though Anthems For Doomed Youth feels particularly sanitised, especially compared to the freewheeling, ragged approach that gave The Libertines’ first two albums such charm.

Deceptively simple, Cocker’s economical narratives sit atop Gonzalez’s evocative ivories, drawing you in with their intimacy, like an old rummy spilling the beans.

Good Sad Happy Bad feels like a curio: a work-in-progress raw recording that hints at better things to come rather than the real deal.

One minute solid as a rock, the next seemingly in flux, Solide Mirage reveals itself anew with each listen: fleeting glimpses at a map into unknown territory.

It’s still undeniably cinematic and heartfelt, but clearly the work of mature heads reflecting on excesses of their past.

The occasional moment of reinvention and the band’s tongue-in-cheek attitude make for a playful listen, but even an audacious twist on Divine’s Female Trouble can’t transform the covers album format from an enjoyable diversion to something more substantial.

Another excellent studio album of all-new material.

You Against You, which benefits from that unpredictable, bolted-together feel that all the craziest Slayer songs possess; and Implode, the first advance single released last year, and now re-recorded. The rest, unfortunately, lack spark.

It’s a psychedelic North American road trip, coloured in by touring member Brent Cordero’s Farfisa and Wurlitzer, adding a fleeting but panoramic sense of wide blue yonder here, and a taste of honey there, to these otherwise introverted and haunting tunes.

Thankfully, in collaboration with his original arranger Anne Dudley and some very fine musicians, Fry has managed to hook a whopper and haul it into his fishing boat.

Miracle Focus testifies to the revivifying powers of curiosity and communion with invitingly expansive, epiphanic fervour. [Jul 24, p.107]

It sounds immaculately like now and yesterday all at once. [Aug 2025, p.103]

By and large, the more substantial the lyric the more layered and complex the musical arrangement.

The vocals float ethereally over the airy atmosphere, feeling wistful yet majestic. A dreamy ambience permeates the entire album, but each track has something different to offer.

Most of Billy 2.0’s low-key lullabies are pleasant enough. Indeed, you could place any one of them in the middle of a big rock record as an eyebrow-raising, spine-tingling palate cleanser. Enduring them all in one sitting is, unfortunately, less fun than consuming 11 consecutive courses of the same pumpkin-flavoured sorbet.

Simon’s song choices weave together to form a narrative on intolerance, the dangers of divisive thinking, impending mortality, the ebb and flow of love, ecological troubles and faith. Where less nimble-minded songwriters might flounder, his literary eye for the minutiae of life stands him in good stead.

There’s effortless and effortless, and this is an album that verges on the predictable.

When in sharp focus, the sound is utterly charming, with Le Bon’s almost trademark Welsh tones a fine match for the amp buzz and Presley’s meandering guitar lines. Too often, though, it spills into whimsy, lacks direction and frequently infuriates.

While there’s no doubting the siblings’ talent, at times the polish of the production does reduce the impact of the songs slightly.

Though there are innumerable influences at work here, it is blessed with an offbeat and singular charm.

[Trombone Shorty's] allusive, crossover style is a piquant marinade that blends Crescent City jazz with blues, pop, funk, R&B, hip-hop, and rock flavours.

Everything is dispatched in pristine FM rock production that could use a little more light and shade. [Jul 2025, p.104]

The scruffy Scots have taken a more polite approach with this one, but Hutchison’s ability to touch the listener’s nerves hasn’t suffered and the result is musically uplifting; a well-crafted testament to the band’s song-writing abilities.

With the help of collaborators, showcases the full spectrum of a unique talent. [Dec 2024, p.109]

The rave presets of old will appease older fans while the more intricate synth work will satisfy more recent converts. Still, it’s the deeper tunes here that point to an intriguing future.

Robyn brings an affecting vulnerability to all the performances. Whimsicality is turned down a couple of notches and the tenderness that has always underpinned his best material shines through.

A couple of duds: No Monsters telegraphs its Lennon-esque references, while England & America is pointless dad-rock. Everything else works.

Best here are the former Free/Sharks bassist Andy Fraser uncurling his immortal taut funk on Shock Treatment and New York’s Robert Gordon crooning I Still Love You with quivering pathos.

As with Newman and Spigel’s previous output, most of it is far too restless to be dismissed as merely “ambient.”

Braver Than We Are knows its audience and plays to it perfectly.

As flawed as this album is, pop will be a finer place with AlunaGeorge’s presence.

The resultant World Wide Funk comes across as a well-drilled unit running through manoeuvres without actually going into battle.

The results occasionally come within touching distance of essential. .... Yet more often than not it resembles a New York-flavoured spin in the retro coffee table house of Zero 7 or Lamb. [Aug 2024, p.105]

When this is good, it’s properly great.

A backhanded triumph.

They don’t stretch their formula, but there’s little need when their galvanic velocity is this purposeful.

Into The Diamond Sun fully captures their kaleidoscopic vision over 11 songs bookended with the terrific The Garden (full of warped guitars, nursery rhyme harmonies and Blakian innocence) and Bear Tracks, a haunting, mesmeric sound mosiac.

Distilled and refined, they remain experimental and temperamental, faltering at times, but ready too to soar beyond National boundaries.

Unable to hold a guitar for the majority of the sessions, his progressing dementia making it difficult to remember lyrics, it is nonetheless a celebratory affair laced with surprisingly black humour.

Completing a trilogy alongside 2010’s Valleys Of Neptune and 2013’s People, Hell And Angels (both of which went Top 5 in the US), it’s clear there’s still a hunger for Hendrix’s unheard back pages. Both Sides Of The Sky is arguably the most satisfying meal of the three.

More so than anything in Harvey’s back catalogue, FOUR impresses with its purity, simplicity, accessibility and lack of pretension.

Regardless of the pretentious set-up, this is another fine record.

Headbangers will be pleased to hear that Scott Ian’s crunchy riffs and Joey Belladonna’s banshee wails are at front and centre, athough--continuing a theme that has endured since the mid-90s--truly warp-speed thrash beats are, disappointingly, largely absent here.

His ever more exaggerated diction adds an unexpectedly acrimonious character to some lyrics so that while Modern Blues is far from disagreeable musically, the words will have long-time followers speculating where he’s at.

MG fits nicely with some of those minimal wave releases, though, and DM fans will of course be in heaven.

There’s feisty attitude in abundance here but significantly, also substance and sincerity behind the rhetoric. Sensational stuff.

The blend of half-real and fake bodies, the beautiful and grotesque, sum up what makes this such a fun listen.

60s references, bloody mindedness, affairs of the heart and a whole ton of drug references make for a perfect storm. But what comes through clearest is the agelessness of the music they make.

Indentations is the pleasing exception. A slowed down, emotionally visceral tune, it demonstrates that Manchester Orchestra have a real breadth in their songwriting.

Wherever you turn, exuberance and invention are generously served.

Their best album in some considerable time.

It’s a dark folk contemplation, austere acoustics from abrasive, angular strumming, but it feels connected, like it’s part of the earth, part of that elemental, ritualistic essence of being in tune with natural forces.

It’s an excellent and cohesive appendix, far preferable to the hotchpotch of remixes sometimes appended to successful albums.

It all adds up to a stylish album that rolls back the years yet sounds right up to date without ever deviating from what Gouldman knows and does so well. We have no notes for you, Graham Gouldman. [Aug 2024, p.100]

Does a fine job of transmitting the spit and fury of their own shows, even o the studio setting. [Jan 2026, p.101]

The Buzzcocks are back. Pete Shelley is, sadly, no more but Steve Diggle does a rip-roaring job in reinventing the band, even if we miss the nasal vocals. [Feb 2026, p.101]

After a while, the lushness of the vocals becomes a little wearing if you’re looking for the cracked, dark heart of yore; a futile task in any case, as that heart stopped beating a long time ago.

10 are less than two minutes and only one is of any substantial length--the last track and best one. This makes it a slightly stop/start stumbling score, one that never really settles and gets going.