Long-term fans will be delighted, the uninitiated might just find themselves falling for his grouchy charms.

Up has always deserved more love and, 25 years on, this remastered anniversary edition, which adds an enjoyably relaxed live set, gives us a chance to hear it with new ears.

Patience and resolve are required, for there are truly baffling abstractions. ... Yet when Davies knuckles down and crafts glorious, idiosyncratic pop such as Needle & Thread, the slow-burning Chills and vulnerable, Television Personalities-esque Beauty Queen Of Watts, he and his ad hoc Moles can burrow into the very deepest recesses of your heart.

It’s not so much that Robyn Hitchcock (the album) resonates with sonic surprise: its default paradigm of dense, shimmering neo-psychedelia is a home comfort that has sustained Hitchcock from The Soft Boys onwards. It’s more the fact that the bendy mirror through which he refracts experience offers a sharper view year upon year.

Produced by Memphis Boys’ bassist Tommy Cogbill, who had also played on Pickett’s sessions, Arthur Alexander mixes greasy soul with country funk.

Loss Of Life feels more at ease with itself. Happily, though, none of this comes at the expense of the band's exploratory urges. [Feb 2024, p.102]

Taken as a whole, the album recalls the literate elegance of 1993’s Kindness Of The World, albeit with more sharply observed snapshots of the nuts and bolts of romantic relationships.

Sure, there’s a mildly preposterous, posturing axe-warrior in there, but it’s tempered, often joyously, with a self-mocking feminine side here, and makes for some of his most carefree but considered music in a very long time.

Morby is able to conjure vast stretches of beauty, but can also disrupt them, causing dead ends and roadblocks for a listener. City Songs, while by no means an ugly sprawl, perhaps just needed a tad more urban planning.

A remarkable and imaginative album. [Jul 2024, p.106]

All This I Do For Glory is a triumph of ingenuity, a genuinely experimental work that echoes with the multi-faceted cries of the human soul.

How Do You Burn? finds the Whigs in particularly lusty form.

The 80s traditionalists will delight in the euphoric synth-pop of Happy Giddy, but this is a far more ambitious delight than that. Her voice might have got her noticed, but her songwriting’s proving the most extraordinary thing about her these days.

Though he’s undoubtedly an anachronistic anomaly whose idiosyncratic style (think Tom Waits meets Edith Piaf in a 19th Century music hall) appears out of kilter with convention, he has, nevertheless, produced an essential soundtrack to our times.

Low still sound beautiful, but there’s a nagging feeling that The Invisible Way represents a slight drop-off in focus.

These 10 tracks will undoubtedly please longterm fans, even if there's little here that doesn't revisit already well-trodden ground. [Jun 2025, p.103]

The symphonies Fuck Buttons make remain as miasmic as ever: odd and unusual to hear for the first minute or so, before fully entrancing the listener. Beguiling stuff.

It is not that The Optimist is awful, exactly--just uninspiring.

The set mops up a satisfying amount of previously unreleased session material from 1967 and adds the first real stereo mix of the whole Wild Honey LP. ... But the real revelations come with the bonus tracks.

The hardcore will need these and it’s hard to argue with the performances and the sound quality. Both shows find Young introducing new material from Harvest, released later that year, and beyond.

One of 2024's evocatively cool finest. [Jun 2024, p.102]

This time round Walker has brought influences from his native Chicago scene to the forefront of his music, loosening up and expanding his sound with frankly blinding results.

This is an exquisite interpretation of an exceptional album.

Alex Nieto, the story of a police shooting of an innocent man in San Francisco in 2014 closes the album with a fire that recalls an on-form Neil Young. Described by Prophet as his first protest song, it concludes an often exhilarating album.

Much of the album’s promise brews in Boyfriend, where backing band The Big Moon’s Radiohead-ish guitar chimes offer suitably insouciant support to Hackman’s take-down of male arrogance. But substance runs thin elsewhere as Hackman seems unsteady in transition, flicking through styles without finding any that thrill in colourless contrast to The Big Moon’s bright vim.

Expands Pigs’ palette further.

Though a snapshot of a still-embryonic Fugazi, First Demo remains a formidable statement of intent.

At its weakest, Sleeper can come across like Beady Eye--and if there weren’t a US voice behind it, it might well be laughed out of town. However, Segall’s motives seem authentic.