This is sweetly strange and often emotional music--an album of disquieting tone poems and outlandish lullabies.

Dear River finds the Australian and her all-female band flexing bigger muscles, producing a much fuller sound that’s closer to the powerful noise they make on stage.

Reader’s own explanatory notes enrich these universal songs with a personal edge, completing a particularly satisfying package.

A triumphant return for one of pop’s most charismatic figures, who has lost none of his ability to make us dance and smile.

For the most part, though, Bette breezes through the 60s.

It’s competent, and some of the songs are good, but it’s just so much old hat.

It certainly sounds like an album collaged over five years in various places around the world. But there are no contemporaries for this sound, and they hit their mark often, that moment where all the dried pasta shapes, buttons and string turn into a surprisingly lucid portrait of a band happy to try everything at once.

Neptune may be swampier, but as side projects go, this is hardly an excuse for a great departure, more of an exercise in indulgence.

Loose but not chaotic, Set Fire To The Stars has a poetic grace more than worthy of its subject.

It’s a pleasingly consistent collection of songs, but special mention goes to the raunchy Relevant (complete with solos for Reinhardt-like guitar and swaggering piano) and May You Never Fall In Love’s wordly advice. All said, it’s a good look on him.

It’s a shame that they can’t quite reach that level consistently throughout the entire record, but those glimmers of greatness nevertheless establish The Wharves as charmingly talented songwriters worthy of investigation, especially if you have a penchant for the faded but still-beautiful glories of decades past.

In the best possible way, their songs feel like being trapped for over a quarter of an hour within the mind of the person whose bathroom is the filthiest you’ve ever seen, but if you want a better picture you should attend one of their gigs gigs gigs gigs gigs gigs gigs.

These floaty psych-funk grooves are more fun than a barrel of chimps, even if the lyrics fret about global warming, nuclear fusion and other harbingers of doom.

Fujiya & Miyagi is the sound of a band no longer press darlings (see 2006’s Transparent Things), but not old enough for local festivals just yet. And it’s that tension that gives us the band’s most confident LP for ages.

Without anything to rein them in, these pieces have a tendency to drift, suggesting that a tighter remit, or more judicious editing, might have had more gravitational pull.

It’s a refined downer, enriched by self-lacerating wit (I Only Smoke When I Drink), indie-boy piss-takes (Sleeperbloke), story-song skills (unwanted-pregnancy tale Johnny (Have You Come Lately)) and briefly off-guard touches of synth-pop wistfulness (Big Blue Moon).

A very welcome return.

The poignant This Nearly Was Mine from South Pacific (“now, I’m alone, still dreaming of paradise”) and I Who Have Nothing, are both imbued with equal measures of yearning and malice. It’s almost as if In Translation has tied up all the strange, raw emotions of the past year and made some sense of them.

An album which is surely his most innovative and creative yet. Heavy but easily accessible. [Feb 2024, p.101]

Their name might reflect their roots and imply tedious student japes await, but in capturing so many club moods, Porij are one of heartfelt pop's best recent examples. [May 2024, p.104]

Bittersweet and heartfelt. [Nov 2024, p.101]

Halo Moon distils everything that makes them great on one handy album. [Christmas 2024, p.133]

It's an album which rewards repeat visits, and whose creator sounds more vibrant than a man of his noble vintage has any right to do. [Jun 2025, p.104]

With Neil Tennant adding to the sense of occasion on a joyful Rebel Rebel, a celebratory There Is A Light... affirms Marr's undimmed bond with his audience. [Oct 2025, p.131]

The voice is perhaps a little too polite in places, but lets loose in fine testifying form on the closing Heart Of Mine. [Christmas 2025, p.133]

A recording half the length would have been more pleasurably effective. [Jan 2026, p.103]

Matt's gobby vocals recall Popscene-era Blur, with Issey's guitars driving the Britpop-y enthusiasm of Geraldine, Newsflash's staccato New Wave and Throwing in a chewy solo among Come On Now's glam racket. [Feb 2026, p.102]

La Dee Da has a welcome edge, with a slightly sarcastic feel reminiscent of Grohl’s stint a few years back with Queens Of The Stone Age, and Dirty Water is a competent bit of mid-tempo, mid-intensity, mid-everything stadium rock, as indeed is pretty much the rest of this polished album.