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.