There are a couple of tracks that veer rather too close for comfort to boy band and eurovision territory, but for the most part, assuming you like the better end of synth-pop, you won’t be disappointed.

Power Of Peace is exactly what it is; people old enough to have long packed up this business, getting down to it, having enormous enjoyment doing it. No one would expect it to touch either artists’ greatest work, but at times, it certainly comes close.

While La Costa Perdida was worth the wait, El Camino Real leaves the listener having enjoyed the trip, but glad to be getting home.

As expected, these 13 tracks live up to Fairport’s high musicianship, and are greatly helped by their rich variety, the maturity in song choices and the breadth of moods they evoke.

Though clearly indebted to Joy Division and Metal Box-era PiL, the band’s two official 45s, Final Achievement and the IV Songs EP, remain compellingly bleak post-punk snapshots, while their lone John Peel session (posthumously released as the Fin EP, and featuring the intense, 11-minute The Fatal Day) reveals just how formidable a unit In Camera were developing into on their own terms.

This suite of songs, from Infestation Of Grey Death and Tower Of Silence to The Last Laugh, sets out Cathedral’s stall once and for all: a metal band whose palette of influences made their songs more than merely headbanging opportunities.

The whole caboodle comes to an interesting end with Neil Young’s Cortez The Killer. An unexpected change of pace, its seven minutes of mid-tempo atmospheric desert rock is wholly at odds with everything that preceded it.

The results are messy, fascinating and frustrating all at once.

His tongue may be in his cheek at least some of the time, but parts of this album feel like the worst excesses of rock opera as applied to dance music.

Santana IV rolls back the years to the time when the band melded spicy percussive Latin grooves with searing blues-rock. Seraphic-voiced Ron Isley fronts a couple of tunes but it’s the spacey, psychedelic instrumental, Fillmore East, and addictive salsa-rock of Anywhere You Want To Go, that impress the most.

While rockers such as Mr Policeman are sufficiently rambunctious (only descending to barroom romping on Willie Dixon’s over-played My Babe), The Rides shine brightest on slower outings such as Stills’ poignant There Was A Place (which sees him lamenting lost friends), Shepherd’s intimate By My Side and Goldberg’s riveting I’ve Got To Use My Imagination, which he wrote in 1973 with Gerry Goffin and became a hit for Gladys Knight & The Pips.

A sequence of aural art installations carved out of sound, a Tate Modern exhibition mounted on a shiny disc, spacious and sparse, repetitive and insistent, haunting and inspired. That makes it disjointed perhaps, but that’s just the diverse nature of its multiple outlooks.

The slower songs could sometimes do with more polish but there's enough doomy intent to keep the devoted happy. [Dec 2025, p.103]

The bleak lyrics are countered by a perky tempo, setting up an interesting tension. If much of the album runs on familiar, well-oiled tracks, The Waves shows what Villagers can achieve when they stretch themselves.

Insular, yes, but in being laid bare it speaks with a strong purpose.

You become mesmerised by Der Kaffee Kocht, its contagious rhythm produced by the rasp of a file, or the clanging Sur Le Ventre, with Peron exhorting in French.

Walk Dance Talk Sing documents something that may work best in the live arena.

Bursting with in-the-moment vitality, it applies a neon topcoat to Gong’s long-established ley lines.

Winter has a distorted, almost industrial grind, fitting incongruously with an uplifting chorus, but saving the best for last, closer After Something is a rather beautiful ballad.

Temple Of I & I is the most rounded and enjoyable album of theirs to date.

Despite the wide range of often contrasting material on offer it hangs together as an exceptionally unified and hugely accessible body of work. [Nov 2024, p.130]

It’s difficult to determine why one session of abstract noise is more thrilling and less tedious than when your mate’s “avant-garde project” bash their instruments discordantly for 50 minutes. It’s not just down to the names on display. There’s a difference. Moore and Hayward play the good kind.

Frontman Jake Webb’s lyrics are often as intricate and tangled as his weaving guitar lines.

The best moments recall Dan Sartain, a man whose moustachioed fashion victim look Pearson seems to have lifted, but whose freewheeling punk rockacountrybilly essence he hasn’t quite distilled.

Some tracks inspire more amusement than may perhaps have been intended.

Summer Of ’13 is a welcome changing of the guard from an occasionally miserablist stalwart and hero. Disregard it at your peril.

It all makes for a low-key effort, which sometimes showcases the band’s skill at crafting neat, 21st-century pop, but all too often fails to spark into life.

This album digs beneath the taut skins of White's kit, charting a mutually invigorating relationship between player and instrument, alternating from visceral frolics to pointillist sensitivity at the drop of a beat. [Jul 2024, p.107]