It's a warm, happy-go-lucky record dominated by rinky-dinky pianos and honey-sweet harmonies. [Nov 2025, p.105]

An appropriately joyful and celebratory eulogy.

Savages is a feisty record that returns to the familiar blend of hardcore, thrash and groove metal.

It’s messy and, true to its title, chock-full of distortion and fuzz but it’s an organised mess with great instrument placements and wide spaces between the players that allow them to revel in dynamically roaming around these songs.

Dr Robert does, admittedly, provocatively parade his influences on the celebratory, Electric Warrior-style The Sound Of Your Laughter and the Jean Genie-esque strut of The Guessing Game. Yet If Not Now, When? still exudes enough contemporary pizzazz to convince on its own terms

While it’s certainly soundtrack material, anyone with good taste would, for instance, go for the original Strauss and Ligeti over this album’s Hollywood light music take on Hal… and dare we say it, anyone with good taste should know not to attempt the latter.

One thing which has barely changed since their Psalm 69 peak is the Ministry formula of chugging metal machine grooves, newsreel samples and stuck-pig screaming. But, when it works, they can still make the apocalypse sound fun. [May 2024, p.103]

There’s good songwriting in places, but with the artist’s idiosyncrasies effectively airbrushed out by a bloated production, the result is a dull, vapid collection of songs desperate to please.

The emotional climax of The Little Things That Give You Away is one of several moments that promise more than the album as a whole can deliver.

Smith's career detour feels like a rather wan aside from a singer spread somewhat thin. [Christmas 2025, p.135]

The band sorely lacks a frontman of true rock-god proportions to transcend the silliness.

With its garage production job, loud tinny drum tracks and an overriding sparseness hanging between each instrument, Drift resembles a very promising demo tape for an album yet to come to proper fruition.

Helmed by ex-Primal Scream and My Bloody Valentine producer Brian O’Shaughnessy, the band’s second release, Everybody’s Dying To Meet You is a shade more confident and fully-realised.

File under late and inessential. [Jul 2024, p.101]

Enjoyable to the core, but not to be taken too seriously as there are so many other bands doing exactly--exactly--the same thing.

Sadly, it’s a plodding, semi-acoustic dirge of little note, while When Shipman Decides--about homicidal doctor Harold--also fails to live up to the shock factor of its title. It makes for a mostly meretricious, self-important record with delusions of grandeur.

Yes, It’s True starts out along a rather pedestrian path of nod-along rock-by-numbers.

Selected Studies Vol 1 is an entirely successful undertaking on its own terms, enriched by the quiet absorption of congruent confederates who intuitively understand that all manner of gods and devils are in the detail.

Signs of progression are, admittedly, belatedly embraced by the ham-fisted, if heartfelt dub-out Serious Business and the bowel-quaking Sunn O)))-style title track, but it’s too little too late.

The main event could have been bloody genius. It isn’t, but it remains fascinating.

Movies are the best comparisons as Faun Fables’ dark yet beautiful songs are utterly cinematic.

To say it’s Stewart’s best album for more than 30 years may, ultimately, not be saying much, but it’s refreshing to hear him at the helm of a high-quality record, to hear him singing with heartfelt vigour, and--perhaps most importantly--having fun.

Re-Mit sounds alive, funny even, as if Smith has made peace with something--possibly his own genius.

The affirmative, feel-good tone is set with the mid-tempo opener, Don’t Leave Me Here, the first of two tunes the blues men co-wrote together.

Though some of the high-tech production gadgetry sounds dated now, back in 1985 it was a fiercely contemporary record. But while time might have blunted its cutting edge, Rubberband, for all its flaws, still fascinates.

With repeated listens, though, the insistent aural assault actually reveals some good ideas, but it’s hard to imagine anyone frequently listening to The Ark Work for pleasure.

What’s also not documented here are The Doors’ performances of Light My Fire and The End, from a second set. Sadly, Peña’s second reel remains buried in a box somewhere, robbing us of fascinating early glimpses of two songs which would grow to gargantuan proportions in the years to come. It’s doubtless as much a frustration for the band as it will be for fans.

Little of the imagination promised by the concept seems to have seeped through into the covers, which are remarkably sedate and faithful for a world supposedly in the grip of two opposing ideological extremes.