They're good at what they do but when songs like Double Negative kick in, those with older record collections might find their hands instinctively twitching towards their Wire LPs. [Feb 2024 p.103]

Songs here frequently unsettle, like the hypnotic Where The Bough Has Broken or the sinister Blood Orange. At times, it's a little too abstract and difficult to connect to--perhaps because of how personal this feels to Woods. Nevertheless, you'll still enjoy losing yourself in this vast, enigmatic world. [Jan 2024, p.101]

It's a hell of a noise for just three men to make with SLIFT effortlessly achieving white knuckle transcendence across eight very long tracks. [Jan 2024, p.99]

An ambitious record that highlights the impressive originality of her ever-evolving, emotionally raw songwriting talents, and which deserve boygeniusesque levels of success. [Jan 2024, p.101]

At their best when the music fires along to match Chubb's lyrical catharsis, Sprints occasionally falter when the pace drops: even Chubb sounds anonymous among Literary Mind's more considered atmospherics, while Shadow Of A Doubt promises to build to a crescendo that never quite arrives. [Jan 2024, p.101]

Not quite the music one might expect from the California coast where Segall grew up ... in fact, wildly at odds with just about anything. [Jan. 2024, p.99]

Paul Weller’s electric autumn that began with 22 Dreams effortlessly continues, and this may be the best instalment yet.

As he goes on to dig into toxic masculinity, his own ageing process and urban isolation (on the striking Safe & Well), Malcolm Middleton’s music is masterful, a combination of dense electronics and angry guitars which perfectly meet the mood of a fiercely current album.

This album is a spirited, catchy, poignant return, yet it’s also the most affecting record about grief since Nick Cave’s Skeleton Tree.

One suspects Gibbons agonised over every word and note on Lives Outgrown, but the result is an album to fall deeply in love with. If you allow them to, these songs will envelope your soul.

Most of this collection, however, offers fleeting impressions rather than signed-off, finished portraits. .... For Broadcast’s true believers, this is an essential and edifying experience, casting its own spells.

A Dream Is All We Know flows seamlessly, with no snags disrupting its mellow mood-tapestry, right up until final track Rock On (Over And Over) throws us a curveball by actually glamming out, Bolan-style, as if to say, “Here’s what you thought we were about”. Superb.

While One Deep River is unlikely to make many new converts, it will more than satisfy his loyal army of fans.

This is one of the most confident and charismatic debuts in years.

The record doesn’t break any new ground, but it walks familiar paths with confidence.

As ever, a warm and humane kind of marvel

It’s a staggering, swaggering achievement more vital than anything they’ve done in the last 35 years.

Tracks such as Psychedelic Orgasm and It’s Dark Inside embody the claustrophobic and saturnine atmosphere on what is essentially an underground hip-hop record made by an inveterate envelope-pushing postmodernist.

At their strange best, they sound like Radiohead with an ABBA obsession. A special album from a special band.

The album certainly wears its influences on its (parka) sleeve but does so while maintaining a freshness and uplifting charm that carries the songs as they zip along. Putting the somewhat clichéd lyrics aside – although it’s not as though listeners generally flock to Liam Gallagher for Significant Meaning – there is plenty to savour.

It’s a record to fall in love with.

While Tangk may bring us a more compassionate, empathetic version of the band who seem to be trying to find something that resembles peace after years of tumult, they still haven’t quite lost their punk spirit.

The re-ordered track list reflects what had been noted in the MPL archive. At first it may seem like another money grab, before steadily, something rather beautiful emerges.

There’s not a weak moment in these 11 songs.

The opening Angel’s cavernous bass is a clarion call for Sisters Of Mercy fans pining new material, yet Sickly Sweet and Dream Of Me are simple, spiky pop made distinctive by Julie Dawson’s slow-build guitars. As singer, Dawson channels a quiet despair in the more vulnerable Nosebleed, but it’s the defiant full-throated charge elsewhere that’s likely to see NewDad emerge as festival favourites.

A fraught album that reaches out furiously for release, forming a push-pull of pressure and release around the band’s defining attributes: Tucker’s tumultuous vocals and Brownstein’s livid guitar.

Iechyd Da is his masterpiece, start to finish.

Latest must-have. .... Not only are most of these renditions drastically different to the originals, Young blends one reimagined song into the next without any pause, producing less of a medley than an epic, multipart ballad. When he’s gone, none will replace him.