Loveless holds it own as one of the great rock albums, period. [Jun 2012, p.90]

The Brewis brothers may be at odds with the modern world, but in this stunningly realised double album, they've created the ultimate sanctuary.

It's the most extraordinary smorgasbord of styles, moods, modes, a far more daring, jolting record than 2001's Essence. [Album of the Month, May 2003, p.88]

Street entirely avoids DIA’s flinty spectrality and staticky crackle and turns a bright light on the smart, compact and relentlessly exciting arrangements he’s here coaxed from the band.

It would be fanciful, not to mention disrespectful, to say that Morrison has waited his whole career to make this album. But he makes it sound like he has. [Apr 2006, p.96]

I doubt there'll be many better albums released this year. [Jun 2003, p.98]

Hubble bubble! From weird sources and high ideals comes a spooky, sensual piece of pop sorcery. And it's bewitching. [Dec 2009, p. 91]

This year's 'Stankonia.' [Sep 2001, p.96] [Review of UK version]

This is an excellent album that manages to be both a mature summary of an artist’s career and something completely fresh and new.

Much of Suicaine Gratifaction sounded like it had been written in a mood of morose introspection, but Come Feel Me Tremble is brazenly exclamatory. [Jan 2004, p.102]

It is quite simply stunning. [Apr 2022, p.30]

The Libertines is a record of such raw autobiographical honesty that it carries a weight few others in 2004 can match. [Album of the Month, Sep 2004, p.94]

The production is beautifully OTT, with everything stretched and digital, zeroes and ones working binary overtime to warp some of Herrema and Hagerty's greatest anthems into robotic rock mantras. [Feb 2013, p.94]

Josh Pearson has gone there so we don't have to--we should be grateful he's returned to tell the tale. [Apr 2011, p.72]

The Fine Art of Self Destruction is one of those amazing records that appear seemingly out of nowhere... that within a couple of plays sound already like something you've been listening to for years. [Album of the Month, Dec 2002, p.128]

[A] breathtaking, virtually flawless album. [Sep 2002, p.104]

While what was lost with Smith is immeasurable, what he left was amazing, and New Moon is an appropriately spectacular monument. [Jun 2007, p.112]

A unique and unlikely moment of retrieval, restoration and renaissance. [Nov 2004, p.98]

This is surprisingly, refreshingly, "modern" music. [Mar 2002, p.104]

The whole thing tingles: you're in the presence of diamond-hard greatness. [Nov 2004, p.110]

Guthrie's work here gives birth to social conscience in pop culture, and this 157-track set, gets it all down in the context it deserves. [Dec 2013, p.82]

Tempest is in many respects the most far-reaching, provocative and transfixing album of Dylan's later career.

May just be the most concise and potent distillation of Thompson's art to date. [Album of the Month, Sep 2005, p.98]

A Ghost Is Born feels like a band learning to be spontaneous and unencumbered, and coming up with their most engaging album yet. [Album of the Month, Jul 2004, p.94]

There are some outstanding songs here, and Jagger turns in a series of performances that are their match, full of much defiant flouncing, strutting bitchiness, preening arrogance, snarling haughtiness and a typically provocative misogyny. [Album of the Month, Oct 2005, p.92]

A world away from their ladrock roots, you might say.

Weighty and impressive. [Dec 2016, p.49]

The first record in a long while I've wanted to play again immediately after it's finished. [Album Of The Month, April 2002, p.92]

All that is good in hip hop is here. [Jul 2003, p.111]

The proof is in the music; it sounds juts great. [Jan 2012, p.98]

Staggeringly good.

It's the freshest, most exciting and far-reaching left-field album in years. [Jun 2003, p.102]

Doves have delivered, with honesty and affection. All other guitar bands this year will seem like a scratchy sideshow. [Jun 2002, p.110]

Here, his luxurious voice, weathered and warm, sits atop intuitive improvations from the likes of Christian Fennesz and Evan Parker. [Nov 2009, p.106]

Waits does nothing predictable here, and the structure of even the most forlorn tear-jerker is ambitious and avant-something-or-other. [Co-Album Of The Month, June 2002, p.106]

A dozen remarkable tracks. [Feb 2006, p.78]

Hailing from the wrong coast, the Charleston, South Carolina-based Explorers Club have done the near-impossible, turning an obsession with everything Beach Boys into an utterly beguiling pop album. [June 2008, p.88

Something's happening wherever you turn on tracks that are dense with detail and brilliant accumulations of incident, but never overwrought or too busy, sheer grace their common link. [Sep 2011, p.80]

Hills and valleys, warts and all, Complete Columbia is simply a singular, staggering body of work, throwing down challenges in all directions.

To devotees, however, it sounds very much like a second masterpiece: a different kind of epic to "Ys," and one with enough hooks and charms to ensnare at least a few Newsom agnostics. [Apr 2010, p.82]

Could very well be the best record of this restlessly self-critical career. [Jul 2006, p.90]

R.E.M. were already walking head and shoulders taller than most by now, but Life's Rich Pageant was nevertheless a startlingly great leap forward. [Aug 2011, p.102]

The most original debut by a Manchester band since Squirrel & G-Man Twenty Four Hour Paty People..., maybe even Unknown Pleasures. [Sep 2002, p.116]

Tin Can Trust is a masterful album from an undeniably great American band, at the peak of its considerable powerers. [Sep 2010, p.88]

Fever To Tell is, quite simply, magnificent.... This is as revitalising a debut as could be hoped for. [May 2003, p.92]

This boxset – beautiful, thorough, a labour of love, offers an opportunity for many more of us to hear and to reconsider Nyro’s music; to sit there, like Alice Cooper, and go, “That’s songwriting.”

The sharpest, most imaginative and downright listenable album of Blur's career to date.... A grown-up alt.rock album of breathtaking potency and invention. [Album of the Month, June 2003, p.90]

The thrill it provides will send a shiver of recognition through anyone who grew up with The Specials, The Smiths or Parklife. [Album of the Month, March 2006, p.86]

They continue to find some clever ways to do a pretty dumb thing. [Jul 2007, p.112]

With Spoils, Alasdair Roberts has delivered his finest work to date. [May 2009, p.95]

Like 1999's The West, The Civil War negotiates a fragile entente between Americana and electronica, but does so on a bigger, constantly astonishing scale. [Oct 2003, p.122]

In just over 35 minutes, the Bonnie Prince's mastery of form, blend of gentle awe and trembling sweetness are distilled to their essence. [Album of the Month, Feb 2003, p.74]

Their scratchily rhythmic guitar music with dour, sardonic vocals has proved immensely influential. [Dec 2006, p.114]

Confirms Doves as the country's most innovative rock group. [Mar 2005, p.94]

Indispensable, but that’s no surprise.

For Emma, Forever Ago is such a hermetically sealed, complete and satisfying album, the prospect of a follow-up--of a life for Vernon beyond the wilderness, even - seems merely extraneous.

In every respect, the performance captured here is as raw and un-redacted as the original record. ... What times. [Jun 2018, p.42]

Though recorded during the same extended sessions, this archival LP is the polar opposite of its fraternal twin: big, bold, vibrantly coloured and laced with sweeping chorus hooks and towering middle eights. In a word, spectacular.

Time is squeezed and stretched in new ways, exotic timbres are distilled on the spot, and this freeform funk still scorches the air. [Aug 2015, p.91]

More of the same, only more so. [Apr 2002, p.94]

This album really is just too good to be true. [Apr 2005, p.114]

This is still music with a lot of virtuosity, and a great many notes, but it and its players are living its adaptability, as the evidence reveals all we have previously believed this composition to be, a confluence of free improvisation and what later became “spiritual jazz”. [Dec 2021, p.43]

A truly exhilarating 50 minutes of music. [Dec 2003, p.122]

Ty's most unrestrained albums stands among his best. ... Like sitting by a loaded jukebox that turns out gems all night. [Mar 2018, p.16]

The Window Is The Dream is sonically richer than Horn's often sparse 2022 debut, Optimism, but each choice - the temporary Band-esque folk-rock swagger of "The Dream", the way "Old Friend" hovers at the edge of an extended jam that never quite breaks - is in service of, rather than overpowering, the song. [May 2023, p.30]

It leaps between the glitch-hop of “Bezerk” to the android hymn “Don’t Go”; from the thumpy funk of “In My Head” to the pulsating UK garage of “Something”. It also employs some audacious samples, like the drumless samba that backs “Walk In The Park”, or the Cuban rumba groove under the vaporous soul of “Mood To Make Love”. But it’s unified by Lowe’s soft, supple voice and a quiet air of hope, warmth and radiance. [Nov 2024, p.40]

Ibibio Sound Machine barely need drums to weave their polyrhythmic magic. [Apr 2017, p.32]

Cousin is deliciously weird and intoxicatingly angular, but it still sounds like a Wilco album. [Oct 2023, p.24]

Collins' first album since 2013 sees the singer in pleasingly superb form. [Apr 2019, p.26]

Her songs feel so neatly woven that they deny all attempts to tease them apart. Listening to Night Reign, you mostly find yourself focusing on Aftab’s voice – a rich and smoky thing, gentle and open-hearted on “Whiskey”, reaching back through the centuries on “Na Gul”. But it also shows she has a keen eye for a collaborator. [Jul 2024, p.29]

The sound of a major talent gone major league. [Apr 2003, p.105]

Transfigures smoothly from one hallucinatory half-style to another. ... The playing is both adventurous and textural, and the surprising, soothing result would have made a fine release on Eno's '70s Obscure label. [May 2021, p.31]

Takes his lush, orchestrated pop to staggering new heights. [Nov 2003, p.124]

The breadth, scope and sheer suppleness of black SUMMERS'night makes one wish Maxwell worked a whole lot faster. [Sep 2016, p.76]

Tribe carry their burdens as lightly as they did on rap landmarks such as People's Instinctive Travels and The Low-End Theory. [Feb 2017, p.38]

Soul Mining is arguably Johnson's defining work: ambitious, strange, exciting. And, 30-odd years on, remarkably fresh. [Aug 2014, p.86]

Ants From Up There is often beautiful, but its not an album you can listen to casually. Its relentless emotional pummelling is quite an experience, a rollercoaster ride for the soul that is likely to leave you feeling distinctly and permanently rearranged. [Mar 2022, p.18]

An album that is leaps and bounds above anything else Shah has done before – a record that’s layered and detailed, coated with beautifully rich production, yet also spacious and considered. [Feb 2024, p.23]

Teems with compelling, trademark narratives full of vivid characters. .... There's a weight to his voice that lends these tales even more authority. [Jul 2025, p.31]

This is a melancholic album, but a determined, thoughtful one. [Mar 2015, p.80]

While the blues, folk and country moments are excellent, the most striking offering on Saving Grace is its most primal, namely their savage version of Low's "Everybody's SOng". .... It's hard to see a limit to their powers, such is their skill with both sweet and the sour, the delicate and the bruising. [Nov 2025, p.22]

It's pure, distilled Quasi. ... Sam Coomes's songs are all killer. ... Janet Weiss, meanwhile, once again proves herself to be a fine vocal foil, and perhaps the greatest rock drummer alive. [Mar 2023, p.35]

I kept wishing I'd been there that night, 45 years ago. [Mar 2020, p.42]

A genuine 2015 classic. [Jun 2015, p.77]

Throughout Jamie, Howard also continues to challenge the impressive instrument of her voice in unpredictable ways. ... Her quest for personal fulfillment doubles as a creative bloom as well, revealing new dimensions of her talent. [Oct 2019, p.18]

Brilliant though many of these musicians have been in numerous other contexts, this might be some of their finest work: a thrilling 90-minute voyage into the outer regionso f electric jazz. [Apr 2023, p.33]

Their breakneck energy highlights the thrilling strangeness of their structures and textures. [Mar 2017, p.40]

The beauty of Coltrane's work, and the way she could transform a personal system of belief into the highest accessible art, is striking. [Jun 2017, p.44]

Some will prefer the stripped-back, elemental performances that are compiled on the extra disc, and they are certainly magnificent recordings in their own right. But part of No Other's magic is its ambition. [Dec 2019, p.36]

A magnificent comeback. [Oct 2013, p.57]

It's yet another display of excellence from an artist in consummate control of his art. [Feb 2015, p.82]

This collection makes clear that there are still many more stories to tell, more beauty and evil left to uncover. [Jun 2017, p.40]

It's impeccably crafted, with Mitchell and Johnson's radiant harmonies to the fore over arrangements that sometime evoke the bittersweet bliss of Fleetwood Mac ot turn-of-the-70s Grateful Dead. [Nov 2022, p.26]

The album's undisputed highlights are "Hit Somebody! (The Hockey Song)" and "Genius." [Album of the Month, July 2002, p.100]

It's an invitation to peer into the hidden spaces of an extraordinary modern songwriter, where calm and quiet moments prompt superlative work. [Nov 2018, p.32]

Joan Of All rarely feels ordinary. ... As a whole, this is a work of strength and variety. [Jun 2023, p.24]

[A] triumphant resurrection. [Nov 2005, p.96]

The result is digital psychedelia with eyedrop clarity. [Apr 2013, p.71]