From the moment you heard her with Our Native Daughters, you knew it was only a matter of time before she made her album for the ages. The Returner is that album. [Oct 2023, p.27]

It hardly needs saying that this mammoth box is not intended for the casual Dylan listener. Even committed fans might think twice. Essentially, what you get is the same songs played in the same order over 23 nights. But, by God, how they are played.

The film and its astutely assembled soundtrack didn't just ride grunge's momentum, it pumped up the volume by capturing the scene in context. [Jun 2017, p.51]

My Dusty Road is facinating as an archive set. [Oct 2009, p.120]

80 minutes of astonishingly powerful and beautifully preserved music. [Sep 2023, p.43]

The three-disc set brings the artist's life and times into sharp focus. [Dec 2012, p.87]

Start Walkin’ emphasises the team’s many deviations from the mean, demonstrating how inventive and subversive Sinatra’s music could be even before her music with Hazlewood took a more avidly idiosyncratic direction with Nancy & Lee. ... 23 concise chapters that are thrilling, surprising and sometimes sublime.

And Justice For All remains their most pivotal and arguably their most divisive album. ... Lots of demos, rough mixes, studio jams and live numbers that show how powerful the new lineup sounded away from the studio. [Jan 2019, p.37]

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

A cornucopia of delights from a band with an unerring ear for melody, undervalued in their heyday. [Mar 2020, p.49]

The Pylon Box is filled with moments that are equally exhilarating; evidently, what was feasible for Pylon was extraordinary by anyone else’s measure.

You don't get bands like Blur very often. They deserve great boxsets, and this feels like one. [Aug 2012, p.85]

Two years on, her sound is equally ambitious but more committed: here are modern, maximalist pop songs with top notes of R&B, Trap and Afrobeat, plus experimental detailing. As ever, Taylor's lyrics convince. [Nov 2021, p.32]

The bonus material proves just as revelatory as the remastered albums, as Against The Odds doubles as a shadow history of the city’s creative heyday. [Sep 2022, p.39]

Never short on vocal confidence, here, she trades divadom for arresting, unconventional shapes. [Jul 2016, p.69]

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]

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]

Young Americans is one monster hit album, but stripped of "Fame," the record's pre-Lennon form as The Gouster makes an immersive, alternate take on Bowie's Sigma sessions. [Nov 2016, p.49]

Few tracks aside, this Volume 2 contains very little trace of the jazz pivot her music would take later in the decade. The outtakes covering that period are going to make fascinating listening. Meanwhile, this feels like a completist’s dream –because even Joni Mitchell’s storeroom sweepings are spangled with diamond dust.

In the transition from imitator to originator, the old boy has made one of his best albums ever. [Oct 2011, p.83]

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

Inside there’s one masterpiece and three very fine records, all remastered. ... As on most of Hard Luck Stories, the remastering is barely noticeable, but the previously unreleased bonus tracks are more notable.

The band shift tempos and settings constantly, veering into the space rock of Tangerine Dream and the kosmische jams of Can. In these juxtapositions between styles, Blood Incantation find an operatic drama as big as all outer space. [Oct 2024, p.33]

This slice of weird-rock from a more contented American decade is playful and preposterous in equal measure. [Feb 2009, p.89]

It’s astonishing that they managed to come up with several of the most thrilling pieces of primal UK R’n’B, before going on to invent the rock opera, following one of the more creatively intriguing examples of ’60s pop’s transition from mod to psychedelia.

It's remarkable... how much of a piece the entire set is, reflecting how skilfully Waits has welded the various tributary styles of his art into a seamless whole. [Dec 2006, p.122]

The complete recording reveals many (until-now) hidden delights that we can enjoy in full. [Nov 2008, p.89]

The best rapper this country's ever produced, period.... Next to Dizzee Rascal everybody looks pale, uninteresting and irrelevant. [Sep 2003, p.98]

The 23-track set--material oft-mired in legal entanglements--which range from hit for others, to darkly melodic deep catalogue gems. Diamond himself provides highly entertaining liner notes. [Jul 2011, p.82]

It's become a cliche to treat every latter-day Cohen album like a potential swansong but it's hard to imagine a richer, finer or more satisfying finale than this. [Nov 2016, p.18]

There’s more, too much more, to come, but for now, Volume One will do just fine.

This is second-tier Sabbath, arriving at the waning of their imperial phase. But that’s still a formidable prospect. ... Also included is a mostly unheard North American show from 1975 that proves the band were still bringing the goods live, especially on a surging “Children Of The Grave”. [Jul 2021, p.41]

Though disparate, it's some legacy. [May 2016, p.90]

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]

Laced with enough blue-eyed longing to make the most diehard Gram Parsons fan weep with wonder and the sort of verbal acuity that would give even Dylanologists pause for thought, Elephant is where the tabloid phenomenon of summer 2001 prove they are no flash in the pan by making a truly phenomenal record. [May 2003, p.94]

Dove Ellis arrives fully formed on this self-produced debut. [Jan 2026, p.30]

This is the best Raw Power has sounded since it was first humiliating people's turntables in the 1970s.

The larger-than-life Elton of the live stage gets a workout on "Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting" and "Benny And The Jets," pounding rockers on the most impressively diverse collection in his catalogued. [Apr 2014, p.91]

Tightly structured, lavishly orchestrated, brilliantly realised. [May 2019, p.18]

Simple, graceful, moving, tender. [Nov 2024, p.26]

Compared with the highly structured Ghosteen (a double album meditation on grief and spirituality, complete with intermission), Carnage is a more concise though no less ordered record. Much as the Bad Seeds’ songs now push into oceanic drift, Cave’s narratives move between worlds fictional and not, the horrific and the consoling. [Mar 2021, p.20]

The Love Below... comprises the most sublime pop music heard on record this year. [Dec 2003, p.118]

Sumptuous and sprawling, his major label debut comfortably backs up the hype. [Oct 2012, p.86]

Here are profound expressions of timeless love, nostalgic memories of relationships past, reflections on fulfillment, grief, desire, belonging and habitual non-belonging. [Aug 2023, p.35]

These delectable hookfests metaphorically parallel Hadreas's move from the gloom of his Seattle hometown to his new base in sunswept L.A. [Jul 2020, p.33]

Though the variable recording quality of the later tracks can hinder their impact, the performance captured at First Ave and newly restored by engineer Beau Sorenson roars and gnashes and seethes with enough intensity to collapse the 40-year gap between then and now. [Dec 2025, p.45]

The performance of a lifetime. [Dec 2020, p.27]

An uncommonly thoughtful victory lap, which deserves--and has received--a handsome recorded memorial.

Every track is a precision-tooled triumph. [Mar 2012, p.81]

An essential listen for anyone interested in where music might take them. [Jun 2004, p.86]

There is no better evocation of the dawn of a new, more questing consciousness than Joni's early albums.... Unfortunately, Joni's Jazz Odyssey leads her into less agreeable territory on the double-album Don Juan's Reckless Daughter and Mingus, the tribute album of songs co-written with the late Charles Mingus.

For all the stray premonitions of patchouli-scented funk-rock, these are less jazz-rock meltdowns and more muscular free improv sessions, ones which suggest a very different direction from Bitches Brew. [Mar 2013, p.89]

You may well own these already, but the value of this collection is as a portrait of the artist through time, and a compilation of the irresistible outpourings of a man who never really knew who he was. [Nov 2013, p.83]

It may be the most accurate representation of her vision yet, a singular blend of abrasively charming feel-bad noir rock. [Jan 2024, p.28]

This set is a confirmation and welcome addition to the catalogue of recorded Alice Coltrane music and spiritual jazz. [May 2024, p.48]

This is Cheap Trick at their purest: a fierce, streamlined rock'n'roll gang. [Feb 2023, p.44]

Does the reissue/repacking thing properly. Forty years after they kicked-off post-punk in a blaze of punk, funk and revolutionary praxis, Gang of Four bow out with a box that deserves a place in the history books. [Apr 2021, p.38]

Beyoncé's seventh solo album is a flawlessly structured feast. [Oct 2022, p.25]

An inspired left turn. [Oct 2023, p.25]

The relative brevity of these four pieces permits an easier engagement with their approach, with the way these three remarkable musicians, while working at their own pace on every level, continue to explore a sound-world and a collective methodology entirely of their own conception. [Mar 2023, p.18]

This is a thoughtful, empathetic showcase of his interests, of intense feelings translated into a dreamy sonic atmosphere. It’s an album that meets the world in its moment, where global issues and far-flung international voices are more amplified and connected than ever.

What are we left with? A handful of wonderful "new" songs, some interesting also-rans and alternative choices, and the sobering realisation an entirely different double album from The River: a work not quite of equal quality, but still of a remarkable standard. [Jan 2016, p.86]

Freshness shines through on this vivacious eight-track recording of 17 songs, here reproduced in flawless quality – all analogue, promises Young, who mixed the record with Stills. It sounds like a dream. [Dec 2024, p.47]

Blue Weekend is a collection of songs that immediately dazzle, with a relentless array of strong hooks, nestled within a sea of diverse sonic colours. [Aug 2021, p.35]

Elitism for the People documents Pere Ubu creating their own private musical apocalypse and then forging in to start the world anew. Not a world to be drowned in, but one to treasure. [Sep 2015, p.88]

Diamond Jubilee feels like the work of an artist operating at the peak of their powers who is able to harness and crystallise all that potency and charge into a record that, on the surface, should be far too large, messy and stretched out to contain such a cohesive body of work. [Jul 2024, p.36]

He also plays an agreeably skronky, Jeff-Beck-style electric on several tracks, but it's when unplugged that Lage is at his most extraordinary. [Apr 2024, p.38]

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]

Mesmerising stuff. [Jun 2007, p.99]

Summerteeth captures the band as they shed the last vestiges of their alt-country beginnings and introduce the ingredients that would catch fire on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. [Dec 2020, p.53]

As ever with such pumped up reissues, the original album is still where the value does or doesn't lie. Most of Quadrophenia has stood the test of the decades better than might be expected. [Dec 2011, p.97]

An extraordinary achievement. [Album of the Month, Aug 2005, p.86]

This companion volume of archives gives us an opportunity to hear the roads not taken, the hesitations, to feel the jeopardy at each artistic crossroads and experience the risk and wonder of the journey anew. Across seven hours, six discs and 98 tracks, this is an astonishing bounty. [Nov 2024, p.44]

A kaleidoscopic trawl through formative memories, cascading with melody and intimate reminiscence. [Apr 2015, p.83]

He tells a sad story but one enlivened by his skills as a guitarist, his expressiveness as a singer and his insights as a lyricist. ... Every song has at least one line that will stop you in your tracks, some songs two or three. [Nov 2021, p.18]

Throughout, their balance of the tense and clanging with the urgently poppy is impeccable. [Feb 2015, p.76]

What strikes you is the sheer variety of styles and textures that Keenan and Cargill were playing around with. It’s a shimmering patchwork of ideas and moments, some more realised than others, some beautiful, some stark. .... Spell Blanket is a glimpse at what might have been. A memory of the future. [May 2024, p.42]

It's an embarrassment of riches. [Nov 2023, p.40]

A deservedly confident album. [Aug 2020, p.28]

There are no retrospective documentaries or scholarly essays to help unpack one of U2's most conceptually rich works. This cautious, conservative repackage may not diminish the greatness of the original album, but it does sell it short. [Jul 2017, p.46]

A pleasantly bitchy book gives all Ork acts their due, a raft of rare tracks completing the picture. Prix offcuts are essential listening for Big Star fetishists.

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]

There's not a weak moment here, though the aforementioned "I Don't Like My Mind" and "The Deal", with its sudden percussive tumult, shine brightest. [Nov 2023, p.31]

The two CDs from SIR Rehearsals in New York find Dylan in what might be described as his element. Which is to say, at the centre of a certain amount of chaos. His Approach to rehearsal is at best relaxed, if not entirely whimsical. [Jul 2019, p.44]

Though Cleveland's delivery is generally far more subdued, Manzanita shares a similarly transportative, anciently psychedelic feel with The Incredible String Band's magical '60s work. [Apr 2023, p.24]

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]

Tough, funky and proud, she sounds like she could have been the new Aretha. [Feb 2004, p.87]

Cook puts Staples right at the front of the mix, accentuating her voice to the point where it's like she's whispering in the listener's ear. [Dec 2025, p.37]

The only downside to this soundtrack is that you can’t watch Prince slink around stage or pretend to take a bath with the audience, but at least the Blu-ray. [Jul 2022, p.44]

However minor these 45s may have seemed at the time, together they constitute a major discovery for any soul fan regardless of his or her denomination (or utter lack thereof). [Oct 2019, p.50]

John Lee Hooker was the most adaptable bluesmen. ... King Of The Boogie is a career-bridging overview that highlights these abundant qualities across five discs. [Nov 2017, p.50]

This new 2024 remix by Paul Hicks and Dhani Harrison brings the album into greater relief when compared to previous releases: the orchestral arrangements are brought out of the murk, Harrison’s vocals are clearer and sharper, and the album’s peculiar air of dry, ascetic starkness is increased. .... Rather than being driven by a holier-than-thou smugness, this is an album whose wracked, painful honesty and sense of deep disappointment rivals that of John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. [Review of the Year 2024, p.42]

Constant Noise is a majestic state-of-the-nation polemic, novelistic in scale, eclectic in sound, humane and lyrical even at its most nihilistic. [Apr 2025, p.28]

A record as sonically rich as it is lyrically bold. [Apr 2025, p.35]

At times their lurid romanticism can be an acquired taste... But there's an ambition and articulacy here. [Mar 2005, p.104]

As a reminder of his consummate talent, and a place to start George's comeback, it's hard to beat. [Feb 2011, p.93]

A cresting, rolling record of complexity and depth. [May 2024, p.24]

A creative triumph out of Mali's darkest hour. [Mar 2013, p.73]