While I’m not sure Veckatimest is the huge improvement on Yellow House that some blogs claim it to be, it’s unquestionably a lovely record and it deserves to be heard on land, sea, indoors and out.

What felt like daydream ideas in maturation then have been shaped into trly rounded songs now.[ Jul 2018, p.30]

For all the dark corners of her ever-changing self she avidly explores, the intrinsic brightness and irrepressible energies in her songwriting continue to enrich the experience of accompanying her. [Sep 2024, p.31]

It’s a fantastic album, containing poppy firecrackers like “Jackie Down The Line” and moments of timeless, mature lament such as “The Couple Across the Way”. [May 2022, p.28]

This new 23-track compilation, cherry-picking the back catalogue from 1989's "Box Elder" through to 1999's "Terror Twilight," might help resolve the band's final enigma. [Apr 2010, p.102]

Still, as a whole, Bitte Orca feels nothing less than a modern equivalent to Talking Heads' Fear Of Music or Scritti's Cupid & Psyche 85 –art-rock with intellectual rigour, borderless curiosity, and no fear of the mainstream. Pop, by any other name.

A finely crafted record, whose artfulness is mediated by informality. [Oct 2014, p.69]

There is zero sense on Amadjar that this band in any way playing to an international audience; on the contrary, this music feels hermetic in its focus, guitars picking out bluesy motifs, voices rising together in mournful chorus, all tethered by a simple drum rhythm that approximates the lollop of a camel making its way across the dunes. [Oct 2019, p.32]

In this live setting, fascinatingly, the brutality to which the songs are subjected only serves to underscore their poignancy. [Dec 2005, p.100]

Great by Smith's standards. Practically genius by everybody else's. [Feb 2004, p.74]

It's a departure from previous Lanegan solo LPs... This time, Lanegan is looser, open to both experimentation and, once more, full-on rock. [Sep 2004, p.96]

Classic Objects is, on its face, Jenny Hval's most straightforward work: her songs flirt with conventional verse-chorus structure, her lyrics are clear nd direct, drawn from life. Closer listening, though, reveals Hval interrogating those experiences. [Apr 2022, p.29]

It's a record that manages to sound deeply affectionate without being sentimental. [Jun 2013, p.70]

The album's musical tone is well judged, with Hiatt equally versed in flinty roots-rock and urban country songs. [May 2020, p.26]

He's unafraid to risk sentimentality in his quest for real feeling. At the end of a vexed, troubled third album, it feels like a hard-earned affirmation of his roots, people and community he's still a part of and still committed to. [Mar 2025, p.30]

More mellifluous than menacing despite its formidable display of power, Life Metal may be the richest work in the band's 21-year-mission to reconfigure Tony Iommi-worthy riffage into a soundtrack for mindful meditation. [May 2019, p.34]

On The Spur, Shelley captures the ache and the sweetness, the loss and the love, the coming and going of it all, with greater scale and skill than ever before.

This is also a brave, compelling record that stands shoulder to shoulder with the Manics’ best.

Best of all, perhaps, the skill and imagination she displays in her arrangements suggest that there's a lot of scope for adventure in the future of a musician who found her groove but seems unlikely to get stuck in it. [Nov 2017, p.34]

Phosphorescent has followed 2010's country-rock homage Here's To Taking It easy with an equally magnificent beast, mixing country jams with claustrophobic electronica and mournful Mariachi horns to create a beautiful but discomforting album. [Apr 2013, p.74]

Sounding like a highly-evolved amalgam of their entire output--with added surprises--the beauty of this 12th album lies in its head-spinning diversity. [Oct 2006, p.134]

They sound not beaten but energised by the spectre of society's destruction, off the chain and high on a cocktail of primal garage punk, astral jazz, pitch-black blues and psych ragas both damned and divine. [Nov 2015, p.77]

It was a landmark in prog rock. [Dec 2016, p.47]

Bowie’s Berlin is more about a state of mind, a population and its thinking than an actual place. Brian Eno and his intellectual playfulness; Robert Fripp’s alien guitar; Tony Visconti’s embrace of meaningful technology. Between them they gave Bowie the materials to build a city larger and more magnificent than anywhere you could hope to find on a map. [Nov 2017, p.44]

The routine comparisons with Terry Riley/Steve Reich/Michael Nyman all apply, but there's something more mystical and elemental at work, too, with echoes of the Third Ear Band and Comus. [Oct 2018, p.27]

Striking enough on their own merits, free of embellishments, all the more powerful for the immediacy of the moment. Simplicity is the key here. [Jan 2020, p.26]

There are many timeless, brilliant moments. [Mar 2020, p.45]

A set of well-crafted songs that resemble PJ Harvey's collaborations with John Parish, but which mainly recall various stages of David Bowie's career. [Oct 2020, p.29]