Writing separately, frontman Rim Wilson and multi-instrumentalist Ryan Carbury have come up with material that falls between the Broadway musical and the motivational speech. [Jun 2015, p.77]

Manson can still whip up an appealingly vengeful turn of phrase, but they retain a tendency to sound stiff. [Jun 2012, p.73]

Never quite persuades you if it's sincerely bitter or a knowing facsimile of an early '80s break-up album. [May 2019, p.29]

The sense of fun has dissipated on Born Under Saturn, an hour of faintly psychedelic heads-down boogie. [Jun 2015, p.75]

Moody shades of The National and Tunnel Of Love-era Springsteen abound, though the whole thing never quite manages to fully convince. [Mar 2024, p.25]

With the entire 10-track affair compressed into just 25 minutes of vaguely expressed melancholia, this flimsy career coda is not the grandly melodramatic Lynchian finale that Li's doom-diva shtick deserves. [Jun 2026, p.32]

Hardcore Poco-heads will reshaped group's Alll Fired Up.... The songwriting, though, is mere genre exercise, mostly, and thin on the ground. [Jun 2013, p.78]

Plenty of charm and style, not much originality or depth. [Apr 2025, p.29]

Abandoning their trademark has forsaken their identity. [Jun 2015, p.80]

It's unwieldy, cheesy, overlong, confusing and, just occasionally, inspired. [Jul 2020, p.25]

Too often, all it offers is the rumble of starting engines. [Feb 2002, p.124]

The fifth album by the Mo Wac founder's creative collective doesn't quite cut the mustard. [Sep 2017, p.38]

Three or four songs short of a really strong album. [Oct 2002, p.107]

Wyman and his band soon settle into a series of mid-tempo songs whose predictable arrangements are matched by bland lyrics and a voice that sounds like it would much rather be someplace else. [Jul 2015, p.84]

A masterclass in menace. [Apr 2005, p.97]

He overthinks the rambling "JTR" and overstuffs the messy collage "Monkey Man."[Dec 2018, p.33]

If you like your pop super-sweet and synthy, fill your boots. [Mar 2020, p.25]

While tunes like "Honeymoon" and "Trick Mirror" have a graceful Fleetwood Mac-style charm, they lack the lyrical bite that was one of her early USPs, and the vocal rasp heard on live performances seems smoothed off. [Sep 2021, p.25]

Holly lacks the heat and fire that makes the best so damn thrilling. [Apr 2014, p.83]

Its fizz fades fast. [Dec 2004, p.142]

The songs are assured, strident and catchy, but often fairly cringeworthy too. [Sep 2012, p.73]

Despite the addition of some burnished guitar licks, the results are as awful as you might expect and his one original composition, "For Love On Christmas Day," isn't much better. [Jan 2019, p.19]

There are some beautiful moments here.... Also some difficult ones. [Nov 2013, p.67]

The Staten Island quartet blend the fixtures and fittings of noisy US slacker rock--Sonic Youth drones, Pavement squalls--but add a bubblegum pop sensibility. Their vocalist Joseph D'Agostino, however, remains something of an acquired taste. [Oct 2016, p.26]

The music is decent enough. .... The problem is Jake Duszik's vocals, which are soft and blank of affect in a way that is oddly characterless. It leaves Rat Wars feeling, if not completely without merit, a bit of an empty vessel. [Review of the Year 2023, p.29]

Lyrically the tone is disappointingly mawkish. [Aug 2012, p.73]

That he can still write a timeless folk-rock melody is evident in songs such as "That Day Must Surely Come" and "After The Harvest", but the contemporary pop orthodoxy of the arrangements and production is disheartening. [Jan 2025, p.35]

It's not always successful...But older songs fare better. [May 2012, p.72]