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]