The New Abnormal is less new big bang, more engrossing sizzle. [May 2020, p.76]

There’s a healthy sense of experimentation, peaking with wondrous prog-metal epic Halloween Bolson.

The band’s forthcoming album has a little bit of everything for everyone. It’s been seven years since the last Pearl Jam studio album, and the world has changed irrevocably since then. But thankfully some things remain reliably the same. ... Pearl Jam have given us an unexpected album of hope. Welcome back.

Even when Fallon does resort to simply weeping into the sawdust – You Have Stolen My Heart and When You’re Ready – it’s over the sort of gorgeous and poignant love letters to his family that make homeliness feel close to Godliness. Such saccharine succour.

My Dying Bride remain steadfastly rooted in gloom. It's a nuanced gloom, though. [Apr 2020, p.87]

Citizens of Boomtown is a startling selection of classically punchy songs. [Apr 2020, p.87]

The APD grooves, jazzes and lover's rocks, but only delivers total post-punk Apocalypse on Panzer Dub and Full Metal Dub. [Apr 2020, p.89]

The album suffers from the Lips' recent tendency for ambient, Blade Runner interludes, while jazzy plods and one-note vocoder drug confessionals drag things to a muted, half-baked crawl. [Apr 2020, p.87]

The album really benefits from Buck's undimmed musical sensibility. [Apr 2020, p.88]

Jerky, visceral, complex, cerebral, a deep joy. [Apr 2020, p.89]

If you've ever gone clubbing on heavy-duty painkillers, expect flashbacks. [Apr 2020, p.83]

They'll never completely escape the past, but it sounds like they're finally at ease with it. [Apr 2020, p.82]

A twelfth album that comes off the ropes swinging. ... His vocals are gleeful and feline, and these 11 songs are full of purpose. [Apr 2020, p.82]

Swamp certainly has a knack for the genre's heartbreak. [Apr 2020, p.89]

A hit-and-miss affair padded out with too many Fred Durst-style shouty tantrums. [Apr 20202, p.88]

Still the greatest run of pop-perfection punk ever produced. [Mar 2020, p.95]

The CD gives you the uninterrupted concert, the most focused of the lot. [Mar 2020, p.92]

Blacktop Run reminds us that he is more of a musical rebel than his tattooed brethren. [Mar 2020, p.89]

He's in fantastic, youthful voice, snarling, seducing and showing off. [Mar 2020, p.93]

It’s a deeply intimate, deeply beautiful examination of regret, loss, disappointment, solitude and personal demons, made all the more alluring by his warm, frank, subtly emotional vocals.

Grounded by explorations into dark electronica and swathes of cascading guitars. ... A coherent journey. [Mar 2020, p.88]

Long may they stay young. [Mar 2020, p.92]

The album tells you everything about what the recently renamed Theory Of A Deadman represent, one thing being class. [Mar 2020, p.87

While on first listen Perida will surprise some STP fans and disappoint others. It’s an album that with repeated listens could well come to be seen by many as being among the band’s best.

It's clear that this form of musical self-help will have even the most mixed-up fan feeling slightly zen. [Mar 2020, p.89]

Simms certainly knows how to deliver Wire energy - compact, disciplined, no waste, no spray, as on Primed And Ready. There are also lovely moments of Wire pop here. [Mar 2020, p.87]

It finds him in a reflective mood. It's a smart musical move, because Storm Damage showcases what a good lyricist he is. [Mar 2020, p.86]

Drive-By Truckers have never been angrier, but, just as crucially, they've never been more musically eloquent. [Mar 2020, p.86]

A group that can shift from straight-ahead retro to effortless eclecticism in the time it takes to shift gears on a truck. [Mar 2020, p.86]

Invigorating results. ... It's refreshing, comforting even, to have Green Day back in their exuberant element, unburdened by message or morality. [Mar 2020, p.86]

Wolf Parade sound alert, ready for a bruising. [Feb 2020, p.88]

They're also still some way off leading any packs, but they're making up ground. [Feb 2020, p.90]

A set of songs that sound like someone's favourite record collection. [Feb 2020, p.89]

A consolidation of their strengths--muscular guitars that alternate from hardcore styling to more sensitive deliver--and a greater sense of melody. [Feb 2020, p.90]

What's missing from these pastiches is a sense of Walrus's own identity. [Jan 2020, p.88]

Their basic musical ethos - pounding, bass-driven punk brutalism delivered beneath a banner of love, compassion and unity - comes into its own, particularly when recorded in Le Bataclan, a venue with its own powerful stamp of solidarity. [Jan 2020, p.89]

Mayhem are restrained by an obsession with their past. [Jan 2020, p.85]

It's a pleasant enough album, but not a crucial one. [Jan 2020, p.85]

When a collection of contrasting voices tackle [Mose Allison's] songs for charity here, it's that character of songwriting which shines through a diverse range of new styles laid upon it. [Jan 2020, p.86]

You'll feel dirty. In a good way. [Jan 2019, p.89]

While there's nothing radically off-blueprint in the finished article, it's obvious that every note has been pored over with love and respect. [Jan 2019, p.88]

There is the occasional flash of pop brilliance - notably desert-rock nugget Arabesque - but for non-fans Coldplay this dose of Everyday Life will be one they can easily do without. [Jan 2019, p.87]

The sound of the otherworldly sci-fi R&B that's released when psych country singer-songwriter and a future-pop production legend bond at molecular level. [Jan 2019, p.86]

Quality levels inevitably vary, but there are enough counterfactual detours and half-realised experiments here to excite even casual fans. [Jan 2020, p.94]

So, far from being another vault-raiding cash-grab by the label, it's a privilege and an honour. occasionally dreamlike. [Dec 2019, p.88]

There's a renewed freshness and immediacy to several of the tracks, particularly in his laconic vocal delivery. [Dec 2019, p.80]

Potent yet poignant, bright if not blinding. [Dec 2019, p.81]

The Gospel according to Water hovers in a mystical space between country, folk and jazz, his literate lyrics providing the thread which holds it all together. [Dec 2019, p.85]

This, by any yardstick, is great music. [Dec 2019, p.89]

It's short--11 tracks over in less than 39 minutes--but genuinely sweet. [Dec 2019, p.80]

Dependably solid. [Nov 2019, p.85]

A murky modern masterpiece. [Oct 2019, p.87]

A labour of well-deserved love. [Dec 2019, p.91]

Live, earlier material, Welcome To The Occupation and Me In Honey especially, benefits from an increased aural muscular density, while several songs from Monster itself pack a greater punch than the studio versions. [Dec 2019, p.90]

The Menzingers deliver an energetic strain of melodic rock and bare their souls on aging, alcohol and angst. [Dec 2019, p.85]

Nobody's pretending that this album is a masterpiece, but it's convivial. [Dec 2019, p.85]

This is music to immerse yourself in, lose yourself within its many complexities and layers of sound, sudden explosions of light and directed commentary; always fascinating, challenging and densely packed. Sepulchral, sombre, challenging, claustrophobic. [Dec 2019, p.85]

Ghosteen is an album which raises the bar in terms of lyrical expression, sonic exploration, and even how an album can be released in modern times. Experiencing Ghosteen involves entering another man's world. It’s a world that is both painfully intimate and startlingly alien.

She's at her best and most fiery in default-setting rock-chick mode. [Dec 2019, p.81]

Retro rock with rage and aspiration. Follow that, Astley.

The wistfulness, the super-saturated sound, the layered harmonies and instrumentation, the timeless echo of pasts and retro-futures colliding. The humanity, the performed frailty at the heart of manufactured perfection. Lynne still has it. He still knows how to create the magic.

This is no means a case of Brock and co serving up space rock comfort food to the faithful. But at the same time the final, nine-minute The Fantasy Of Faldum would be welcomed onto any Hawkwind album of the last 40 years. [Nov 2019, p.80]

Four 11-minute "Improvised modal drones." [Nov 2019, p.85]

Not essential, then, but well worth a peek through the window. [Nov 2019, p.84]

Cronin's produced an engaging gem. [Nov 2019, p.85]

This third album finds the Los Angeleans aided and abetted once more by the late Neal Casal to transformative effect. [Nov 2019, p.85]

No longer on the run, Mother Nature is instead "pushing Earth in a baby carriage." This recurring theme in Young's work is echoed in the equally powerful yelp of Shut It Down and the altogether more downtempo Green Is Blue. [Nov 2019, p.80]

It may not match the mind-melting complexity or bold inventiveness of their finest hour, but War Music solidly demonstrates that Refused's passion remains undimmed. [Nov 2019, p.82]

The Kids Are coming (To Take You Down) is the one highlight of the album, a thundering radio anthem redolent of Cheap Trick. Its carefree joy is notably absent pretty much everywhere else. [Nov 2019, p.81]

This fourth album sounds like a broken man writing himself better, Tolchin weaving beautifully sparse folk-blues fingerwork around autumnal organs. [Nov 2019, p.81]

An ambitious concept work based in the 15th century's Hundred Years War. [Nov 2019, p.85]

Two plays in, as with this utterly endearing tenth, you will overlook its flaws and follies and fall for their gentle angst massages and relentless power pop melodies. [Nov 2019, p.84]

High Water II isn't The Southern Harmony And Musical Companion, but it might just be By Your Side. In the absence of anything else, we'll take it. [Nov 2019, p.85]

The original album, remastered by a team co-headed by George Martin's son Giles, is presented with a freshness and immediacy that makes a mockery of the passage of half a century. ... The two CDs of sessions and demos are a revealing trove. [Nov 2019, p.88]

It's Lanegan's Americana growl that keeps the whole thing sounding ironically timeless. [Nov 2019, p.85]

No Home Record is a masterstroke of intimate solitude, often boiling down to poetic, semi-spoken vocals and a drum machine. ... and noise, as fans of her old band would expect, is expertly corralled. [Nov 2019, p.85]

A full-on rager, this one. Devour You knows what's up. [Nov 2019, p.82]

For all the vein-bulging intensity--which reaches heroic levels on standout The River--you're left with the sense that Gallagher remains a great singer short on top notch material. [Nov 2019, p.81]

Wonderfully schizophrenic and shamelessly populist, this is prime Babymetal. [Nov 2019, p.81]

Their hooks seem to call to you from misty, far-off shores, promising mystical rave-ups. Drift in. [Oct 2019, p.91]

Triumphal stuff. [Oct 2019, p.91]

The biggest draw is the plethora of out-takes and demos. ... A 15-song love set show The Replacements at their ramshackle, off-kilter power pop best. [Oct 2019, p.96]

Highlife electronica meets understated Celtic folkiness on charmingly whimsical, multifaceted, Welsh language. [Oct 2019, p.91]

Free is easily Iggy's most ambitiously left-field album since Zombie Birdhouse in 1982. [Oct 2019, p.90]

Somewhat lacking in real character of its ow, there is nevertheless a certain charm to this album, and it's sure to trigger a nostalgia trip in those who came of age at the turn of the current century. [Oct 2019, p.89]

Perhaps Korn's best album this century. [Oct 2019, p.89]

A muddled attempt to signal contemporary relevance. [Oct 2019, p.88]

Fish cherry-picks her favourite bits from the old masters and fuses them with Stax-flavoured brass, southern warmth, classy pop balladry in Fairwell My Fairweather and nicely sleazy swagger in You Got It Bad. [Oct 2019, p.86]

For those who remain strangely tickled by their frivolous, heart-felt one-offmanship, every track here will prick your ears. Easter might be cancelled, but for rock fans Christmas has come early. [Oct 2019, p.86]

If you do like a bit of in-depth rock luxury in your life, In Cauda Venenum delivers by the caseload.

While they might not whip up the same adoration, Another State Of Grace shows that there continues to be life beyond Lizzy. [Sep 2019, p.84]

An extraordinary 11-track distillation of raw urban vitality that recaptures and resets the dizzying conversational street energy of 1972's On The Corner at the cutting edge of 80s soul. [Sep 2019, p.90]

Overall this album is Hynde's most adventurous experiment to date, opening new autumnal terrain for one of rock's greatest voices. [Sep 2019, p.85]

Randolph's evocative pedal steel soars reliably as his assured vocal attains new peaks of emotive character. [Sep 2019, p.87]

This is his best record yet. [Sep 2019, p.87]

Powers is a confident and welcome comeback. [Sep 2019, p.86]

This slick trio from Dripping Springs, Texas add cloying twang to yacht-rock tropes to asset-stripping effect. [Sep 2019, p.87]

It's music to glue your arse to a Barclays to. [Sep 2019, p.84]