[J Spaceman's] rare communications (this is just his second album in a decade) are generally breathtaking events, and Everything Was Beautiful is no different. [Mar 2022, p.82]

Futurology isn't just the best album the Manic Street Preachers have made this century, it's arguably the best album of the year. [Aug 2014, p. 206]

All nine studio albums are covered, although the sequencing defies logic. [Dec 2023, p.85]

A bona fide, big, stadium-pleasing epic. [Mar 2013, p.95]

These eclectic make-overs [on NEU! Tribute] are pleasingly irreverent and mostly excellent. ... Also worth a fresh listen is NEU! 86. [Oct 2022, p.83]

As a close-quarters portrait of a singer-songwriter at a relatively early stage of his ascension to true greatness, it's hard to beat. [Feb 2014, p.97]

Gritty, punchy and hooky. [Aug 2022, p.67]

This is no hasty cash-in. The music is exemplary: rock'n'roll, southern gothic, serious stuff and downright fun tunes. ... There are 63 examples of Petty's art in total and they illustrate that his range was far wider than some think. [Oct 2018, p.92]

Alone In The Universe is a triumph of songcraft and studio invention, one that trounces notions of soft rock and guilty pleasures. He might be a man alone, but he’s got the whole world, potentially, in his hands. Again.

Even in the late autumn of his career, Neil Young can still turn in something as vital and musically catholic as Worl Record. [Jan 2023, p.78]

A beautifully constructed, artful and imaginative debut. [Jan 2014, p.116]

Not only have the Bad Seeds delivered another healthy baby, but perhaps the most gracefully beautiful of the whole brood. [Mar 2013, p.98]

All the albums, and the odds-and-sods presented on this 11-CD collection are remastered, but only Lodger, in a move approved by Bowie before his death, is given a Tony Visconti 2017 remix. This new mix illuminates the giddy mood of experimentalism abroad, a contrast to the intensity of its precursor’s, and a band fresh from the tour captured on the exemplary Stage (also here), in fine, resourceful fettle.

By making new albums like this, the band sidestep the entire revival punk circuit ethos and create something new, again. [Summer 2014, p.88]

The whole show is masterfully orchestrated. The first 25 minutes is all bangers. [Summer 2022, p.78]

It's up there with the very best records they've released. [Sep 2018, p.86]

An instant classic. [Apr 2013, p.94]

This might well be the finest example of the genre since My Bloody Valentine perforated their first eardrum. [Summer 2014, p.91]

An excellent remaster accentuates the nuances and stresses the space in a mix that’s by turns claustrophobic and widescreen, crisps hi-hats, sharpens ice-pick guitar shards and further fattens bass subsonics. There are extra tracks, B-sides, Peel sessions, a live ‘rehearsal’ set from Manchester’s Factory, and it’s only a joy.

A more polished and less primal prospect. ... Nichols' dusty acoustic fingerstyle and burnished voice shares little of Eric Bibb's barbed eloquence, and the album grows angrier as it unfolds. [Nov 2021, p.75]

Birchwood is still making rowdy brand of blues, seemingly unlikely to suit up or slow down any time soon. [Apr 2021, p.87]

Dark, desperate and full of great tunes, this is rock'n'roll at its black-hearted best. [Nov 2013, p.90]

She has made her masterpiece; remarkable at any age. [Oct 2014, p.91]

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]

Thoroughly anti-social and wonderfully obnoxious throughout, this is kick-arse psych’n’roll as it should be.

This 20th-anniversay reissue is a reminder of just how great [White Pony] was and is. ... [Black Stallion is] a uniformly impressive feat of deconstruction and reconstruction. [Feb 2021, p.90]

Weighing in at 133 tracks, Feel Flows' bulk may be harder to validate than existing sets for the Pet Sounds/Smile era, but as a locked-down summer's soundtrack its mellifluous existential musings are hard to fault. [Aug 2021, p.86]

This is bigger, bolder, and better in every respect. [Mar 2014, p.97]