It's wise, but rhythmically, musically, it feels Byrne's age. [May 2018, p.91]

Alcohol And Cocainemarijuananicotine, is borderline endearing, while Love Thyself reminds us that Taylor-Taylor can still write pop hooks whenever he can be bothered. [May 2024, p.77]

[The album] runs from garage rock to impressive reggae-tinged fuzzstompers. [Sep 2013, p.93]

Perfection, though, remains unattainable thanks to Barney Sumner, whose enthusiasm is such that he adds an uncommon amount of whoops and yelps to songs that really do not need any. [Aug 2013, p.89]

While nobody would mistake it for the work of a man who's trying too hard, it's not without its charms. [Sep 2020, p.87]

The result is less a coherent statement and more a collection of songs that simply show off their eclectic influences and their ability to reproduce them well. [May 2018, p.91]

The song titles may be a little lacking this time round (although The Sordid Soliloquy Of Sawborg Destructo makes up for it), but The Blood of Gods is more of the same monstrous bilge.

Dependably solid. [Nov 2019, p.85]

For all its flaws, Rewind The Film shows they're not ready for the glue factory just yet. [Oct 2013, p.86]

Highlights are the punchy pop-metal of Got The Power and the greasy glamorama of The Reverend, replete with satisfyingly fuzzy guitar, but Zipper Down misses as much as it hits.

McCauley strains a little too hard for unpolished authenticity over originality, but he still hits the emotional bullseye half the time. [Oct 2013, p.86]

Ironically, these more daring forays emphasise the inoffensive blandness of some of the other tracks, but if the future holds more similarly brave experimentation then ZBB are on a fascinating career trajectory.

The Mule's taste and experience largely wins the day. [Oct 2013, p.87]

Overall ATW seem "smaller" somehow, where previous records were... well, bigger. If it were anyone else we'd be more impressed, but ATW can do better. [Nov 2018, p.80]

While this album is unlikely to win them many new fans at this stage, there's plenty of the old charm twinkling away to get fans back on board their wonderfully strange little ship. [Oct 2013, p.89]

Tunes and sound both stay below the Gold Standard. [Dec 2014, p.104]

A case of more darkness required. [Mar 2015, p.94]

It’s all great if you’re willing to strap on some cowboy boots and hop on the nearest hayride, but hardcore rockers are gonna wanna sit this one out.

This is a more conventional album. [Dec 2014, p.104]

Overall these Merseyside extreme-metal veterans sound a little unfocused and uninspired on this record, falling back on tired retro-metal tropes. [Oct 2021, p.72]

It's a fine line between hypnotic and soporific, but he's usually on the right side. [Nov 2018, p.83]

Too much of Big Music seems to be reaching for a gravitas it can't back up with emotional or musical substance. [Dec 2014, p.104]

Independence Day is normal for Neil: he tests the climate and the atmospherics are depressing. Terrorise Me, a response to the Bataclan outrage, is the key piece. The rest is no faffing and easy listening.

Language Of The Dead is a 21st-century wake-up call, dismissing the knowledge of a civilised past and demanding we toss our "idols into the sea," to catch some of the rock'n'roll "lightning" slashing throughout the skies instead. At such moments, the cathedral-sized keyboards don't sound quite so fake. [Dec 2014, p.105]

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]

There are many less rewarding experiences than hearing Springsteen thirstily sing his favourite songs, but there’s a sense here that all concerned hope it would catch fire and amount to something more. [Dec 2022, p.76]

Ronnie Radke's lyrics are convincingly nasty. [Oct 2013, p.91]

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]

By occasionally confusing drabness for darkness, they've fallen short of their own lofty standards. [Aug 2018, p.86]

The rest of the album is all over the map, from electro-rocker Let’s Get The Party Started (featuring Oli Sykes of Bring Me The Horizon) to Charmed I’m Sure’s dub-step metal. It’s fun hearing Morello stretch out, though all but the most broadminded RATM fans are unlikely to feel the same way.

A quaintly dated second set haunted by cliche. [Apr 2019, p.89]

Here, White Manna have created grown-up lullabies of the most primal kind.

Sign O' The Times might be Prince's apex. .. The extras on this eight-CD/13-LP set, however, include a lot of dry-humping, second-rate material that hints at the decline he would go into in the 90s and beyond. [Oct 2020, p.91]

Doherty himself remains endearingly cack-handed and poetically confessional but uncontrollably wayward. By the final third, the band appear to have given up and gone to the pub. [Jun 2019, p.84]

Sprightly mid-life Americana. [Jun 2019, p.89]

Peace Trail is a wide-open-sky gem that feels wild and free, while Cowgirl Jam s stupendous, a vintage Young showcase of instrumental assault and battery. Frustratingly, these highlights are punctuated by the six Paradox Passage instrumentals, which desperately miss a visual accompaniment to hang off. [Jun 2018, p.90]

It's a roguish enough distillation of Aussie rock's most okish corners. [Sep 2022, p.73]

Accomplished but derivative.

With all profits going to MusiCares, it’s a worthy effort--if not an entirely worthwhile one.

A rockier proposition, re-channelling the militant, straight-ahead postpunk spirit of 1980, especially on Psychic Attack.

A curious curt selection with no obvious crowd-pleasers, but doubtless KC fans will rise to the challenge. [May 2015, p.107]

Double down on revitalising their music while finding new logs to throw on the philosophical fire. [Oct 2023, p.81]

If you fancy being barked at by a grizzled campaigner about pesticides and sea pollution over three-chord sludge and ragged-glorious guitars, then you’ll love what Young and co cook up here. If not, stick to Harvest.

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

Classy but strangely sterile. [Sep 2022, p.77]

Social Cues feels like the sound of a great band in desperate need of some down time. [Jun 2019, p.88]

Utilising informed guitar sound palette and Johnny Marr ingenuity. [Aug 2020, p.89]

Here he duly revisits his own past, on an album that blends new material with covers of his old work and that of others.

The basic country sounds frame a compelling singer. [Apr 2015, p.97]

Where Is The Water twists and meanders hazily before shifting into gear with a riff from the Jack White school of thud, while opener Needles is excitable garage rock with a stiff, post-punk edge. And over in the kaleidoscopic corner, Wheels Within Wheels flips merrily from one psychedelic landscape to the next and includes a wriggling organ solo that sounds as if it's being squeezed from a tube. All in all, it's quite the adventure. [Dec 2022, p.75]

It's rock'n'roll for aging urchins who don't know how to quit. [Apr 2015, p.98]

The result borders on easy listening with a yacht-pop vibe, before the psychedelic starbursts come out to play. [Nov 2022, p.75]

There’s a demo version of The Ramones’ Rockaway Beach included here, which is as scratchy and worn as you might imagine and, remarkably, lacks any of that patented, and much missed, Motörhead kick. Much better is their gnarly version of Metallica’s Whiplash; if you didn’t know any better you’d swear it was one of their own. Ditto Twisted Sister’s Shoot ‘Em Down.

Romy Vager's vocals are raw, earnest, and Tambourine is Brain Worms distilled, a taut memoir of remote mourning. [Jul 2023, p.87]

Magnetic may veer close to Maroon-5-at-their-very-best territory, but let's not get sniffy. It's a life affirming, joyful record. [Jun 2013, p.91]

There’s little to distinguish its 10 tracks from each other, beyond Wishing’s stark, startling verses. It’s a shame, because Fafara clearly believes in what he’s doing, and this is far from a bad album. It’s just not enough to reach beyond the faithful.

Great in parts, but flat and clumsy in others, Bellamy’s bid to become more serious appears to have stunted what he does best, which is operatic excess fuelled by volcanic emotion.

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

For all his apocalyptic bleakness, Moby’s electropopulist instincts remain active, lending a euphoric rush even to suicidally glum Joy Division-style confessionals like Silence and All The Hurts We Made.

It's probably the Rolling Stones' best album ever. ... Slim pickings of the expanded vinyl package border on the insulting. [Dec 2018, p.94]

Noise & Romance offers a much more disjointed, disorienting and unpolished experience. [May 2019, p.84]

Another adequate but inessential album.

The stumbling block is that too many songs here never develop pasta dino-stomp riff, and that the vocals can be a little shrill. [Summer 2013, p.89]

While there’s plenty of self-indulgent noodling (God Is In The Rhythm; the final section of Infinite Rise) compensation comes with their adventurous spirit.

Sections within Things Buried In Water 1 and The Stranger’s House suggesting melody, the rest an offbeat, thrumming sound collage.

This is certainly a dead weird album; it may improve with time.

Despite a handful of anodyne plodders, it is difficult to dislike Simple Minds in this nostalgic late-career mode, elder statesmen with nothing left to prove. [Nov 2022, p.71]

The album emerging as willfully lo-fi, bouncing along on cheery electronica while McTrusty's almost spoken-word panic attack showcases his rich Glaswegian vocals. [Feb 2022, p.79]

It cuts and blazes and works well live in all its kinetic abandon but, if Shining really want to lay claim to a new genre, they need to integrate their progressive elements into the mix rather than add them as a side option.

Nothing here is as good as their Sweet Jane, but it'll do. [May 2022, p.87]

On 33 Crows he channels his inner Dylan, giving it lots of nasal drawl. Holy Flame brings things up to date, recalling Dandy Warhols. If you fancy some 60s-centric pop-rock, this might work.

Her heart is laid bare in a manner that just manages to avoid becoming cloying.

Inviting famous friends to help him give the songs a fresh coat of paint doesn't, for the most part, make any real impact. [Summer 2013, p.91]

It grows with listens, and at its best (as on Hold On), Clark’s guitar/soul-beat fusion is smooth and stylish. But some of it is just (whisper it) a bit boring.

This is modern life sliced up with the precision of a medical scalpel and then force-fed through a high-density filter of piss and vinegar.

Super-smooth strings, bluesy stomps and immense righteousness are crammed into this varied, if oddly disparate selection. [Feb 2015, p.98]

[A] blend of instrumental moods, torpid 80s indie and self-regarding songs that never entirely clear their launchpad. [Oct 2021, p.79]

It's basically business as usual here. [Nov 2013, p.91]

Some fans may miss the hobo simplicity of yore. [Summer 2013, p.92]

It’s well-meant but well-trodden, rarely exciting ground.

Sporadically great but decidedly patchy, A Moon Shaped Pool is not the sound of a great band dying, more a great band spreading themselves too thinly.

23 tracks is too many. ... But when it's good - as on Marc Almond's ballady Teenage Dream or David Johansen's R&B stomp through Get It On, it's great. [Oct 2020, p.84]

This fifth edition's half-hour documents their second collaboration with Nurse With Wound and never fully recovers. [Sep 2022, p.83]

Overall the album comes together in somewhat less cohesive fashion than Ride Out, and listeners may end up wishing for a Seger to take firmer grip on the steering wheel for one final album.

Some nifty tricks - mashing their own Lonely In Your Nightmare into Rick James's Super Freak, for example - but not enough treat. [Dec 2023, p.74]

Ultimately a completist's set. [Dec 2023, p.84]

Little has changed in the schlocky-horror junk-shop aesthetic.... However, the polished and emotive power-pop chuggers She's The Bad One and Sorry About Tomorrow show more midlife maturity. [May 2015, p.103]

Hard Light works so well because rather than cling on to relevance during the wilderness years, Drop Nineteen have simply waited and let the world catch up with them. [Dec 2023, p.77]

Baird’s weary, almost impassive croon and deadpan humour across both records can’t hide his serious resistance to our self-deceiving, digitally distanced lives.

Past Lives is a wilfully uncommercial record, made for the sheer love of the tight-knit scene that spawned them. [Dec 2022, p.74]

It makes sense with the book on your lap, but otherwise, the album may not convince. The acoustics are peculiar on tracks like Pride and the vocal mic seems compressed, rather than expansive. Something to do with surrender, perhaps. What remains of it, when you give yourself away. [May 2023, p.80]

The band's sixth album is another uneven mix, but with enough fresh twists and smart cameos to save it from redundancy. [Jun 2015, p.90]

It’s a fine mix of odds and sods to stave off the hunger for the next sonic feast they cook up.

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

The majority of this all star tribute treads an inappropriately conformist path. [Apr 2022, p.83]

A little unwieldy in places, but still pleasingly timeless. [Jul 2019, p.85]

There is skill on display, but the album is unlikely to progress beyond background music. [Jun 2015, p.93]

The Minus 5 remain a star-heavy Trojan horse for McCaughey's songwriting. [Jun 2015, p.97]