Ultimately, where Imagine wins over similar projects is the degree of access Yoko has given to source material. A Simon Hilton-edited, Ono-prefaced book is exceptional. And the core album? A masterpiece. [Dec 2018, p.94]

Safe to say, the album's 14 tracks are confirmed to be nothing less than brilliant (it wasn't consistently voted the best album of all time back in the 90s for nothing), with Martin's beautifully burnished, respectful restorations of For No One, Here There And Everywhere and the enduringly magnificent Tomorrow Never Knows packing particular emotional punch.

It's an essential addition to any Young fan's library. [Jan 2019, p.94]

Live At The Hollywood Bowl is back, with new mixes by Giles Martin that sharpen the sound but don’t ditch the screams, plus extra tracks, including a wonderful I Want To Hold Your Hand. The great lost Beatles album just became the essential new Beatles album.

This is a brilliant time-stamp of a band on the cusp of greatness. In this all-encompassing collection, Metallica have actually managed to improve on perfection.

Fans will alp up the spot-on menu, while newcomers can discover one of the most criminally overlooked musical titans of the last century. [Nov 2013, p.98]

A monumentally hideous, yet strangely glorious album. Some might say it goes up to 11... [Dec 2023, p.72]

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

Visconti spent weeks polishing Live And Dangerous into a masterpiece. This box set suggests that all we ever needed was around 80 minutes, including encores. Seven additional, yet equally dazzling, versions prove that and give us Thin Lizzy in their prime: live, raw and dangerous. [Feb 2023, p.84]

A richly imagined widescreen masterpiece that grows deeper and more emotive with each listen, Ghosteen may well prove to be the most ambitious, achingly beautiful, boldly experimental album of cave's career. [Dec 2019, p.83]

Lost Domain will leave the listener raw. [Jan 2015, p.114]

It's getting late, but Springsteen's dusty art shows no sign of fading. [Summer 2019, p.84]

This album is the high point of his career, and it could be one of the finest albums you'll hear this year too. [May 2024, p.76]

Dense, rich and deeply rewarding.

The best showcase yet for a candid performer for whom the warts are the best bit. [Sep 2023, p.79]

It's a great way of refreshing an often overly familiar catalogue. [Jan 2015, p.124]

Rhythm & Blues is a proper double album: each disc is notionally themed though, as you'd rightly expect, there's plenty of each. [Oct 2013, p.88]

It's a pleasure to report his studio debut catches the spark. [Dec 2014, p.103]

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

Although his french horn resounds like a signature motif throughout his work, Czukay's genius was as a discreet creator of space, in which ideas, energies, colours and found sounds could flow freely. [May 2018, p.98]

Not just euphoric but also important music, and another near-faultless Wolf Alice wonder. [Jul 2021, p.84]

Chunky but not over-egged at 14 tracks, Bury Me In My Boots is packed with honed tunes, new ideas and loveable old tricks.

At no points does the listener throw up their arms and shout, “My God! Let It Be is the greatest Beatles album ever made!” but this larger, panoramic overview does wonders for the record, giving us a bird’s-eye view of the sessions. Buy it and you’ll play it a lot. [Nov 2021, p.82]

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

Their 1997 self-titled release marked their effective rebirth, signalling the end of that period when they used outside writers and became themselves again. But no album since has had quite the consistency and urgency of this, their 17th studio record. Bang Zoom Crazy... Hello.

With Life Is But A Dream… Avenged Sevenfold haven’t just transcended their metal peers for good, they’ve also created their definitive artistic statement. And it’s bloody fantastic. [Jul 2023, p.80]

The most thrilling of everything here is a newly discovered BC radio recording from 1964 that fizzes with the thrill of making music and being alive. [Oct 2013, p.92]

Thematically, if previous Andrew WK albums have felt like having entire kegs shotgunned in your face, this one is like being syphon-fed after-dinner brandies.

Needless to say, this is irresistible stuff that demands to be listened to while twerking in a 70s style (Steve Priest pout on your face; mock-surprise eyes à la the disgraced Gary Glitter).

Their story is one of the great oversights of rock'n'roll and it's a joy to see it curated with such care. [Apr 2015, p.106]

The USA in the year of Trump, though, has inspired Drive-By Truckers to make this lacerating denunciation of the state of their nation, which stands right up there with Springsteen’s Wrecking Ball and their own best work.

As evidenced here, experimental doesn’t mean inaccessible. This is music from the past that, while only looking forward, is still daring the present to catch up.

The recording is great, Fogerty's in fine voice throughout, the hits keep coming, and when the band slip into those chugging grooves they're emphatically fierce.

A towering testament to a much-missed band. [Aug 2019, p.84]

A major work of stunning breadth and originality, heralding a talent who shines a blinding white light in the post-Prince darkness.

As albums go, But Here We Are might be the Foos’ most cathartic, but it’s also one of their best, and a fitting tribute to the late, great Taylor Hawkins. [Jul 2023, p.82]

The Tipping Point album is tip-top art-pop. [Mar 2022, p.80]

Inevitably, some of the bonus tracks are duds. The Dance Electric is the kind of boxy, Huey Lewis-style synth-funk jam that Prince could churn out in his sleep, while Velvet Kitty Cat and Katrina’s Paper Dolls are twee, lightweight sketches. But overall, the extra material makes Purple Rain a richer, deeper, stranger and ruder album.

Trower’s guitar playing is deliciously inventive, whether he’s channelling Mark Knopfler on Wither On The Vine or moving closer to Eric Clapton circa 461 Ocean Boulevard on the title track.

Rough And Rowdy Ways is unique, precious testimony from an elderly rock'n'roll survivor who, for all the games he plays, is a seer nonetheless. [Aug 2020, p.82]

It's an astonishing set. [May 2021, p.84]

It's a dazzler, a dynamic folk-pop record steeped in style and bristling with modern touches. [Oct 2021, p.76]

Experience Hendrix have done him proud with this reissue. Take it as his ultimate monument. [Dec 2018, p.92]

Rock'n'roll in 2022 doesn't get any better than this. [Jun 2022, p.82]

Cave remains inspirational working widescreen miracles from cataclysmic events. [May 2021, p.85]

All three [previously unreleased tracks] are worthy additions to the Radiohead canon, enhancing and enriching an all time classic album rather than diluting it.

On the raw, muscular opening Notches it’s the ‘notches on my walking cane’ as Bonamassa’s guitar sends out a series of flares from the powerful blues boogie that propels the song. ... It’s a headlong rush to the final slow, melodic Known Unknowns, where his angst drains into an acceptance that he will never beat the ticking of the clock. It was a journey he had to make and now he’ll have to follow it.

An absolute must. [Nov 2021, p.83]

VDGG’s fourth album since they became a trio in 2007, Do Not Disturb is every bit as strange, angular and unpredictable as anything the band did in the 70s.

This is simply stunning. [Jun 2023, p.79]

S&M2 is a success on the grandest of scales. [Sep 2020, p.84]

An essential album that gets better with every listen. [Nov 2020, p.86]

As Long As I have You surpasses expectations at every turn, a high-water mark in a career already boasting a fair few triumphs. [Jun 2018, p.92]

Marvellous album. .... A rock'n'roll record that's funkier than a tramp's kacks, more soulful than a gospel convention, warmer than a mother's love and groovier than the Grand Canyon. [Apr 2024, p.78]

This is an utterly brilliant collection. [Mar 2022, p.90]

Compiled with discipline, diligence and no little love, Archives Volume II is an immersive treat. It’s primarily for fans, but even the most casual of acquaintances will find much to adore here. [Jan 2021, p.93]

Cousins is in remarkable voice, his lyrics better than ever. [Apr 2021, p.87]

It's an astonishing, tour-de-force performance, ferocious and committed and dripping with confidence. [Jun 2015, p.90]

The Book Of Souls will doubtless be celebrated most for its epics, and if you thought Maiden had pulled out all the stops in the past, you may need to strap yourself in and say a quick prayer to Eddie this time round.

The energy and buoyancy never sacrifice Elbow's innate knack for emotional impact, as Garvey sings with poetic accuracy of the abyss, various hallelujahs and the meaning of love. [Apr 2024, p.82]

An unlikely masterpiece. [Apr 2021, p.89]

An hour of sheer roar-along brilliance. ... Stupendous. [Jun 2020, p.88]

For any given sideman, a Bowie gig was invariably an occasion to rise to, and on this particular night rise they did. ... “And it’s fucking great.” He’s not wrong. [Dec 2018, p.99]

Their rejuvenating effects make this the most rounded and melodic QOTSA album in a decade, a triumph snatched from the mortuary doors. [Summer 2013, p.88]

Oddly, the title track, a low-key ballad, is the least satisfying song on offer here. It's the only aberration. [Summer 2013, p.94]

Whichever level you enjoy it on, this folkie’s volte-face is less ‘Judas’, more ‘genius’.

First pleasure-shock come with previously unknown 1974 demos of the Shangri-La's Out In The Street, The Disco Song (Heart of Glass) and Labelle-like Sexy Ida. ... First impression on hearing this much remastered Blondie is how perfectly Harry unleashed beautifully nuanced sexualised dynamite over the band's tightly crafted power-pop bombs and genre diversion on what remains one of the last century's finest bodies of work. [Sep 2022, p.80]

Villains, this deep and danceable delight, ends with two searing six minute tracks: the razor-blade blues of the White Stripes-ish The Evil Has Landed, and a sunrise-of-the-ancients pop finalé called Villains Of Circumstance.

This follow-up is, if anything, even more exquisite.

When real, life-changing tragedy strikes a master of dark musical arts, masterpieces can be made: Lou Reed and John Cale’s Songs For Drella. Bowie’s Blackstar. Sufjan Stevens’s Carrie & Lowell. The Bad Seeds’ sixteenth album, Skeleton Tree.

This album is a vindication of the instinct that less is more. It’s a magnificent testament to a man who has been scarred and damaged by his journey, but whose lust for life remains gloriously intact.

Every Loser captures an Iggy Pop never more ready to be himself and never better equipped to deliver a stone-cold classic. [Feb 2023, p.78]

All told, a crowd-fuelled triumph. [Nov 2021, p.75]

Some tracks here might surprise on first listen, but surprise quickly gives way to joy. This is superb. [Aug 2020, p.84]

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]

One to drown in. [Sep 2023, p.85]

Hearing Southern Man played on a single acoustic guitar as opposed to the thrash of the album is one epiphany, while the windswept Don’t Let It Bring You Down is cataclysmic. ... Magnificent.

The soundboard mix of this version of an already much-expanded CD sounds gleamingly, unfeasibly fresh. [Nov 2013, p.93]

There won't be a better record released this month, and very few this year. This is one for the ages. [Nov 2018, p.84]

Every second feels vital, vicious and vastly more exciting than a band approaching their fortieth anniversary has any right to be. [Oct 2020, p.84]

A fascinating and entirely listenable record of an imminently great talent. [Sep 2022, p.80]

Outstanding. [Summer 2021, p.82]

There's a remarkable sense of interplay, open space, hard rock and ambition that suggests other bands might as well pack up their tents and think about heading home. It's hard to pick gems from a sea of diamonds. [Oct 2022, p.72]

While the remastering is a major improvement on previous CD releases, it is the session discs that are of most interest to anyone who grew up with this timeless record. [Nov 2013, p.101]

The nine-song eulogy assumes the quality of a heady elixir. All told, a very wonderful thing. [Summer 2021, p.83]

Such is Taylor’s bristling conviction, and the mastery of his sparse instrumentation, that he holds you transfixed.

Bohemian Rhapsody's soundtrack is as dramatically paced, unrelentingly emotive and intrinsically cinematic as it's reasonably possible for any flat piece of circular plastic to be.

The guitar tones and drum sounds are worthy of a review in themselves, micro-nuanced even within a track, and set in a 3D space that both breathes and is right up in your face at the same time.

Automatic impresses in its scope and daring. Certainly, the drone-like Drive was a surprise choice for first single and opening cut, as if R.E.M were wilfully avoiding the rock god game.

It's their finest by some distance. [Summer 2021, p.84]

1976’s Presence was both the nearest Zeppelin ever got to recreating their live power in a studio setting, and the album that bears closest inspection and repeated listening when the familiarity of earlier high spots has been exhausted.

Instead of losing intrinsic magic, Martin's enhanced it. ... Everything sounds more emphatic, more...everything. ... Bin your bootlegs, [the Esher demos are] exceptional. But the gold for completists comes on discs 4-6: the sessions. [Nov 2018, p.90]

A masterful companion piece to Lanegan's unflinching memoir. [Jun 2020, p.88]

It's surprisingly excellent. [Oct 2021, p.79]

These now achingly familiar songs never sounded so good. ... An immaculately packaged, multi-format tribute.

A break from the band’s soundtrack work, ironically, Every Country’s Sun sounds, like a brilliant soundtrack in its own right. To what is up to you.

All the songs get the live treatment from an already available concert recorded in Montreal. Work tapes and a live Sweet Jane and Walk On The Wild Side add heft, but the main work is the thing here.

While everything here echoes its maker's past, it all sounds new. ... The Boy Named If (And Other Children's Stories) is excellent. [Feb 2022, p.78]