The Listener

The repetitiveness made me cry with boredom: Mark Pritchard and Thom Yorke’s Tall Tales reviewed

10 May 2025 9:00 am

Grade: B+ You are in the wrong hands here for what is a homage to this duo’s favourite electronic music.…

An astonishingly good new album from Black Country, New Road

19 April 2025 9:00 am

Grade: A Is that a kind of nod to Oasis in the album title? I can’t think of a band…

Sunny Schubert and iridescent Ravel: album of the week

12 April 2025 9:00 am

Grade: A Maurice Ravel was tougher than he looked. True, he dressed like a dandy and wrote an opera about…

Dazzling: Marc-André Hamelin’s Hammerklavier

23 November 2024 9:00 am

Grade: A When Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata was published in 1818, pianists were confronted with a mixture of ‘demonic energy and…

Goodbye to MC5, the holiest of rock’s holy cows

16 November 2024 9:00 am

Grade: D+ Ah, the original Linkin Park, except even more spavined. MC5 came outta Detroit in the mid 1960s and…

A box set for those on the spectrum: Markus Poschner’s Bruckner Symphonies reviewed

28 September 2024 9:00 am

Grade: B+ Anton Bruckner wrote 11 symphonies – Numbers One to Nine plus a student exercise and the formidable rejected…

Too bombastic to be country music: Post Malone’s F-1 Trillion reviewed

24 August 2024 9:00 am

Grade: B Country music has become the acceptable route through which American pop stars resuscitate their floundering careers: sales are…

As good, and inventive, as modern rock music gets: Black Midi's Hellfire reviewed

30 July 2022 9:00 am

Grade: A+ The difficult question with Black Midi was always: are you listening to them in order to admire them,…

An intense slab of religiosity: Nick Cave's Seven Psalms reviewed

16 July 2022 9:00 am

 Grade: B There has always been a seriousness and intelligence about Nick Cave quite at odds with that which usually…

Humour, sweetness and sincerity: Father John Misty's Chloë and the Next Twentieth Century reviewed

23 April 2022 9:00 am

 Grade: A– In which Josh Tillman reimagines the whole back catalogue of 20th-century American pop music (except for rock), tilting…

No one should be doing indie rock at 43: Band of Horses's Things Are Great reviewed

2 April 2022 9:00 am

Grade: B That thing, ‘indie rock’, is so well played and produced these days, so pristine and flawless, that it…

See this Russian hip hop star before they arrest him: Oxxxymiron's Beauty & Ugliness reviewed

26 March 2022 9:00 am

Grade: A+ I was going to review hyperpop chanteuse Charli XCX’s album this week, but it was such boring, meretricious,…

Fabulously boring: Weather Station's How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars reviewed

12 March 2022 9:00 am

Grade: C– Anyone remember that TV advert for Canada from the 1980s – a succession of colourful images, including a…

Too neat but it has hooks aplenty: Avril Lavigne's Love Sux reviewed

5 March 2022 9:00 am

Grade: B Yay, life just gets better and better. World War Three and now this. More petulant popcorn pre-school punk…

Pretty astonishing: Black Country, New Road's Ants From Up There reviewed

19 February 2022 9:00 am

Grade: A+ It is not true, fellow boomers, that there is nothing new under the sun nor no good new…

Has the whiff of Spinal Tap: Jethro Tull's The Zealot Gene reviewed

5 February 2022 9:00 am

Grade: C+   I bought the ‘seminal’ Jethro Tull double album Thick as a Brickfrom a secondhand shop when I…

Lovely and wistful: Neil Young and Crazy Horse's Barn reviewed

15 January 2022 9:00 am

 Grade: A I have persisted in buying everything Neil Young releases since I first heard On the Beach as a…