The Listener
The repetitiveness made me cry with boredom: Mark Pritchard and Thom Yorke’s Tall Tales reviewed
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Grade: A I have persisted in buying everything Neil Young releases since I first heard On the Beach as a…
