Back catalogue: Rock (All)

Review: If any album comes close to the beauty of Crosby, Stills & Nash in 2025 it's this. It's difficult to imagine anyone else nailing melodic, acoustic guitar-oriented music that treads in gospel, blues and pastoral psychedelia better than this supergroup. Could Bernard Butler be on his way to another Mercury Prize nomination with this? They've got a strong case for it. The band itself is something a little different and formed by popular demand. Norman Blake (Teenage Fanclub) Bernard Butler (Suede) and James Grant (Love and Money) originally got together for one occasion, at Saint Luke's in Glasgow in 2022 for Celtic Connections, but the power of them together was so great they've been talked into putting an album out. They've gone about it in quite a pragmatic way, with each member labelling which songs theirs, as opposed to all trying to write the same song at the same time. Makes sense really.

Review: This reissue of Janitor of Lunacy recaptures Nico in a stark, spellbinding 1983 live performance at Manchester's Library Theatre during a period when she called the city home. Spread across 20 tracks on double vinyl, the album distils her haunting presence and singular voice into raw, intimate recordings that draw from four of her solo records as well as Velvet Underground classics like 'Femme Fatale' and 'All Tomorrow's Parties.' The set also includes a brooding take on Bowie's 'Heroes' which is, like the rest of the pieces, minimalist and emotionally charged. This was Nico stripped down to her essence, namely bleak, beautiful and moving.

Review: What you see before you ranks among the most mythologised live albums (n)ever released. Like the title suggests, it was originally recorded in 1972 at Parisian rock institution Le Bataclan, a legendary venue which would later gain notoriety after a group of armed gunmen opened fire on a crowd in 2015, killing 90 people. But that grisly recent history belies its status as one of the most respected concert halls in the French capital, and this not-quite-Velvet Underground show has contributed to that legacy. Showcasing the stop-you-dead qualities of Nico's staggering (and unique) vocal timbre, the surreal, immersive qualities of the Cale and Reed's legendary art-rock tones, this time capsule had been bootlegged and bootlegged until 2004, when it finally got an official release. Now it's back.