Another inspirational triumph over adversity. [Oct 2018, p.90]

The hair-raising honesty of their younger incarnation might have softened, but their new confidence and control ensure theses songs let a lot of life in. [Apr 2021, p.78]

Polwart conveys contrasting themes of tragedy, redemption, hope and homecoming with immensely affecting guile. [Jan 2018, p.93]

Providence Canyon is one of those brilliantly timeless albums that could have been lost in someone's dusty attic for decades. [Aug 2018, p.93]

It's a journey beyond self-consciousness and towards mature vulnerability, to an evolved idea of what is musically pure. [Jan 2019, p.82]

Worth the 10-year wait. [Nov 2019, p.91]

Singer Barbora Patkova's soulful charge that brings a tighter focus to a set of roiling, otherworldly jams whcih sound like Can and Funkadelic getting high on Sun Ra's unfettered jazz supply. [May 2020, p.93]

The Old Fabled River deals only in wistful enchantment, with four, typically bardic, otherworldly Roberts originals augmented by traditional ballads and a brace of Norwegian hymnals, achingly emoted by saxophonist Marthe Lea. [Aug 2021, p.88]

Throughout, the Brothers' riotous dustbowl carnival sounds and Ian's pointed deadpan make for a consistently entertaining cocktail. [Oct 2021, p.92]

Citizen Kane Jr. Blues has the challenged audio of a cassette machine hidden inside a coat or under a napkin. it also has the precious, authentic thrill of one-night-only magic. [Jun 2022, p.96]

A potent artistic tour de force, White Jesus Black Problems' message is ultimately a simple but life-affirming one: love can conquer all. [Jul 2022, p.94]

Its four long, richly-textured instrumentals thrum with existential reverence. [Aug 2022, p.89]

A few sag under the weight of brooding brass and strings - Lookout For Hope, Doom - but others soar - Beautiful Dreamer, Electricity, We Shall Overcome. Ultimately it's a winner. [Jun 2024, p.91]

There’s a vulnerability and a very English kind of saudade to Below A Massive Dark Land, but also a sense of individual purpose [Nov 2024, p.94]

Ultimately, A Sober Conversation amounts to a brilliant and bold record that is all the more powerful for its deployment of life-affirming groves and melodies. [Aug 2025, p.78]

Yet another acknowledgement of these two commanding talents. [Nov 2014, p.95]

Morby has delivered largely run-of-the-mill roots rock, but Singing Saw is more measured. [Jun 2016, p.91]

Each song is perfectly realised.[Mar 2021, p.90]

A rare (and improved) document of a more muscular Wings. [Aug 2024, p.99]

The trio's key facet is their instrumental nous, all hypnotic tension and release with abrupt chord/gear shifts. [Mar 2026, p.88]

Electric Dirt, as implied, is a continuation of "Dirt Farmer's" themes, packing a sharper jolt. [Jul 2009, p.94]

It flits between rigorous, tricksy composition and kinetic improv. [May 2021, p.78]

Both energy and melodies hold strong throughout, and, suitably topped off with Ballad Of Mott-style self-chronicling finale Born Innocent, Redd Kross is these Angelenos’ defining epic. [Aug 2024, p.86]

Surely the sweetly sour bubblegum album of 2015. [Sep 2015, p.86]

Before The Dawn is glorious and confounding--in other words, pure Kate. [Jan 2017, p.96]

A beautiful, comforting lament. [Nov 2019, p.95]

The self-analysis is elevated by Chatten's scowling poetry and producer Dan Carey's bright detailing. [Aug 2023, p.80]

Well after its final note fades, Islands lingers long in the memory. [Oct 2014, p.93]

An album whose wider appeal reaches for powerpop nirvana. [May 2015, p.98]

A densely orchestrated album that, even by his standards, is full of reflective melancholy. [Dec 2017, p.90]

A fourth album of brisk Saharan grooves, heavy jamming and trance percussion. [May 2018, p.98]

To most ears, this late-night, whipcrack-sharp chooglathon, finally unveiled, sounds astounding. What were they like on a good night? [Sep 2019, p.107]

It's not gloom and vitriol, it's gorgeous. [Nov 2020, p.83]

Throughout, a recurring Satie-like piano motif floats in and out, soothing the raw emotions. [Apr 2021, p.83]

While it lacks the hostility of its role model or its strident central voice, there's intrigue aplenty. [May 2023, p.84]

A triumph of healing and connection, experimentalism balanced out by emotional heft. [Nov 2023, p.89]

A glorious convergence of talents. [Sep 2024, p.92]

From Terry Edwards’ dysregulated trumpet on Always A Stranger to the wheezy strings of The Secret Of Breathing, Soft Tissue is a magnificent reminder that few people know better how to arrange life’s broken pieces, how to orchestrate the chaos. [Oct 2024, p.84]

One tiny complaint: the original tapes were intended as complete listening experiences, immersive acts of prayer with transportive qualities of a religious or psychedelic experience. For the time being, this is just a taste of the full bewitching trip. [Jun 2017, p.102]

Love's Crushing Diamond is restful, woven, baroque. [Feb 2014, p.89]

Altogether, a bold and beautiful record. [Sep 2025, p.78]

The rehearsal-room feel of Mwng succeeds in capturing the organic, woody, mystical atmosphere that was sometimes missing from its highly-polished, heavily-digitised predecessors.

This time [COF] have tempered their voluminous superfuzz with scenic bliss. [Oct 2004, p.101]

Not only the bravest record she's ever made, it's also one of the strangest and most uncompromising by a major artist to get a commercial release. [Sep 2004, p.93]

Delicate yet powerful, and utterly compelling. [Feb 2023, p.92]

Has a spare, homespun feel with its simple folk guitar. [Sep 2023, p.82]

The brothers have recorded an album that goes to the heart of who they are. [Jul 2026, p.80]

For all these disturbances, this grappling with difficult stuff of life and death, there is lovely, graceful ease to The Ballad Of Darren. This isn't the sound of a band trying to react against their past, or challenge their Britpop audience with US noise, or justify their existence - it's Blur simply showing what they do best. [Sep 2023, p.80]

A companion piece, maybe, but these songs can stand alone. [Apr 2022, p.84]

A one-man rap vigilante. [Jul 2012, p.92]

Remarkably, the performances by current artists from Ralph Stanley down the generations to Angel Snow are all superb. [Feb 2014, p.91]

Vega's spirit still blazed with righteous passion even when his body was giving out. Now it glowers like a ghostly light sculpture from beyond the grave, predicting current atrocities and still bang on for modern times. [Sep 2017, p.89]

The Curious Hand is that rare thing in folk: original, self-contained and unencumbered by the genre. [Dec 2017, p.88]

It's a unique kind of unhappy listening, too toxic on the universal scale to be bled out. But it leaves you galvanised, purged and recharged for the unending war against mediocrity. [Mar 2019, p.90]

She sounds like a full band as vamping pianos, rubbery double basses, freeform vibes and skittering beats collide. [Sep 2020, p.85]

It's a compulsive listen. [Feb 2021, p.85]

Rare, Forever's prevailing mood is sensuous and luxurious. [May 2021, p.88]

The free-est, fun-est, most psychedelic Villagers record so far. [Sep 2021, p.76]

This is not only Horace Andy's best album in 40 years, but it is also a work of lasting power. [May 2022, p.84]

With its own low-key sparkle Archangel Hill stands testament to a musical third act every bit as engaging as anything that went before. [Jun 2023, p.91]

Discs 2 and 3 are essential if familiar, given they document sessions taped for the BBC, from an unreleased January 1972 Peel session to the version of Starman taped for Top Of The Pops in July. .... By contrast, everything on Disc 5 is fresh to this box. [Jul 2024, p.96]

Reflective, yet joyful, it's an absolute triumph. [Apr 2025, p.79]

Familiar elements (Nancy Wang's cheerleading vocals, sparse instrumentation colliding, lyrical misanthropy) are present and correct, but everything is bolder and deeper. [June 2010, p. 93]

Dan Bejar's surprising mix of slinky '80s soft rock and sophisticated disco. [July 2011, p. 106]

Snares feels more like No Age's greatest hits than their fifth album. [Feb 2018, p.95]

It's Beach House's grandest vision yet. [Mar 2022, p.83]

A poignant tribute. [Jan 2020, p.84]

Their most ruthlessly focused. [Nov 2020, p.88]

The source isn't always apparent, as Loscil and English's manipulations drift closer to the ambient techno of Gas. [Mar 2023, p.91]

In Waves partly mimics the jostle and heave of a crowded dancefloor. All You Children presses The Avalanches into euphoric service, matched for dynamism by Baddy On The Floor, a bend-and-snap collaboration with DJ Honey Dijon. [Nov 2024, p.85]

Linderman owes what happened to her with this superbly honed musical novella. [Feb 2025, p.80]

The Hex expands brilliantly in a musical vision that had lain mostly dormant. [Dec 2018, p.90]

With its 10 tracks and 24-minute running time, this unexpected sequel--its sleeve nodding playfully to Dr Dre's 2001-might look like a small-scale musical property, but once inside, it's a mansion. [Sep 2021, p.84]

Decidedly bolder than 2016's Ellipsis, it is an album that revels in subverting expectations. [Jun 2020, p.88]

This is an album that seduces as readily as it challenges. [Sep 2015, p.88]

Boone's rich, Rickie Lee Jones-meets-Chrissie Hynde voice is the careworn bedrock upon which these bruised, dynamics-rich songs depend. [Feb 2019, p.92]

Elbow reflect an unruly world here, but if they sometimes lose faith, they never lose heart. [Nov 2019, p.87]

Rhys’s melodies stay with you, and his wordplay is as pleasingly idiosyncratic as ever. [Feb 2024, p.89]

Like Baldwin, Ndegeocello isn’t one to look away, but both are generous enough and have the artistic skills to let you walk a mile in their shoes. [Sep 2024, p.87]

Sleigh Bells offer a thrilling ride. [Sep 2010, p.104]

Getting back in touch with his anger hasn't come at the cost of Mould's innate tunefulness. [Oct 2020, p.86]

Constant Bop is even more eclectic [than White Denim's music]. [Jun 2015, p.87]

Full and lush, yet somehow homey and direct. [May 2003, p.97]

Although Evening... has this unexpected core of angry commitment, she's still slick with Californian cruisers. [Nov 2003, p.123]

Beautifully recorded, this is intimate seduction for voice, elegant finger-picked guitar and not much else. [May 2004, p.93]

Vincent's voice is so unusual and beguiling, it almost detracts from the lyrics, but they eventually punch through. ... Vincent and Another Sky enthrall. [Sep 2020, p.88]

They might shake, they might tremble, but The National remain a safe pair of hands. [Jun 2013, p.86]

Lynn still sounds full of the life-force; more engaged and effervescent than many stars half her age. [Apr 2016, p.88]

From Ireland's proliferating alt-guitar pack, these intense runners could go the distance. [Feb 2024, p.89]

Now 25 and treading Nirvana/Hole-influenced terrain better suited to the bleed and luster of these uncensored songs of self-empowerment, she has found her perfect skin. [May 2023, p.94]

Hval deals in big cerebral questions, but these songs--intimate, intricately fleshed out--have roots in both body and mind. [Oct 2019, p.86]

Rendered with a delicate, impressionistic touch, Phasor's dreamlike entreaties cut far deeper than predecessor Far In's lockdown ruminations. [Mar 2024, p.90]

Her characters will wander through your imagination for days after the record's stopped spinning. [Nov 2016, p.86]

Ire Works is a thrillingly hostile racket containing 13 wild bursts. [Dec 2007, p.110]

Vibrant and uninhibited, dotted with rule-bending twists, Mood Valiant is the sound of summer. [Aug 2021, p.88]

While the album's nine, wordless pieces for mournfully beautiful cello and shifting ambient atmospheres may not always conjure seismic volatility, there is certainly an underlying tension close to the surface of swooning opener Hellebore. [Jan 2016, p.96]

A masterclass in sound design, Bolted creeps up slowly then engulfs you. [Dec 2023, p.91]

A heady, volatile brew that, in these emboldened settings, have the makings of anthems. [Jun 2017, p.92]