Orbital remain a comforting presence, and still have plenty to say. [Mar 2023, p.85]

Yet it all still swings, rocks and rolls like a galleon in a squall, the Stones live remaining the luxury you can't do without. [Mar 2023, p.102]

O'Neill has locked into humanity's flawed relationship with nature. But there's celebration too. [Mar 2023, p.92]

What follows is a quietly substantive if still somewhat pallid, meditation on faith and death. [Mar 2023, p.92]

Their most corrosive cocktail yet of melodious sunshine pop and blackly comedic lyrics. [Mar 2023, p.85]

The likes of Beck and Stevie Nicks play supportive rather than starring roles, and the sonic flavours here recall the noir clubby pop of Humanz (2017). The woofer-pumping reggaeton of Tormenta however sees Albarn step aside to let Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny shine. [Mar 2023, p.85]

Lewis hits peak saxophone artistry here. [Mar 2023, p.89]

Dickinson is the singer's best foil since Bernard Butler, spinning a kaleidoscope of suave, modernist soul-pop. [Mar 2023, p.87]

It's also the group's most exciting, most engaged, most breathtaking album this century. [Mar 2023, p.85]

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

A follow-up that finds the pure-toned Montreal-based singer painting with a wider palette, thanks to backing from pianist Felix Fox-Pappas and Toronto jazzers BADBADNOTGOOD. [Mar 2023, p.89]

The past might be intoxicating, but The Candle And The Flame - lucid, conversational, immediate - is beautifully present in its moment. [Mar 2023, p.84]

All guns are still blazing, but slightly differently. [Mar 2023, p.86]

They sing beautifully together and play everything. [Mar 2023, p.83]

Hawk's stentorian baritone croon is almost irony free and his freewheeling songs blossom because of it. [Mar 2023, p.93]

Despite its unruly title, Anarchist Gospel takes all the splits and divisions, the churn and the confusion, and turns them into something remarkably centred and complete, the work of a songwriter who knows who she is and how she got there. [Mar 2023, p.82]

A blissful escape from whatever ails you. [Feb 2023, p.89]

Young Fathers remain a frequently forbidding proposition, and all the better for it. Thrillingly, it's still impossible to predict what we might hear next in any of their tracks. [Mar 2023, p.88]

Fans of the early records of Margo Price and Courtney Marie Andrews will find much to love here, while the diversion into groovesome country soul on Rows Of Clover keeps the head nodding. [Feb 2023, p.84]

His own music finally snaps into focus: gone, the scrappy garage/glam, in favour of sophisticated singer-songwriterly pop constructed around acoustic guitar, strings, extravagantly multi-tracked vocal harmonies and consistent tunes. [Mar 2023, p.86]

The album's abstemious drums help the untethered material breathe, and on point contributions include Lisa Hannigan, and fellow voyager Daniel Lanois, whose sombre instrumental opener Prelude To Song primes us for gravitas-laden songs of loss, warning, transformation and stoicism. [Mar 2023, p.92]

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

Elements of deep soul and space-age pop combine to create a retro-futurist vibe, songs sounding instantly familiar but slightly fried, as if beamed in from other worlds. [Feb 2023, p.84]

This suprise follow-up to May's A Bit Of Previous smacks of pressure-off invention, the sense that they know how to do this by now - and have fun doing it - cemented by Late Developers' title. [Mar 2023, p.84]

A meticulous and bold piece of sound art, but one which is rooted in a plaintive local, human response to global catastrophe. [Mar 2023, p.91]

This is music that needs to be heard in as long a form as possible, so nothing breaks the immersive hallucinatory effect, and you can lose all sense of time direction and place. [Mar 2023, p.93]

An electrifying exercise in first thought as best thought, ... One Day is thrillingly direct. [Feb 2023, p.83]

Furling expands the sonic palette, bringing in piano, percussion, harp, vibraphone and more. The results bring new dimensions to her psychedelic folk. [Feb 2023, p.92]

While Idles boast similar reserves of adrenalin and attitude, Italia 90 better deploy groove. [Feb 2023, p.84]

Despite the occasional maudlin drift, The Bad ends meet rapturous ends when they rally against impending darkness. [Feb 2023, p.85]

The flittering hooks of Whitty's first solo outing impact with tender grace. [Feb 2023, p.90]

It initially feels fragile, but Carvings is hard to shake off. [Feb 2023, p.84]

Are these essentially live recordings of a visceral, in the moment experience? Of course they are. You can’t fake that vital spark. ... Live And Dangerous still stands as the band’s finest hour; the crystallisation of all that made them so irresistible, so brilliantly volatile. [Feb 2023, p.94]

Not the pinnacle of his varied career, maybe, but not a low, either [Feb 2023, p.82]

Another Day To heal opens encouragingly. ... Midway through, La La Land derails, as Queen Of Spaces errs into forlorn folky picking, while Slowly On The Wheel opens with one-finger piano and voice. The Chugging Face Eraser and Baba O'Riley-ish Pockets pulls things together. [Feb 2023, p.84]

Gigi's Recovery fully achieves TMC's transformative purpose, its lyrics of unflinching self-scrutiny leading to side two's exhilarating Only Good Things and the thrillingly airborne climactic title track. [Feb 2023, p.82]

Time's Arrow is Ladytron's equivalent of Simple Minds' early-'80s heyday, where burnished synth-pop meets the hyperreality of travel. [Feb 2023, p.87]

The lack of solidity can make Mercy nebulous like any spirit photo, it sometimes takes work to find the shape, fill in detail. Yet slowly, its unfamiliarity coalesces into a cold beauty, memory acting as a spur, not a comfort blanket. [Feb 2023, p.85]

Repeat plays lay bare a record of rare ambition and thematic complexity. [Feb 2023, p.84]

The result is brooding, often humorous musing on life, joy, occasionally death. ... But it's tender love song Mary, with its meandering sax, that stops you. [Feb 2023, p.92]

While Long Live The Strange turns the outsiderism of Supergrass's Strange Ones into an anthem, with bonus chorale. The rest is more soul-searching, but with instrumental structuring and melodic grace of satisfying excellence. [Feb 2023, p.82]

The narrative lines are fractured, the satire removed; these songs play out like stress responses, fight-or-flight impulses, each one a little panic room. ... There’s not a lot of feeling OK on CACTI, but for once, it feels like exactly the right place for Billy Nomates. She’s brought herself, entirely. [Feb 2023, p.86]

The six lengthy meditations here refine the formula. [Jan 2023, p.84]

The finale to an exemplary act of curation. [Jan 2023, p.102]

It's Plain's elusive ruminations and off-balance poetics that resonate in ever more artful, affecting ways. [Feb 2023, p.88]

Muted, syncopated beats, ghostly pedal steel and icy Solina string machine conspire to create the effect of a slow-motion scene: unwanted debris blowing away in the wind, with our stronger and more resolved singer standing at the centre of the wreckage. Even amid the ashes of her past, it seems, Margo Price keeps burning ever more brightly. [Feb 2023, p.80]

Heaps more respect's due for the full-bloodedness of rippers like Frenzy, Modern Day Rip Iff and Neo Punk. ... Four-letter lyricism and dumb-ass riffing, however, leave you craving the substance of '16's Homme-guided Post Pop Depression. [Feb 2023, p.85]

The group demonstrate their vocal prowess on Hamba, a relentless dance groove featuring plaintive a cappella harmonies. [Dec 2022, p.89]

Songs decay, disappear, swell, mutate, Dalt's seductive, lonesome voice investing them with a sinuous, alien romanticism. [Feb 2023, p.87]

The sheer relentlessness dilutes that thrill factor, but there are shades, notably on the stately opener 2022 and the closing Sleep Cult. [Feb 2023, p.91]

She has found a new confidence in her sound. [Feb 2023, p.92]

Strings offers one of his most vulnerable vocal takes yet on John Deere Tractor, a tender note home to a country mom from a son stuck in and troubled by a city; it feels like a letter from the road, hungover and threadbare. And the playing is flawless and charged, from Cleveland’s steam-engine fiddle during Way Downtown to Rob McCoury’s edgy delicacy during Frosty Morn. [Jan 2023, p.85]

Her torch-song voice is often exposed by spare arrangements - a solemn piano or glowing embers of electric guitar - but songs also burst into euphoric life, like exorcisms. [Jan 2023, p.91]

Despite the band's commendably cyclonic hardcore punk energy, Premonition underscores the fact that White Lung are a vehicle with only one gear, and one that has now run out of road. [Jan 2023, p.88]

Barnes's first outing in seven years offers a timely blast of healing positivity, all but impossible to resist. [Jan 2023, p.84]

Stewart sets about pushing up the earth under these delicate folk orchestrations and prog madrigals with subversive skill. [Dec 2022, p.91]

Eight lengthy bouts of exquisite thrumming folk. [Jan 2023, p.86]

Effortlessly good fun. [Jan 2023, p.99]

Exhaustive box set. ... Very much like a portrait artist will make numerous sketches, so we see the evolution of these songs as Bowie rewrites lyrics, improves melodies, tweaks arrangements, each stage an improvement on the previous. [Jan 2023, p.94]

Warren's razor-sharp lyricism - and her ability to deliver hard truths and cold comforts s gracefully - ensure Lessons For Mutants is endlessly compelling. [Dec 2022, p.85]

Inessential recordings predating the Tuaregs' breakthrough by a decade. [Dec 2022, p.93]

This jazz grandee has nothing to prove, but his quest for a deeper understanding of the human spirit is encapsulated by Sacred Thread. [Dec 2022, p.87]

Tempus is overwhelming serene. [Dec 2022, p.89]

One of the most inventive, exploratory albums of the year. [Jan 2023, p.90]

[Jess Shoman's] roller-coaster voice, sometimes Kermit-like, sometimes as out there as Mary Margaret O'Hara, is an acquired taste. yet she's successfully sensual on Be. ... Everything comes together on Sharp Wheel. [Dec 2022, p.82]

The pop and alt-country arrangements shine throughout, with all concerned inspired and on point. [Dec 2022, p.85]

There's a first-take feel, which the Horse are known for, and a whole lot of background harmonies, which they're not. [Dec 2022, p.84]

Titles like Telekinetoscopes and After The Visions are as gripping as the levitating grooves and flickering pulses that accompany them. [Jan 2023, p.93]

Amid these epic soundtracks of rage and empathy, the legend of the Loaf lives again. [Jan 2023, p.86]

While the odd misstep lurks, longueurs are few and far between, the skippy guitar figure of Nightcrawler and creeping tension of Wide I's scaling harmonic heights against the odds, recalling early millennial triumphs Double Figure and Spokes. [Jan 2023, p.86]

Springsteen's choice of songs, especially in the deep tracks and left turns, also i=underscores a deeper retrospect and aspiration. [Jan 2023, p.82]

And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow again shows Mering's most extraordinary craft. [Dec 2022, p.82]

Abetted by producer Photay's sharp editing skills and tactile sound design, KALAK's wildly careening spirituals up the ante with missionary glee and emotional intelligence, Korwar tapping into the diversity of the Indian diaspora via some of his most captivating, immediate and inventive compositions to date. Not for the first time, he's raised the bar. [Dec 2022, p.88]

Even with the bright flickers of Kate Bush-like experimentation and excellent Depeche Mode disco, though, these songs tend to lack the high-definition of 2018's Chris, their earnestly fixed intensity never quite catching from pop smoulder to earth-scorching flame. [Dec 2022, p.84]

The Space Between is a delicate, dignified joy. [Nov 2022, p.86]

It's utterly convincing and frequently ace. [Nov 2022, p.87]

Protector feels rooted in the psychedelic quicksand that surrounded 2020 debut, and Of No Junction. It's no less enchanting though. [Dec 2022, p.92]

Ezra Collective's confidence hits a fizzing high on this freewheeling 14-track double. [Dec 2022, p.87]

Palomino is a wholly convincing bid for wider recognition. [Dec 2022, p.84]

This second is more sophisticated [than 2018 debut Sistahs]; distorted guitars still feedback and synths jar, but there is also mellotron, violin and Omnichord bringing subtlety and depth. [Dec 2022, p.91]

Thrilling collective racket. [Dec 2022, p.90]

[Luke Haines] has never been backed like this before. ... It's as if The WreckingCrew wound up on a Skip Spence album. [Nov 2022, p.91]

F&M hit peak funkiness on this fat-free blend of Krautrock pulses and pop melodies. [Nov 2022, p.94]

It retains the singer's inherent quirks while offering a more accessible sound. [Dec 2022, p.87]

Revolver presents an accomplished, almost impenetrable sheen - which makes the archaeology provided by the outtakes and different mixes all the more involving. ... You can hear the pace of their lives and their ideas in this perfect encapsulation of The Beatles at their peak. [Dec 2022, p.96]

Their third LP is mostly comprised of ground-quaking punk-dance anthems, they're also politically charged, shot through with ribald wit, simmering anger and references to philosopher Frantz Fanon. [Dec 2022, p.93]

Its peaks evoke Jack White's maximalist blues fusion. [Nov 2022, p.94]

A sonic adventure best enjoyed with very good headphones. [Dec 2022, p.85]

Up-tempo and poppy, Simple Minds' energy remains undiminished on Direction Of The Heart. [Nov 2022, p.90]

A potpourri of country, rock, bluegrass and folk, the constant being top-shelf picking and soaring harmonies. [Nov 2022, p.93]

Isn't shy about where it's coming from, and it is assured. But ... It lacks their previous warmth. [Nov 2022, p.93]

Their albums from this period were a little low on magic, but this is the real deal, an organic sound full of strange, shadowy moods and adventurous and melodic playing. [Nov 2022, p.104]

Full of perfect pop, its 10 songs are giddy bursts of optimism and wonderment. [Nov 2022, p.86]

It's bracing, intense stuff, though the bleak wit that runs through Morris's proclamations and Dimitri Coats' brawny riffage ensures the earache is addictive. [Dec 2022, p.90]

Delirious, danceable songs with emotional heft. [Dec 2022, p.89]

This is a more soulful, less arch record than Tranquility Base. Not quite as detached from Monkeys past as it first appears, either. [Dec 2022, p.84]

All told, an uproarious upgrade on the garage bashfest. [Dec 2022, p.86]

With its major keys, funky breakbeats, scorching guitar solos and soothing flutes, here's one Gizzard Magnum opus not to miss in the deluge. [Dec 2022, p.92]