Their shortest statement yet, offering seven songs in 34 minutes, with a stripped-down, countrified focus. [Feb 2022, p.91]

A little more sonic danger may have roughed-up the pristine veneer that dampens the fun. [Dec 2021, p.89]

The most energised performance Costello has committed to record in a long time and - despite his protestations that The Imposters are an entirely different band - his most classic Attractions-like album since 1994's Brutal Youth. [Feb 2022, p.83]

Bruland has build her formative P.J. Harvey influences with a blurrier, chillier mix of guitars and electronics, landing somewhere bewitching between Broadcast, My Bloody Valentine and Lush. [Jan 2022, p.87]

Blind Date Party is intriguing enough to be more than a one-night thing. [Jan 2022, p.82]

A richly downcast experience, his deft arrangements recalling the powerful, orchestrated cloudbursts of Curtis Mayfield's solo debut. [Feb 2022, p.82]

This album again showcases Marshall's exceptional ability to burrow right into the marrow of a song. [Feb 2022, p.82]

Its class is unmistakable, surpassing even the low-slung gait of 1995's previous career milestone Smokers delight. [Dec 2021, p.89]

A delight of many layers. [Aug 2021, p.83]

Among wild wanderings, Trees Speak frequently snap back to a crisp, jazzy bassline groove, making their whole far-out adventure hard to resist. [Feb 2022, p.87]

While Mollestad is at her most formal, this album's power and deep cultural roots bring a resonance akin to that of the work of Nordheim. [Jan 2022, p.88]

Built around minimalist synth sequences that are slow-building and tense, with agitated pin-prick rhythms and pulsing stabs evoking a vastness of space and associated emotional states. [Jan 2022, p.87]

His voice surprises. [Jan 2022, p.88]

Springtime has two approaches, one more methodical, like the intense needling Will To Power. ... The other is rooted in improv. [Jan 2022, p.84]

A series of musical shocks driven by Marcal's powerful vocals. [Feb 2022, p.89]

Musca is far more than filler. Opening with the crunching sweep of two Doors, Herbert sets sail on a (wonky-ish) 4/4 course. Hypnotised is moody, throbbing house with a UK garage skip. [Nov 2021, p.91]

12 solo guitar pieces conjure spatial evocations. [Jan 2022, p.91]

The whole of Open Arms is much larger than the sum of its parts. [Jan 2022, p.89]

Genre-curious in its sparkle and allure, and most certainly not for everyone. [Feb 2022, p.102]

Moves from a first LP of monumental pinguid hypo-groovers to a second of fried-amp creepy-crawl sludge and crude-oil ghost harmonics. [Dec 2021, p.86]

As with all such improvised projects, Gong Splat is as much about the journey as the destination, but there's little meandering to Dwyer's questing. [Feb 2022, p.87]

A liberating 73-minute sprawl, constantly blurring the lines between euphony and cacophony. [Dec 2021, p.89]

These 11 songs sound like they've been here forever. [Jan 2022, p.82]

Can's high-wire spontaneous creation sustains over 90 mind-bending minutes at the highest pitch. [Jan 2022, p.101]

Subtitled "Ghana Music Power House", a fitting epitaph for Dick Essilfie-Bondize. ... Highlight: the blissful whirl Yeaba by CK Mann's Carousel. [Feb 2022, p.103]

The 50th-anniversary edition affirms the underrated triumph in Cahoots. [Feb 2022, p.97]

The more gothic the song (Girl In Amber; Red Right Hand) the better the interpretation. [Feb 2022, p.92]

He digs deep on guileless rock and soul with bold flourishes, ala Lowell George or Randy Newman. [Feb 2022, p.92]

The highs of Fade, Queens and Better Love variously recall Arcade Fire and The Flaming Lips in euphoria mode, while the lows plumb eerie depths akin to Big Star's Third. [Feb 2022, p.89]

There are moments where the charts could bear being much edgier, and the guest spots are variable. ... In the midst of it, Weller himself sails regally on, in fine-grained voice, and the songs are happily, bomb(ast)-proof. [Feb 2022, p.87]

He cameos his way through an album of star-studded but largely by-numbers major label rap/R&B without breaking sweat. Yet jewels lurk amid the imitation pearls. [Feb 2022, p.82]

A reminder that Green Day's songwriting is far more nuanced than they're often given credit for. [Feb 2022, p.96]

This is the sound of 19 different keyboards imagining a parallel world where the test record in every '70s hi-fi home was Wendy C micro-Mooging her way through the Sun ra spaceways. The combination highlights the innocence and beauty of both styles, like forgotten '70s TV themes soundtracking scientific experiments or lonely IBM computers hymning their own obsolescence. [Jan 2022, p.86]

Her best songs - cinematic anthem Lost Woman's Prayer and highly charged Every Day In Faith - sound like well-established country classics. [Jan 2022, p.89]

For all its neo-classical leanings, Frahm's music engages emotion as much as intellect, these sketches and fragments offering a meditative respite from a world far more chaotic than this music. [Jan 2022, p.83]

A sturdy enough vehicle for Young's polemics, Crazy Horse are an even stronger conduit for the metaphysics of their union. ... But when you want it dark, no one does dark like Neil Young and Crazy Horse. [Jan 2022, p.80]

Drily recorded and subtle to a fault. in places, Island Of Noise becomes so evanescent it threatens to disappear altogether. [Dec 2021, p.92]

Skirls of noise are layered like mille-feuille, bass drops hit with the muscular impact of a piledriver, and a cloud hangs heavy over the entirety of proceedings. [Jan 2022, p.87]

Caravan sound reinvigorated and energised here on their best album in, let's say, quite some time. [Nov 2021, p.93]

Immersive and entrancing. [Jan 2022, p.90]

It's a daunting but ultimately rewarding listen. [Jan 2022, p.92]

It routinely achieves a perfect fusion of forma nd content. [Dec 2021, p.87]

[Body/Erase's] opening six minutes resemble an accidental recording made inside an overcoat pocket before mediated snatches of feedback further hint towards this maverick tape manipulator's dark art. [Jan 2022, p.82]

It's a vivid glimpse of a phenomenon on the cusp of mega-fame. [Jan 2022, p.100]

A beguiling outing, cinematic in scope and ambition. [Jan 2022, p.86]

The Bridge is Sting at his most-Sting like. [Jan 2022, p.82]

Aoba's hushed voice makes for an immersive meld of indie-folk, classical and jazz. [Jan 2022, p.91]

One for the fans delighted he's still here and fascinated by how such classic songs started out. [Jan 2022, p.82]

A sensual, hallucinatory delight. [Jan 2022, p.86]

Georgia Blue's diversity of Georgia sounds sits well with its campaign for inclusivity. [Jan 2022, p.86]

The sixth full-length is a more modest affair, but also one of their finest. [Nov 2021, p.88]

The finest track is Lukas's high tenor take on George Harrison's All Things Must Pass, a hymn to wisdom and humility its timelessness reinforced as a country song. [Jan 2022, p.82]

Makaya McCraven's alchemical abilities and subliminal technical savvy offer both a sensitive update of the Blue Note label's depth-charged catalogue and a welcome pathfinder for the uninitiated. [Jan 2022, p.83]

A collaboration where each sulphurous element perfectly complements the others. [Jan 2022, p.90]

Roots-rock Zelig with a punk past, the New Yorker's double long-player has Roots Rock and Radical discs. [Nov 2021, p.94]

The remarkably unhurried, hermetic vibe of her intimate chamber-folk remains unchanged. [Jan 2022, p.89]

Out There, but inclusive too. [Jan 2022, p.89]

Garvey's lyricism is elevated by the subtle complexity of the music, clarinets, choral voices and churchy keyboards whispering through the vents of these sons, causing a quiet stir. [Dec 2021, p.86]

Things could have easily slipped into a kitsch pastiche by this stage, yet La Luz continue to find fresh avenues to explore. [Jan 2022, p.85]

While there's nothing here that immediately screams to be considered in the front rank of their input, the more you listen, the more it feels like being reunited with some long-lost, missing-presumed-dead relatives. ... Voyage is just as good as you expect. [Jan 2022, p.84]

Imposter, if not essential, always ring true. [Jan 2022, p.83]

A lyrically strong album. [Jan 2022, p.82]

The formula still works a treat. [Dec 2021, p.86]

It's the way these sessions are gracefully processed into digitalia that makes the whole thing so cohesive. [Dec 2021 p.87]

Grand, unsettling, and a fitting finale that propels The Upsetter to a higher plain. [Dec 2021, p.91]

His solos still dazzle and the riff to Notches could move mountains, but too much of Time Clocks suggests Bonamassa by numbers. [Dec 2021, p.91]

Ultimately, it's the push and pull between Duncan Bellamy's mantric hang-drums and Jack Wyllie's floating sax lines that ensure these widescreen creations feel so vividly full of life. [Dec 2021, p.89]

An auspicious new singer-songwriter, not afraid to broaden her Horizons. [Dec 2021, p.90]

Ian Devaney's tremulous tones and Michael Sue-Poi's melodic bass lines cutting deep on heartbroken ballads. [Dec 2021, p.94]

Idles are finding new directions home: the hallmark of a great band. [Dec 2021, p.85]

It's music that's soothing as transportive. [Dec 2021, p.87]

Blom's buoyant indie-rock - a perfect vehicle for the everyday anxieties that power her songs - quickly proves hard to resist. [Nov 2021, p.84]

May prove to be one of the most beautiful, tangentially produced artefacts of our strange and uncertain times. [Dec 2021, p.82]

Shadowy, masterful set. [Dec 2021, p.91]

For a record about captive states - isolation, anxiety, romantic hope - Things Take Time, Take Time knows how to move. [Dec 2021, p.85]

With its poetic allusions to loss and loneliness, will resonate with many who have felt the same. [Dec 2021, p.90]

Mann's voice remains exquisite, her lyrics cinematically vivid, often painfully so, but the album possesses a chimerical looseness, a fuzzy aimless drift that is simultaneously haunting and somniferous. [Dec 2021, p.87]

A music-box intricacy keeps these anxious, wondering songs on a room-sized scale even as they worry at the big issues over strings and keyboards. [Dec 2021, p.90]

He covers old bases with new fervour, but there's so much happening, so much detail that it feels like a giant leap forward. [Dec 2021, p.92]

Both of these albums twisted machines to Radiohead's will, to their need to hear soulful songs singing in their wires. And they're resonating still. [Dec 2021, p.102]

Strictly for fans of "difficult." [Dec 2021, p.92]

New Adventures In Hi-Fi holds up well now. ... CD2 consists of all previously released material. Fun of you've never hears R.E.M. saunter through Wichita Lineman, but completists will see this one as a massive opportunity missed. [Dec 2021, p.98]

There are shorter tracks, but the longer songs (averaging seven minutes apiece) are the real gems. [Dec 2021, p.89]

On the plus side, Ross is in good voice, but as comeback albums go, this is an underwhelming affair. [Oct 2021, p.96]

Stirring, seductive album. [Dec 2021, p.88]

Despite the turmoil these songs describe, a flash of Elliott Smith-style emotional acuity every few seconds, musically Valentine tells a different story. Building on the confidence of 2018 debut Lush. [Nov 2021, p.87]

Beautifully poised. [Dec 2021, p.92]

Music best experienced as the sun drops below the horizon. [Nov 2021, p.91]

An intimate, thematic country-blues-rock set. [Nov 2021, p.93]

Paints on a much broader canvas here than 2019's debut Fyah, roving roughshod across genres. ... In Cross's seasoned palms the tuba's possibilities feel endless. [Dec 2021, p.89]

Witty and moving, somewhere an indie movie needs this as a soundtrack. [Dec 2021, p.85]

The focused, meander-free Ocean To Ocean is big on uplift, balm and musical adventure. [Dec 2021, p.84]

There's considerable ambition at play here. [Dec 2021, p.90]

Absence finds New Orleans trumpeter Blanchard and regular band E Collective effortlessly shifting textures, with disguised flares of long notes and high blasts casting fresh melodic light on much-covered works Fall and Diana. [Nov 2021, p.89]

I Don't Live Here Anymore is the most grounded War On Drugs record and the best: a calm space amid a world in collapse. [Nov 2021, p.82]

Reinvents Burt Bacharach on the Bell Gets Out If The Way and brings an XTC-ish bloom to the downtempo powerpop of Cherub and The Great Child Actor. [Dec 2021, p.84]

Stripped back and raw, his mesmerising guitar front and centre, this is gritty old-style blues with a laser-sharp modern focus. [Dec 2021. p.86]

-io doesn't try to ingratiate or console. Instead, Fohr ambitiously attempts to strip back protective coatings and cocoons, to show what happens when distractions peel away and the inevitable pushes through. [Nov 2021, p.90]