Interesting as the Wallace mixes are, the band is most compelling thrashing through Talent Show and I Won't, live in Milwaukee. [Nov 2019, p.102]

A useful and thoroughly entertaining precis of one of the great 21st century rock projects. [Jan 2021, p.101]

Clark has whittled a motley crew of characters who sit inside taut, ever so slightly paranoid, Byrne-influenced P-funk.... Wonderful. [Mar 2014, p.88]

This quick-fire sequel brutally updates the sabre-sharp formula. [Dec 2014, p.93]

Since I Left You fuses dozens of different styles -- and over 600 lovingly reconfigured samples -- into one riotously enthusiastic, awesomely seamless whole. [May 2001, p.116]

An album that's thoughtful, emotional, expertly crafted and often sublime. [Nov 2019, p.84]

It ranks among the best work of a major innovator and his unfeasibly talented Magic Bands. [Dec 2014, p.106]

Crudely put, it is the sequel to Love And Theft, which is to say that a great deal of it is split between 12-bar treatises about love and lust and croonsome ballads about much the same themes.... That said, it is not quite as sharply focused as that record. [Oct 2006, p.94]

What remarkable about the Roxy recordings, though, is the focus an power of the Santa Monica Flyers. ... The live performances a few days later are more robust, without diminishing the wired ambience. [Jun 2018, p.103]

That's a lot of black power in every sense and edition. And this time, you can get up and dance on the grass all you want. [Apr 2023, p.92]

As complex, compelling, and at times unsettling a record as Cale has unleashed since 1982's Music For A New Society. [Oct 2003, p.105]

One could argue the 68 tracks of live Material and multiple versions of certain songs - five of Heathen opener Sunday, for example - might be overkill. .... The exclusive four-disc Live At Montreux Jazz Festival, recorded on July 18, 2002, has a weak sleeve, but the music is blistering. [Nov 2025, p.100]

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

Every inch of tape had emotional or melodic purpose. [Nov 2011, p.109]

A deeply human record, the shepherd stepping away from his sermons to look for wonder and rapture. [Oct 2024, p.86]

A third album bursting with intense energy and sparkling invention. [Nov 2025, p.85]

While production high jinks threaten to override shapeshifting songs like Neon and Angst, the delicate balance between Ellery's lithe effectual voice and Skye's layered abstractions continues to confound expectations in singular skew-whiff fashion. [Oct 2022, p.89]

Choosing favourites is almost futile with so much scintillating brilliance on offer.

Behind the parachute silk and dry ice, the smoke and mirrors, stands a record in high emotional definition, its outline becoming sharper by the second. [Nov 2019, p.92]

Shows[s] significant growth from 2023's more dream-poppy debut Erotic Probiotic 2. One senses this twisted R&B Baby Bird has even more in the locker. [Sep 2025, p.86]

A bold sequel whose charms unravel further with each listen. [Oct 2022, p.84]

[The 50 outtakes] are not fore the casual listener.... The big find is the rambunctious Mardi Gras party-style I Shall Sing, a small 1974 hit for Art Garfunkel but never released by Morrison until now; Van unsurprisingly give the tune a more soulful treatment. [Nov 2013, p.98]

Even if purists find the whole baroque confection too much, they will have to admit there's never been a record quite like this. [May 2015, p.99]

[The remix disc] does a decent job of contextualising Leftism's legacy. But it's the originals that still burn with rare incandescence. [Jun 2017, p.100]

The likes of Strange Quiet, wit its pretty, pointillist synths and wobbly drones, the stately crystal guitar-flecked Capsule, or the tremulous, opalescent Under The Moon, serve to deepen the original album's strange, wonderstruct mood. [Aug 2019, p.108]

At times it's all too much, but Christinzio knows how to burn without crashing. [May 2020, p.88]

Haunted and intimate, Balfe's deep brogue ultimately salvages hope from the wreckage. [May 2021, p.83]

Packed with urgency, edge and scope, it's light years ahead of the competition. [Apr 2022, p.89]

Melusine retains the intellectual curiosity of Salvant's jittery, questing catalogue. [May 2023, p.86]

Black Bayou is surely the album Finley was put on Earth to create, filled with stories only he could tell. [Dec 2023, p.82]

Impeccably sequenced, with fulsome liner notes, global groovers will find this seamless mix of the known and obscure frequently revelatory. [Jun 2024, p.101]

Nobody Loves You More is a singularly uplifting, life-affirming listen, where joy and despair, love and loss, are irrevocably entwined, and kept afloat by Deal’s unfailing lightness of touch. [Dec 2024, p.82]

Merges jazz and Arabian classical music with invention and panache. [Apr 2025, p.87]

Now restored to their original length, the Fillmore performances--characterised by lysergic avant-funk and tripped-out soundscapes--are incredibly powerful and a permanent reminder of Miles Davis's pathfinding genius. [Apr 2014, p.107]

Escape and new beginnings are constant themes in these eight mostly superb songs, but his old preoccupations keep yanking him back onto familiar turf. [Sep 2024, p.85]

Linderman's triumph is more sophisticated than a simple contrast. The Ravishing music is studded with jazz details - the impressionistic gusts of saxophone and flute; Linderman's own clangorous guitar overdubs - that add a neurotic edge to the proceedings. The words, meanwhile, luxuriate in the prettiness of our world. [Mar 2021, p.80]

Fed is something of a lost classic. [Sep 2008, p.123]

Valerie June's siren-like vocal delivery [is] both beautiful and tempting. [Apr 2017, p.98]

Chris is an imposing structure, one likely to dominate 2018's skyline. There are, however, still heights left to hit. [Oct 2018, p.89]

With its measured banjo pecks and perfect shadow bv's, courtesy of rising Southern rock talent MJ Lenderman, Right Back to It's simple classicism seem to explore over sensitivity, while Crowbar, possessed of a lovely, Peter Buck-ish jangle, also stands out. [Apr 2024, p.91]

A sensitive, sure-footed triumph. [Jan 2017, p.99]

Tender dream-pop which is simulataneously familiar and novel. [Aug 2004, p.96]

Mvula is a gifted arranger with a distinctive cri de coeur, and this is where she soars. [Aug 2021, p.83]

Dizzied, delirious, conflicted, Night Reign draws in tight around you. [Jul 2024, p.91]

All credit to Knowles, though, whose vision is so cohesive that the 19 short tracks feel like one long, utterly immersive piece. [Jun 2019, p.86]

It's a hyper-vivid and intensely musical affair that takes us deep inside Apple's skittish, fretful mind. [Jul 2012, p.82]

By far the most streamlined and purposeful Animal Collective record. [Jan 2008, p.98]

If modern folk music needs its own OK Computer, its own The Dark Side Of The Moon, or indeed its own F#A#∞, this may well be it. [Apr 2023, p.80]

All the elements which made its predecessor so great are here, but in excelsis, and occasionally excess. [Sep 2002, p.95]

Producer Dan Carey brings cohesion to the multiplicity. ... An absolute tonic.[Jun 2021, p.86]

What's truly remarkable about the interplay, however, is the way the two seemlessly bridge the gulf between their cultures. [Mar 2010, p.93]

The pair's musical chemistry is a potent one. [May 2021, p.78]

This defiant, death-defying record - as much joyride as memento mori - is the glorious reward. [Oct 2025, p.80]

A clearly cathartic album that further proves Annie Clark to be a brilliant and multifaceted musical force. [Jun 2024, p.83]

After 20 years, Fuzzy Logic still hasn't stopped making sense. [Jan 2017, p.110]

The inevitable irony is that the first-class packaging and mono fidelity makes this serial potpourri feel new and thrilling again - while none of it accurately reflects the Beatles' creative intent and daily momentum. [Dec 2024, p.100]

The stark beats are the best Hugo and Williams have built in years. But its themes--dealing, girls--require more lyrical innovation to compel. [Feb 2007, p.105]

This exhaustive reissue includes his [Bob Stinson] final contributions, though the real gold comes in their studio sessions with Jim Dickinson. [Nov 2020, p.95]

Choruses swell gorgeously but unpredictably out of the continual wordplay and there's occasional moments of musical reverie. [Sep 2025, p.79]

[Grian] Chatten’s role feels ever more pivotal. His voice now has multiple personae, notably a Jeff Buckley doppelgänger on Romance’s upper register peals. His lyrical flow, meanwhile, makes pretty much every song an event. [Sep 2024, p.82]

With a gift for creating memorable melodies allied with a strong storytelling narrative, he comes across like a sophisticated jazz version of Bill Withers. [Apr 2012, p.94]

Luminous and alive, Dear Scott is just what Mick does: Head music, straight from the heart. [Jun 2022, p.82]

It's a thematically and musically complex record that encourages wonderment. [Jun 2023, p.92]

In turning inward, back to their own natural successors, Tinariwen have made a fine tenth album befitting of that milestone. [Apr 2026, p.86]

It's difficult to detach this record from the harrowing specificity of its backstory, yet Riderless Horse never makes you feel like an intruder. That's testament, after 12 long years, to Natasia's skills, the undimmed songwriter able to transform all the pain and horror into something indelibly beautiful. [Aug 2022, p.88]

They've upped their game. [Jun 2020, p.87]

This compelling, enlightening aural history gives [lesser-known artists] a worthy platform. [Jun 2016, p.102]

Interspersed with scored interludes and fragments of poetry read by Jessica Griffin of Would-Be-Goods, the effect is one of benign diffusion, the hazy avenues of MacLean's impressionistic lyrics running through the music as if the songs themselves now inhabit that hypnopompic state of consciousness where the centre cannot hold. [Aug 2023, p.86]

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

Its such an embarrassment of riches it actually seems preposterous that everything here was produced in just four years. [Dec 2008, p.118]

Music ripe for reappraisal. [Nov 2022, p.98]

These former young lions are well on their way to becoming venerated old masters. [Nov 2022, p.91]

Hearing this in its entirety 45 years on, it really is up there with Young's greats. [Oct 2023, p.97]

Ozarker is both sentimental and hard-nosed, nostalgic about a past without ignoring the modern world's gritty reality. [Dec 2023, p.93]

Live God does what the best live albums do: capturing both the thrills and spills of the performance and the audience's rapturous response to it. [Feb 2026, p.82]

Reorderd, with three more excellent songs, copious sleevenotes, and some remixing and updated vocals that never detract from the authenticity of the project. [Aug 2023, p.93]

A gorgeously warm, light-footed pop that roams freely. [Aug 2024, p.88]

The balance between Joe's resigned words and uplifting melodies remains sublime. [Aug 2003, p.100]

It sears through the essence of what makes this band special, the brave voice and ebullient delivery of singer-songwriter-guitarist James Mercer. [Apr 2004, p.98]

Given its length, trying to tackle To Be Kind n one sitting might feel like the musical equivalent of scaling Everest, but with so many dizzying peaks along the way the effort is well rewarded. [Jun 2014, p.90]

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]

This is a protest album and a damn good one. [Nov 2016, p.93]

This is a completist's delight in drab artwork. [Sep 2017, p.100]

Lightning Bolt consistently sound like no one else. [Dec 2005, p.105]

Indelible, compulsive, flecked with genuine brillance throughout, it's as good as any of the acknowledged clasics from the Clan's '93-96 peak. [Nov 2009, p.95]

The album appears as a warm, welcoming pool, soaking its balms, and its messages, deep into our bones. [Jun 2020, p.84]

It's when everything begins to fan out like a peacock's tail at the height of courting season that you're reminded just why Newsom is a 21st century one-off. [Nov 2015, p.84]

The music - a little Lumineers, a little Fleet Foxes - stands up for itself. [Jul 2021, p.88]

Still ethereal and episodic, it's less sequestered, more outgoing [than Ekstasis], with an influx of strings and brass bringing warmth to concoctions of stunning invention and variety. [Sep 2013, p.94]

Bad As me is alive with some of his greatest yet. [Nov 2011, p.90]

All told, another luxurious wallow in art and agitation. [Jul 2016, p.98]

If that all sounds bleak, it is. Yet Lives Outgrown is also very beautiful. [Jun 2024, p.80]

Dark, intense and utterly compelling record. [Nov 2017, p.98]

A thick braid of an album, each song a bundle of strands interweaving with next. [May 2020, p.94]

Malone excels himself with the brassy pop of 'Lover's Day' and 'Golden Age.' [Oct 2008, p.112]

As on her debut, beats are minimal, bordering on lo-fi, allowing Bey space to voice in meditative jazzy runs whose no- messing eccentricity strongly recalls primetime Erykah Badu. [Jul 2024, p.94]

All quite stunning. [Jul 2024, p.92]

Jewel-sparkly and gently devastating. .... Devotees of Judee Sill, loved-up Bill Callahan and When Harry Met Sally will find it bright-eyed, glossy of coat and gentle of snout. Take it home. Feel less alone. [Aug 2024, p.85]