As Chloë And The Next 20th Century sees Father John Misty escaping into his parallel Hollywood reality, it's highly entertaining to slip in alongside him. [May 2022, p.90]

The Brilliance of I Was Real is visceral rather than intellectual. It lies in how 75 Dollar Bill locate the possibilities of transformation and release, of physical and spiritual abandon, in border-destroying party music. [Aug 2019, p.94]

How To Live is more of a creative evolution than a total break from Cooper's previous music. [Sep 2019, p.88]

Seen from 2022, Stereolab's sheer breadth of endeavour here can justly be vaunted as heroic. [Oct 2022, p.100]

It boasts stronger songs than Stern's 2007 debut "In Advance Of The Broken Arm," without losing the fretboard fireworks that made its predecessor an underground smash. [Feb 2009, p.106]

Sunken Condos is a slyer, slow-burning pleasure. [Dec 2012, p.89]

His wunderkind status is underlined by an obvious passion for Brian Wilson: stacked harmonies, deft chordal shifts. In Butterflies From Monaco, that Wilson influence comes laced with sturdier fragments of rock and funk a la Prince. [Dec 2019, p.93]

By opening up melodically as well as rhythmically, Garbus and Brenner better reveal the big heart at the centre of Tune-Yards. [May 2021, p.87]

Labyrinthitis is another tantalising Destroyer album, one that resists being clutched too tight or loved too hard as it roams its peculiar world. [Apr 2022, p.86]

A gloriously unviable alternative to dullard R&B/X Factorism. [Jun 2012, p.92]

Fade feels like a definitive and hugely uplifting summary of a cult institution. [Feb 2013, p.88]

Stott again collaborates with opera singer Alison Skidmore on decaying digital laments, warped twilight anthems and claustrophobic club bangers; stuttering songs of mourning for 21st century club culture. [Jul 2016, p.93]

This is an opaque and quietly intense missive. [Nov 2016, p.86]

The songs are gorgeous, lyrical, chimerical, the arrangements weighty, complex and cool. [Jan 2019, p.89]

A pulse-racing revolt into style. [Jul 2019, p.96]

Simian Angel is a continuation of those percussive ideas [in his previous albums], but with a far more abstracted, exploded view. [Sep 2019, p.91]

The best protest albums generally come bathed in their own brand of musical sunshine and Cornershop's joyous post-Brexit call to arms is no exception to the rule. [Apr 2020, p.86]

Dreamy, psych-folk beauty. [Jun 2026, p.91]

Though not an unqualified triumph... The Great Destroyer is the latest high from a band that routinely rewards the virtue of patience. [Feb 2005, p.94]

A bold and celebratory affair. [Feb 2017, p.90]

Save a few saggy, meh0ish collaborations mining genres, this sparky yet spiritual blend of bum-rushing hard bangers and deep soul dives further underscores his three-dimensional star quality. [Feb 2020, p.86]

You might assume, given the title, that beam's seventh full-length album as iron & Wine is lightweight and whimsical. Actually it's pretty magnificent. [Jun 2024, p.84]

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]

The results, recorded in Brooklyn over two years, are something of a revelation. [Mar 2025, p.82]

It is simultaneously comforting and haunting, an emotional closeness that is both playful an unsettling. [Jun 2026, p.93]

The set pivots around its experimental jazz title track, where warming Rhodes are counterpointed by fractured beats, fidgety bleeps and trills. [Dec 2016, p.93]

A definate contender when those Best of the Year polls gets underway. [Aug 2008, p.105]

In pursuing the anarchic, joyous mash-up of their debut Remedy to its twisted conclusion, Basement Jaxx find themselves in androgynous, genre-bending territory that is Prince-ly in spirit even when it isn’t in sound.

The mind-boggling intricacies and moody, broody sound-sculpting on tracks like Pen Expers find Autechre zooming off, leaving their followers eating cosmic dust. [May 2001, p.110]

Often he sings with a richness, depth and conviction worthy of Johnny Cash. [Jan 2001, p.98]

Antitheses abound--organic and electronic, modern and ancient, pastoral and urban. Combined, they create something extraordinary. [May 2016, p.91]

Live albums often give you the gist of the jam, inviting you to imagine studio details; The War On Drugs invert that expectation, letting the rest sparkle beneath stage lights. [Jan 2021, p.86]

The trio's debut album is rich in textural sophistication, carving hooks from fidgety harmonics and swooning whammy-bar abuse. [Jul 2022, p.86]

The result is a sparkling 24-minute digital raga that builds to a tumultuous mid-point crescendo, before gliding elegantly out of the other side. Euphoric synth-pop that's smart and never po-faced. [Sep 2022, p.90]

An urgent debut perfect for anyone grieving The Comet Is Coming's demise. [Aug 2024, p.90]

It's the vast common ground that they delicately negotiate and improvise in which makes Totality so enthralling, so satisfying. [Jun 2025, p.89]

Evocative rather than vivid in a way that evokes Faith-era Cure's greyscale atmospheres, Everything IS Alive is the sound of Slowdive still holding their impressive earthly form. [Oct 2023, p.85]

There are perhaps too many guests, but this unassuming talisman clearly prefers sharing his space. [Nov 2013, p.84]

On these dozen tracks, Washington creates a playground and invites friends in to be themselves, shaping a dizzying crosshatch of ideas where George Clinton’s lounge croon sets up a trumpet-chased pep talk from rapper D Smoke, or André 3000 slips – with flutes in hand – into a nocturnal haze that feels like some futuristic Debussy state of bliss. [Jun 2024, p.85]

Joan Shelley has a trick, at least, of making time disappear, her stately clear voice a rock at which the world flings itself in vain. [Jun 2017, p.86]

His strength is his honesty. He couches his anxieties in simple but poetic language as his band find the sweet spot between country and rock. [Jul 2017, p.90]

[Album opener Civil Servant is] sonically inventive, with vocoder interludes and a rousing final call of "Refuse! Refuse!," but its on-the-nose swipes at "Bus-fulls of meat...staring at phone-screens" can't avoid the patronising tone of 95 per cent of all songs about "the workers," written by those otherwise employed. ... Far better are songs where Dawson locates the misery and mystery of life in smaller worlds and stranger vignettes. [Nov 2019, p.90]

There's no easy niche in which you can place this new statement: like Dylan's Time Out Of Mind, it ventures into a doomy, mythological area, where the directions are muddied and the heartbreak is total. [Jul 2001, p.98]

It's an album that is, by turns, melancholy and unsettling, tragic and nightmarish, unfolding with a creeping narrative dread. [Dec 2018, p.93]

Immersive and thought-provoking record. [Apr 2019, p.87]

The Afro-beat timbres peeking through also reveal more about who Vagabon is, and what she is capable of. [Dec 2019, p.95]

Even though it's only eight tracks long - a rare example of the band having some chill - their fifth album feel like it's operating on a cosmic scale. [Nov 2022, p.92]

The bass-fuzz stomp and chain-gang holler of 'Grounds for Divorce' couldn't be more immediate, Guy Garvey refusing to let emotional intelligence blackball a decnt tune. [Apr 2008, p.106]

Africa Express score by proffering a raw immediacy and innovative spirit that instantly expels any whiff of imperialist musical tourism. [Feb 2014, p.88]

Super-barbed, electro-pub rock. [Jun 2015, p.96]

A fascinating pleasure and a 21st century classic-in-waiting. [Aug 2016, p.95]

Rarely can the lute have sounded quite as threatening as it does here. [Nov 2016, p.93]

Closer listens reveal small universes of movement, tension and suspense pulsing just beneath the surface. [Dec 2019, p.88]

On Sunset will not be remembered as Weller's most immediate record, or the most musically even, but it's certainly one of the most rewarding, and powerful. [Jul 2020, p.76]

Linthicum's guitar adds texture and twang, as the interplay between the trio delivers their Plastic Bouquet close to country perfection. [Jan 2021, p.86]

Yorkston is one of our finest talents, still stretching out. [Feb 2021, p.82]

Proof that inventive, envelope-pushing indie rock hasn't disappeared off the map just yet. [Apr 2021, p.83]

This may be the best album of their 50-plus years together. Bonkers, yes, but quite brilliant. [Jul 2025, p.84]

Kammerkonzert's immediacy and dynamism feel more like a concert recording than studio album, powered by the incandescent energy of its creator. [Jun 2026, p.93]

Reverberant secular folk, with spectral guitar and magic-realist vocals. [May 2026, p.93]

Their most piercing and autobiographical yet. [Sep 2020, p.82]

This is a raw and acutely personal document. [Mar 2018, p.93]

The result might be Orcutt's most beautiful album, a phantasmal union of folk, blues, rock and country visions that crackles with the intense fire of his own country's turbulent history. [Jan 2020, p.89]

Reveals a confident desert punk classicism. [Sep 2020, p.94]

On Fenian they back that shrewdness with songs of depth and substance. [Jun 2026, p.90]

It's a record best consumed in a semi-recumbent position, in order to match the loping, laidback pace of the music and Cox's stoned, oak-aged vocals. [Dec. 2011 p. 99]

Jet Plane And Oxbow pulls together crisp, motorik grooves, dirty great guitar riffs and arms-aloft choruses. [Feb 2016, p.90]

Pale Green Ghosts is both novel and familiar. [Apr 2013, p.86]

This is a remarkably strong set. [Dec 2016, p.88]

Remastered with a disc of rarities and curiously, a screamtastic bootleg-quality 1980 show at Tokyo's Budokan. [Apr 2021, p.97]

Unwieldy on paper, it comes to life through odd, prickly phrases, but the music cuts deepest. [Aug 2014, p.93]

There are some serious jazz chops visible amid the instrumental chaos; a devotional intensity that earmarks them as psychedelic idealists rather than nihilistic noise-punks. [May 2019, p.91]

Unabashed clever buggers, their seventh is where Water From Your Eyes let their hearts rule, and it's a glorious sound. [Oct 2025, p.86]

A vast swirling dystopia of euphoric white noise. [Mar 2017, p.97]

Slowdive is a surprisingly joyous return to the fray. [May 2017, p.90]

A deep, thrilling listen. [Jan 2020, p.88]

At their most effortlessly eclectic. [May 2021, p.82]

His 20th album has production that sounds home-made, as if he's singing besides you on the sofa while the bass player, drummer and peep-y keyboard player are playing in the empty attic upstairs. [Jun 2021, p.87]

[Godrich's original tracklisting] play to what Malkmus saw as the album's "psychedelic, trippy" strengths. .... A deep dive of the box set's bonuses turns up further treasures. [May 2022, p.98]

Fairbairn's side-of-mouth playing is extraordinary bucking the universal post-millennial effort to out-blast Coltrane, in favour of beautifully gentle explorations which are both intrepid and sublimely calming. [Oct 2023, p.85]

Crafty, insidious creations which gradually accrue substance and emotional heft even as they remain soothing on the ear. [Jul 2021, p.83]

This promises to be a hard one to beat for fire and fury. Fela would be very proud. [Apr 2018, p.92]

It is a relief to see Wainwright honouring his formidable songwriting talents with songs as luscious as those on Poses or Want One. [Jun 2020, p.94]

Plenty of young pups are revising the pop-smart bludgeon of, say, pre-goldrush Nirvana, but only Pissed Jeans deliver with such panache. [Mar 2013, p.91]

The Magic Place is her most fully involved album, suffused with the warmth of fond memories and a deep, dream-like resonance. [Jun 2011, p.96]

Blissed out, beautiful... and quite probably bonkers, with Dilate Bardo Pond seem intent on redrawing their personal cosmos's final frontiers yet again. [May 2001, p.100]

The pleasure... is in hearing it unravel. [Aug 2003, p.98]

Los Lobos' ingenuity with arrangements and atmosphere makes The Ride something special. [Jun 2004, p.102]

Uplifting, exuberant gloom. Tremendous. [Oct 2001, p.108]

Frustratingly short of utter genius, but largely lovely too. [May 2003, p.102]

Best of all is Sleep Together: like Radiohead playing Kashmir, and brilliantly led by former Japan keyboard player Richard Barbieri. Yes, prog lives--and Porcupine Tree are its leading players. [July 2007]

The boy done good, again. [Jun 2011, p.100]

Nothing here is naive or inaccessible. [Jun 2013, p.89]

English subjects his ghostly pastoral chorales and haunted organ tones to crashing interrogations of harmonic distortion, transforming old worlds of meditative calm into a new decaying landscape of soaring despair. [Sep 2014, p.91]

It is full of sublime moments. [Mar 2015, p.97]

Like Lamar’s grandstanding To Pimp A Butterfly, the numerous strands of Compton: A Soundtrack take time and effort to fully unravel, but the rewards are manifold.

Jambu captures Belem's delirious party spirit in full swing. [Aug 2019, p.108]

The edges of 2019's Candy Colored Doom have sharpened: her voice and guitar sheer off into abrasion on Metal Bird. [Feb 2022, p.85]