Sharp, sleek, sophisticated, more going on (jazzy horns, juicy backing vocals, switchblade rock guitar) than a couple of spins can take in and seductive enough to keep drawing you back.

Deceptively simple, the result is a lovely thing. [Feb 2022, p.86]

Hitchcock's own songs--especially Trouble In Your Blood and San Francisco Patrol--maintain the heartsick mood, drawing the corners of this record together into a beautifully measured whole. [Sep 2014, p.91]

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

Trentemøller deftness in balancing light and shade and a multi-layered approach are key to its allure. [Mar 2022, p.87]

What Orton has sacrificed in terms of post-clubbing appeal she has replaced with grit and poignancy seldom heard since the LA canyons were in their pomp. [Mar 2006, p.96]

The best record of her life. [Jan 2019, p.85]

Anthropocene is rich with stark beauty and wry smiles hidden among Oren's observations of "billboard signs touring God's designs," and "the Bible belt taking to itself all night on the FM waves." [Jan 2018, p.90]

A spectacular lift-off, but Owens' career apogee sounds a long way off yet. [May 2017, p.91]

[Francesco Turrisi's] accompaniments, often on old/unusual instruments, add a strange, delicate beauty to Giddens' solemn, powerful soprano. [Jun 2019, p.89]

Lyrically it's one of Cohen's least ambiguous albums... Musically it's melodic and memorable. [Nov 2004, p.96]

The sound of a man stretching out... What breadth of vision McCaughan has. [Nov 2021, p.86]

Life In The Dark constantly threatens to fall apart at the seams but the Felices miraculously hold their world together, the greatest campfire band imaginable. [Aug 2016, p.93]

Their music is an improbably addictive miasma of chopped-up spoken-word fragments and spectral electronica. [May 2011, p.110]

What with that album title, a wistful opening waltz, entitled Oh, The Divorces! and a beautifully resigned lament called Singles Bar ("Can you tell how long I've been here? Can you smell the fear?", the theme of mid-life crises hangs heavy over these 10 simply arranged vignettes. [June 2010, p. 92]

There's taut New Wave (Tiny Moves; Jesus Is Dead), but mainly moody electronic balladry (think Streets Of Philadelphia), with Del Rey turning up to fulfil the intend of her one repeated line ("I'll make it darker") on Alma Mater. [Jun 2024, p.82]

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]

A heartily uplifting brew of scruffy street style, swear words and stammering pop tunes which sweat musical history. [Sep 2001, p.99]

The gauzy seductive songs feel like euphoric conjuring, chinks in the doors of perceptions that reveal another hidden capital, a misty tapestry of late-night idylls, laced with a rapturous melancholy magic. [Oct 2017, p.91]

A culturally rich and generally wonderful 72 minutes of little-heard revelry. [Oct 2024, p.94]

Arular's irresistible blend of crafty refugee chic and subversive digital skipping rhymes will do very nicely for the moment. [Jun 2005, p.108]

Caracal is nothing less than one of the best pop albums of the year. [Oct 2015, p.90]

Their clearest vocal to date, not from a guest, but from guitarist/mouthpiece Stuart Braithwaite. ... Yet another high water mark in Mogwai's irresistible ride. [Mar 2021, p.83]

Signs of life: abundant. [Aug 2023, p.82]

The trio's approach naturally invokes comparison to their forebears, but pleasingly, Night Beats are distilling a strong vintage of their own. [Feb 2016, p.92]

With Heartworms James Mercer has produced another fine crop of pop. [Apr 2017, p.88]

So does the pairing work? The answer, from the first, strutting beats of Modern Guilt's opener, 'Orphans,' is a gleaming Yes. [Aug 2008, p.104]

10 wistful, tender songs. [Feb 2014, p.98]

Aficionados will hear a master ambient craftsman in his element. [Dec. 2010, p. 95]

In trying to make an album that pointed to where he wants to go as an artist, Hawley has taken the best parts of his past and uploaded them onto one sublime record. [Jul 2019, p.90]

V comes as a spellbinding corrective. [May 2013, p.95]

This debut long-player has been greatly anticipated, and does not disappoint. Skating an agreeably fine line between conscious dancehall and complex nu-roots, Chronixx delivers 15 deeply personal explorations of Jamaica and the challenges it faces.

Expansive and coherent, yet always subterranean and claustrophobic, this is easily Fearless's finest hour. [Aug 2016, p.94]

The moving Electric Shock incorporates joyous synths and Headcase is berserk thrash-pop brilliance. Dizzying closer, Mortals, meanwhile, might have been a Top 10 hit in the early '80s. [Oct 2019, p.86]

Malone draws the listener into the unique interior timbre of the pipe organ, like the idling breath of a large machine at rest; a music of worship, where the object of spiritual veneration is the inner space of the instrument itself. [Oct 2019, p.89]

The LP's title might suggest the randomised poetry of google translate, but Low Probability Of A Hug speaks a language everyone can understand. [Oct 2019, p.85]

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]

Sus Dog is the sound of Clark finding his voice in more ways than one. [Jun 2023, p.95]

For the most part A World Lit Only By Fire finds Godflesh sounding just as brilliantly brutal as ever. [Oct 2014, p.92]

Both halves of Legacy + prove the Kuti continuum to be in rude health. [Mar 2021, p.86]

Mid-life crisis rarely sounded so appealing. [Nov 2014, p.90]

Piercing, heated, Fever Ray is taking no prisoners. [Mar 2018, p.97]

Sports is more circumspect and subtle. Yet when the hooks of White Pebbles, Bad Rockets or Syncing In slyly take hold, the effect is indelible. [Mar 2017, p.97]

Deliver[s] more surreal, neon-psych country rock, in sweet harmonies and super-crunchy six-string riffs. [Oct 2023, p.89]

It's good to hear that force-of-nature voice again. [Dec 2012, p.96]

Two Gallants make good on their promise with this third LP. [Oct 2007, p.94]

Enlightened and challenging... an incredible String Band for a brave new world. [Mar 2016, p.99]

It's top quality stuff. [May 2008, p.106]

The Song Of Day And Night catches Jones aka Summertyme at his best. [Jun 2017, p.91]

Eno has rarely sounded so luminous and wistful, evoking alongside Wolfe a desert sunset that makes you excited to be alive but sad to have only so long left. [Jul 2025, p.83]

But whereas their 2004 debut EP Headgit was intriguing if slightly stiff, they have developed into a propulsive unit with good tunes and a panoramic, near-psychedelic guitar sound. [Jan 2010, p. 90]

The economy and velvet touch of Efterklang's music-making have survived, except the finesse is now allied to a newly arresting, wistful songwriting style that carries with it echoes of the early Coldplay.

The sweetness of its sun-kissed textures and playful melodies mark out El Turista as his best work since 2005's near flawless "Nashville." [Apr 2010, p.98]

Here they're presented as a crisp, razor-edged groove unit, with not a milligram of flab aboard. either instrumentally or melodically. [May 2024, p.84]

Y'Y shows his fluid piano technique - a hard to quantify mix of Monk, Ibrahim, Corea and Shipp - let loose on looping patterns that trace ever more surprising arcs and mood variations. [Jun 2024, p.88]

Same old boots, maybe, but significantly racier kecks. [Oct 2025, p.88]

It's the "ballads," for want of a better term, that provide V's definitive highlights. [Oct 2017, p.89]

A 14-song whirlwind of dazzling approaches. [Aug 2024, p.88]

Often described as old beyond his years, on Fires For The Cold Tolchin has truly grown up. [Nov 2019, p.88]

The thrill-packed Mudflowers--as unlikely as it seems--will be high on 2015's American best-of lists. [Sep 2015, p.88]

Legendary US photographer employs Korg synths, piano on Home-recorded improvs and covers. [Dec 2017, p.96]

Her lovers rock take of Patsy Cline's Walking After Midnight further strengthens reggae and country's fine romance, and who could have predicted that Morrissey's Everyday Is Like Sunday would sound like an out-take from the Special AKA's IN the Studio when reworked as rocksteady with woozy horns? [Jul 2023, p.82]

An action-packed blockbuster. [Oct 2006, p.104]

Vessel Of Love is her most vital work to date. [Mar 2018, p.91]

Booker has relocated to a more contemporary - and sonically speaking, far more interesting - place here. [Feb 2025, p.82]

The result is a thematically complex neo-romantic narrative of wit, tension and sweep. [Mar 2016, p.97]

Ex-Orange Juicer bounces back, against cruel and unbelievable odds. [Oct. 2010, p. 96]

It's a fantastic collection, there's still nothing else remotely like it. [Apr 2008, p.104]

Ryan's predilection for Wilsonesque harmonies, glokenspiel, etc, erupts into twinkly fairytale pop that's bold and forward-looking in equal measure. [Mar 2008, p.113]

Their ninth studio album is simultaneously more cosmic and conceptual than earlier efforts. [Jun 2017, p.89]

The 12 songs making up their self-titled first album, though, are broad in scope and full of individual flourishes. [Oct 2022, p.89]

It's the songs--funny, literate, doomed--which get under your skin. [Apr 2009, p.100]

For an artist who is often too much, however, it is just enough. [Jul 2018, p.89]

He understands the value of restraint, his meticulously assembled songs slowly giving up their secrets rather than tipping everything out at once. [May 2013, p.82]

Moisturizer shows, decisively, that while the metal gauntlets might be very much on, creatively, Wet leg's gloves are off. [Aug 2025, p.74]

Well-served by the sparse guitar-and-vocal arrangements and intimate, reverb-y ambience. [Oct 2020, p.84]

Drake's genuinely fleet-footed flows and sly humour prevent his pained introspection descending into a cheesy whine fest. [Aug 2016, p.95]

He finds drama in the mundane. [Nov 2021, p.94]

Peripatetic post-Americana quintet release their Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. [July 2011, p. 104]

There's more to the differences between the two versions, however, than a valve amp versus the original's solid state, with over 30 years of musicianship and experience bringing the songs up to modern speed. [Sep 2018, p.92]

Iconoclasts is its own untamable beast. Adventurous sonically, dynamically rich, it feels daunting, deep as the Mariana Trench. [Dec 2025, p.81]

Supple rhythm section underpins Rowley's abstract lyrics facing existential ills with charisma and skill. [Dec 2020, p.89]

They still sound remarkably fresh, and here their short (only three of the 14 songs last longer than three minutes), sharp shock still kicks hard. [Jan 2024, p.86]

It is a deeply odd but consistently compelling work. [Nov 2014, p.98]

Black City is the devil leering over Asa Breed's shoulder, a seedy, dirty place--but a fascinating one, too. [Sep 2010, p.99]

A joyful, celebratory affair. [Apr 2014, p.92]

The bare-bones magic of Don't Forget Jane and Of Mind And Feeling proves Lewis's capacity for generating uplifting melodies matches the brawn of his solos. [Mar 2025, p.89]

It's better to simply let La Cucaracha happen and enjoy how much Gene and Dean toy with and transgress musical forms while still playing them to a high degree of invention, proficiency and sincerity. [Dec 2007, p.99]

These tracks feel more like intimate conversations, with Allen's boundless curiosity shining through. [Jun 2021, p.82]

At this temporal distance from the shock of their new, the post-millennial Pop Group are engaging, galvanizing, and far from unlistenable in its ongoing fusions of Afrobeat, funk and dub.

There's more hope to be found in the sound Deerhoof assemble into single songs that play like a hallucinating DJ's set. Any element sounds perfectly straight by itself, but layered together, they feel imported from the multiverse. [Jul 2020, p.87]

Throughout, Bryant's vocal is rich and full on songs that are framed in exclamatory horns and soothing organ. [Jun 2017, p.92]

The overall vibe here us one of relaxation rather than tension. [Apr 2015, p.93]

A real treasure. [Sep 2009, p.90]

Oddly seductive, genre-refuting curio. [Jun 2019, p.91]

It's over in a flash, an exhilarating fairground ride you won't want to disembark. [Mar 2024, p.88]

Mind Control [is] as entertaining as the schlock horror flicks which informed it. [May 2013, p.86]

An expansive, summery jazz-funk crossover that lives and dies on its monster grooves. [Aug 2021, p.85]