There is a grab-bag of variety. [May 2020, p.93]

It's artfully rumpled, but the ragged angry gasps that close the record confirm Bridgers' songwriting isn't the effortless dream it seems. [Jul 2020, p.78]

Lyrics are vital, and here they often clunk where they should pierce, deadening some of her undeniable power. [Jun 2020, p.86]

A transporting treat, tapping both the personal and the universally political. [Jun 2020, p.86]

A trancelike alliance of technical mastery and instinctual chemistry far greater than the sum of its acoustic parts, GoGo Penguin already feels definitive. [Jun 2020, p.93]

The extras will delight Ig-heads and Bowie buffs, likewise the thoroughly annotated 40-page booklet, featuring new interviews with key participants. [Jul 2020, p.92]

Urgent, retro-futurist and profoundly absorbing. [Jul 2020, p.84]

Gene is not restful, but it displays impressive commitment to following the whorls and helixes of its inner logic. [May 2020, p.86]

There are a lot of moments when - sleeves rolled up, top button undone - it sounds as if they're pouring out their hearts to the same bartender as The National. When they get the detailing right, though, it flies. [Jul 2020, p.78]

If Sideways To New Italy is a reckoning, Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever's balance sheet is entirely in the black. [Jul 2020, p.79]

The sound has been filled out. ... The burnished folk rock accentuates the intimacy of Power's voice and her writing. [Jul 2020, p.80]

Beginners is less rip-it-up statement than subtle realignment; less countrified and polished, more folky and sparse. [Jul 2020, p.80]

Heartbreaker Please expresses its title in the most literal terms; it's broken and pleading. At the same time, the music provides a through-line to the 43-year-old's singer's past, striking his usual balance between Buddy Holly simplicity and Roy Orbison sweep, with a dash of Memphis horns tossed in. [Jun 2020, p.89]

It lacks the gargantuan personality and all-encompassing throaty bark of FU's leader Damian Abraham to give it a USP, but Falco, as frontman, does a decent job of stamping his own marker. [Jul 2020, p.84]

It starts in fine fashion. ... Tellier's Auto-Tuned croon is unrelenting, and by the album's mid-point we're approaching the realms of self-parody. [May 2020, p.89]

There are transcendent moments. ... But Atkins tries on so many hackneyed faces during these 11 tracks that the overall effort feels faceless. [Jul 2020, p.82]

Highlight of an unfathomable whole: Hell. [Jul 2020, p.88]

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]

Too opaque to fully connect, Consummation keeps its mystery high. [Jul 2020, p.85]

The boogie imperative on Knuckleball Express is less deconstructed than usual. [Jul 2020, p.84]

Twisting the familiar sounds into altogether more challenging forms. [Jul 2020, p.84]

There's so much going on that each sitting reveals new nuances and added twists of slender wonder. [Jul 2020, p.82]

A future late-night classic. [Jul 2020, p.80]

Though there isn't a dud in Apple's back-catalogue, she has never sounded quite so liberated and artistically sure-footed as this. [Jul 2020, p.86]

These 10 duets/duels can be pretty gnarly, but there are beautiful epiphanies, too. [Jul 2020, p.82]

Her fourth album has a gently-assured, incantatory feel. [Jul 2020, p.78]

This second RVG record finesses a precision indie-pop sound hinged up on Reuben Bloxham's chiming guitar, equal parts Johnny Marr and Darklands-era William Reid - a classy backdrop for one of 2020's most arresting batch of lyrics so far. [Jul 2020, p.78]

The everything-but-the-kitchen-sink sonics are matched by an unrelenting emotional honesty. [Jul 2020, p.85]

Powerful stuff. [Jun 2020, p.93]

This retreat to classical roots is soothing, if a little one-note. [Jul 2020, p.88]

Joan Wasser's second covers set finds romance in Prince's lust-blind Kiss and innocence in the Strokes' Under Control. [Jul 2020, p.88]

Serene, mostly, where free improv is usually abrasive. [Jul 2020, p.88]

Earnestness often rules. ... They're better at slushy, Radio 1 epics and louder, brasher tracks. [Jul 2020, p.78]

Despite playing with pop forms, Set My Heart On Fire Immediately holds Hadreas's experimental shape, his artistic line. ... A slow burner, in every way. [Jun 2020, p.94]

With its acute portraits of a troubled and tangled life, Reunions is ultimately a story of redemption through fatherhood and self knowledge, epic country-soul opener What've I Done To Help setting the mood perfectly. [Jun 2020, p.95]

It's all carried off with the panache and confidence of a group making their first, not 24th, album. [Jun 2020, p.89]

Shape of Light harbours hues of Nick Drake, but occasionally Modern Studies' mellow beauty drifts into Enya-land. [Jun 2020, p.90]

The album is crowned by the extraordinary, seven-minutes-plus Death Engine, where a gospel feel gives way to a lengthy, rolling, Bach-like coda. On an otherwise tonally unified album, this is where Linden's emotions are at their rawest. [Jun 2020, p.89]

The freshness of allowing us into his private world, most importantly, fuels Lanegan's third rock/electronic beauty on the bounce. [Jun 2020, p.86]

Earworms abound. [May 2020, p.96]

Two nuanced, outstanding duets with French avant-popper SaraSara help lighten the all-consuming existential despair. [Jun 2020, p.91]

It sounds as spare and intimate, as if Jurado were singing inside your head. The songs are up there with his best. [Jun 2020, p.91]

10 seamless melds of indie guitars and electronic pop, stuffed with spry choruses and poetic self-castigation delivered in Toledo's appealingly crushed bleat. [Jun 2020, p.86]

A piece of music caught between the human and alien, the reassuring and the uncanny. [May 2020, p.91]

Intended as a chilly-pastoral instrumental cycle for piano, three cellos and string quartet, but Los Angles sound designer Jennifer Pague pitched lyrics for four tracks and a more personal narrative took shape, evoking solitude and morbidity. [Jun 2020, p. 93]

[The new songs] have a compression and pop playfulness often lacking from his albums, yet still manages to address the complex "every feeling" emotions of high school students. [May 2020, p.91]

A giddy, unpredictable pop record that put new spins on every cliche it touches, while Benson;s innately McCartneyesque melodic gift successfully sells every occasionally saccharine lyric. [Jun 2020, p.88]

A return from the wilds. ... Some of the best vocal melodies Tabish has yet channelled. [Jun 2020, p.93]

Only a droll stab at Dueling Banjos shades into the hokeyness that could've cursed the entire project. [Jun 2020, p.95]

While the drum-less duo reach a wonderfully womb-like stasis amid Moth To The Flame's nine drawn-out minutes - Weber's whispers all at sea in a deep duvet of guitars - they're also unafraid to explore darker territory. [Jun 2020, p.91]

Far Enough takes the most exhilarating form of resistance, much more than riot grrrl's DIY aesthetic, akin to a harder-rocking Sleater Kinney with a similarly wailing centrifugal force in singer/guitarist Jenny McKechnie. [Jun 2020, p.90]

It's numinous stuff. [Jun 2020, p.95]

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

There are straight-ahead, stripped down, old-style blues rockers. ... Also there just the blues - slow beauties that seem to be about depression and being lost, that feel more personal than political. [Jun 2020, p.88]

Dark humour and combustive noise are proven fine bedfellows, and Flat Worms will soon have you slam-dancing as the planet burns. [May 2020, p.86]

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

He and his songs sound beautifully close-knit. [May 2020, p.89]

The songs on this second solo album are more substantive than those of 2017's Wintres Woma. [May 2020, p.90]

A very fine, if long-gestated, debut. [May 2020, p.93]

Slightly frustratingly, similar changeability [as 2018's Lala Belu] prevails here. [May 2020, p.86]

Best tracks are the most acid. [May 2020, p.96]

It feels both strangely timeless and oddly new. [May 2020, p.93]

A heady cultural cocktail where the Sahara meets the Rising Sun. [May 2020, p.87]

Their cover of Got Love If You Want It is a raw, gritty highlight. [Apr 2020, p.96]

The arrangements within are more ebullient and wide-ranging. ... His subjects - all character sketches of friends or chance meetings - are also multifaceted. [May 2020, p.89]

Yet even at its most downbeat and damaged, this music gleams with a steely determination to be heard. [May 2020, p.87]

Disillusion and disappointment have become fuel for creation, not self-immolation; second-guessing has been replaced by first-hand emotion. ... For the first time in a while -- that The Strokes shouldn't be gearing up for goodbye. [May 2020, p.86]

After 33 years of intuitive playing together they are able to show you their close-up sculpted technique, as if revealing their workings, and then do something so transcendent, so miraculous, that it causes you to believe in magic once again. [May 2020, p.90]

Fine follow-up. ... McBryde's charisma remains centre-stage. [May 2020, p.90]

Kushal Gaya's vocal hooks bristle with political fury as polyrhythms jostle with George Crowley and Pete Wareham's brass riffs. [May 2020, p.95]

It's a beautiful warm bath of a record, but a soporific one too, better suited for wallowing within, rather than getting you moving. [May 2020, p.90]

[If You're Dreaming] has a strong vintage feel. [May 2020, p.88]

Further confirmation, then, that this stalwart of the rave generation, with a little help from his friends, still has plenty of fire left in his belly. [May 2020. p.89]

The musical and emotional ground covered here is remarkable, evidence of an artist who can locate joy inside pain, and whose adventurous, modernist, fearful funk can be movingly expressive. [May 2020, p.88]

There's an early Daptone feel to this strong set. [May 2020, p.96]

Beautiful stuff. More, please. [Apr 2020, p.89]

The amount of recording distortion on some pieces, like on the sparse, meandering piano instrumental Last Of The Lantern Oil, can tip the balance over into ear-buzzing discomfort. [Apr 2020, p.87]

Svelte, mostly acoustic collection is so refreshing. [May 2020, p.94]

Nothing is ever explained, but ambiguity only reinforces Sorry's wonderfully slippery presence. [Apr 2020, p.95]

Showcases [singer Yukimi Nagano's] full emotional range. ... Six albums in, now, as ever, Little Dragon deserve far more attention. [May 2020, p.94]

A jittery suite of clattering protest jams, further uplifted by the ferocious interplay between trumpeter Aquiles Navarro and alto saxophonist Keir Neuringer. [May 2020, p.95]

An irresistibly raucous entree to their world. [May 2020, p.88]

With hooks as deep as heartbeats, this has the sweep of the desert dunes in it. [Apr 2020, p.93]

These 21 carefully edited electronic jams have a distinctly new age feel, glacier-sized slabs of ambience occasionally disrupted by undulating or cluttering beats. [May 2020, p.89]

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

Rose Golden Doorways will undoubtedly repel and attract, but its sheer force is spellbinding. [Apr 2020, p.94]

Rejoice stands tall alongside both artists' greatest work. [May 2020, p.95]

Regularly transcend mere pastiche. [Apr 2020, p.86]

A free-floating space jazz run at Joni & Mingus's Goodbye Pork Pie Hat is typical of his approachable fusion. [May 2020, p.96]

Singer Barbora Patkova's soulful charge that brings a tighter focus to a set of roiling, otherworldly jams whcih sound like Can and Funkadelic getting high on Sun Ra's unfettered jazz supply. [May 2020, p.93]

Revisits some of his most famous tunes. [May 2020, p.90]

No one said living "woke" was gonna be easy, but Thick turn the friction into furious, satisfying pop. [May 2020, p.95]

Eventually capturing both the sickly magenta beauty and unnatural creeping dread of Lovecraft's alien world. [May 2020, p.90]

Sometimes, it fits and sounds glorious. ... But on other tracks it sounds like an Aphex B-side is bleeding in from the next room. Beneath the white noise, however, Moreland is in rich form. [May 2020, p.88]

A superlative crooner with grit, soul and impeccable phrasing, James caresses and finesses every syllable of his highly literate, deeply personal songs. [Apr 2020, p.88]

Strong and loose, political and personal, Pearl Jam get the balance absolutely right. [May 2020, p.84]

Elegant and haunting as the individual tracks may be, it's difficult to remain engaged throughout 75 minutes of music with such a uniform mood. [May 2020, p.89]

What's missing? A hot-shot producer. Turbocharge their tunes with studio oomph and jiggery-pokery, and Soul Motivators could fill floors worldwide. [Feb 2020, p.90]