10 moving gems of adult experience. [Oct 2025, p.90]

The flow is smoother, and the whole thing has a more compressed, accessible feel, without compromising the essential psychedelic madness at its heart. [Apr 2004, p.113]

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]

Pearl Jam grungemeister reveals self to be shameless romantic. {July 2011, p. 106]

His voice is parched, so the songs, many acoustic and trailing brutal honesty, speak clearly enough to grip you in their gnarled fist. [Sep 2016, p.98]

It finds the group's estimable strengths consolidated as never before. [Jun 2005, p.112]

Lotta Sea Lice feels like a happy and deliberate mind-meld, rather than the work of two competing songwriters duking it out knee-to-knee over their guitars. [Dec 2017, p.84]

Richly soulful, heartsore second LP. [Dec 2017, p.96]

Packed with fine folk-tinged numbers. [Jun 2006, p.102]

Each song feels handmade, having the precise airiness or density it requires. [Jan 2007, p.112]

Gorgeous minimalist songs are punctuated by Prince-like synths and Ware's impressive vocal range. [Nov 2014, p.102]

Stellular serves up a lovely, liberated tonic in dark times. [Feb 2017, p.93]

13 is a shape-shifting delight sans longueurs. [Jun 2026, p.88]

While the incredibly kinetic South Central LA rapper's second album wins no prizes for originality, it's a relentlessly fun listen. [Mar 2018, p.93]

They return forever changed to confidently shape a form of country music that is entirely of their own character. [Jul 2022, p.87]

On The Move sounds like music made with drinks in hand and wide smiles on faces. [Feb 2016, p.95]

While Reggae Film Star is often droll, Jurado's empathy for his characters - from the enduring recriminations of Lois Lambert to the aching isolation of What Happened To The Class Of '65? - often makes for affecting songwriting. [Aug 2022, p.87]

Literary, rockin' and still pathologically possessed of above-par tunes. [Apr 2018, p.96]

After all this time, Eric Clapton finally sounds at peace with himself; secure even. [Oct. 2010, p. 88]

The best Waterboys record since 1988's Fisherman's Blues. [Feb 2015, p.88]

Part band memoir, part call for artistic renewal, delivered via chiming rock anthemics with pop appeal. [Oct 2011, p.105]

This is Sign 'O' The Times territory. ... When Prince wanders from the funk path the results are more mixed. ... Yet there's strength in Welcome 2 America's commitment to the idea of the Classic Prince Album. [Sep 2021, p.93]

Gruff Rhys returns from his sabbatical to release another crush of blissed-out psychedelia, crunching beats, sun-kissed harmonies and topsy-turvy rhythms. And what a blast it is, too. [May 2009, p.96]

Joyful and full of subtle vigour, it's the perfect headphone-heard walking companion when you don't want lyrics crowding your thoughts. [Jul 2020, p.85]

The resulting sings--beautifully built around guitar, piano, drums and strings--are as their psycho-geography would suggest, intimate autobiographies, about ruined relationships. [May 2013, p.88]

Largely an enjoyable exercise in the perversion of the three-minute pop song. [Nov 2002, p.110]

An exquisite, arresting introduction. [Sep 2025, p.85]

Musically, the spectral sound lies between Fever Ray at their least forbidding and the shadows cast by David Lynch soundtracks. [Mar 2024, p.90]

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

The Youth split their sound into four clear component parts: piano, drums, percussion and guitar-screes that separate out beautifully and merge grimily--just like the kids in the film itself. [May 2011, p.112]

So unlike "Raw & Alive" by The Seeds, say there's no need for overdubbed excitement here, just the Noughties' most smokin' rock'n'roll act, on breathtaking form. [Apr 2010, p.96]

The saturnine wavs of As Above Perhaps So Below suggest the torpor induced by the titular barbiturate, while We Were Vaporised proffers further subterranean tectonics offset by cosmic keyboard drifts that might have been plucked, like much here, from an art-house sci-fi movie score. [Jun 2024, p.91]

Delivers some great tunes in tight, concentrated blasts, but sets them behind a gauze of distortion that gives the impression they are gradually fraying around the edges. [Apr 2004, p.102]

Immunity never drags. [Jul 2013, p.86]

The 22-track vinyl's an ace place for newcomers to get electrified. [Sep 2016, p.107]

As ever, Butler weaves these disparate ups and downs without visible joins. [Sep 2017, p.91]

Despite its experimental provenance, Wysing Forest is a cohesive, multi-layered collection. [Jul 2014, p.87]

Master of genre purity in R&B, Country and folk, Knopfler shapes each style to his own purpose and personality. [Oct 2012, p.83]

It's a compliment that guest spots by simpatico icons Iggy Pop and Kool Keith are by no means the best things here. [Dec 2019, p.86]

To Find Me Gone won't win any awards for wheel reinvention, but it's no sterile exercise in genre classicism. [Jul 2006, p.101]

Retour Au Champs De Mars oscillates malevolently with throaty, Death Star bass synths; like much of Iris, it uses a covert approach to win you over. [Feb 2017, p.95]

A dreamy, immersive mood piece that is as personal as it is instantly accessible. [Nov 2014, p.93]

Tropicália, Third to Six Soft Machine, Santana, Dungen, Alice Coltrane and Kamasi Washington seem to be in there. The Nick van Bakel-led, Melbourne-based art-popsters subsume all of this and more into the whole; a seamless coagulation. [Jan 2025, p.85]

Swindle wears his perfectionism lightly: satisfying tastebuds while leaving listeners hungry for more. [Mar 2019, p.98]

When Crisci does expansive, with the six-minute Ode To The Pleiades, the tremor is sizeable, its rattlesnake beats sinking into jazz piano riffs and iridescent synth pads, [Apr 2017, p.97]

His offbeat personality and refusal to pound the toad most traveled mark out this wildly talented bearded savant as a potential game-changer. [Dec 2013, p.89]

Lynn still sounds full of the life-force; more engaged and effervescent than many stars half her age. [Apr 2016, p.88]

Brevity obviously suits them as the results are both evocative and sublime. [May 2008, p.111]

Fans of dramatic Diamond are well taken care of here. But the real masterpieces are the opening and closing tracks. [June 2008, p.104]

Certainly, for anyone dosed up on post-Sisters black-attired rockisms, these Alabamans are a pulse-racing godsend. [Jan. 2008, p.110]

The band make each piece their own on this, their most satisfying set for years. [Dec 2008, p.102]

This excellently curated three-disc set uncovers a selection of previously unreleased outtakes. [Oct 2022, p.102]

McLaughlin's inner creative fire is till burning brightly on Liberation Time. [Sep 2021, p.78]

Stalking drumbeats collide with lush chords and Joel Cadbury's smoky vocals for an emotionally fragile record. [May 2004, p.104]

William Bell has forgotten nothing, it seems, least of all how to make wonderful, eternal soul music. [Aug 2016, p.88]

His score for this Murakami adaptation is just as striking, referencing Vaughan Williams and Shostakovich in a manner similar to such 20th century Japanese magpie composers as Hayasaka and Hashimoto. [May 2011, p.112]

Treacherous lapses notwithstanding, there's enough vim and invention here to suggest that Foals may yet prove themselves champion thoroughbreds. [June 2010, p. 96]

No 11-minute epics this time, but there are two stand-outs: Neil Young-esque Cumberland Gap, and Airplane, as hypnotic and moving as anything on The Harrow & The Harvest. [Sep 2017, p.92]

Furling expands the sonic palette, bringing in piano, percussion, harp, vibraphone and more. The results bring new dimensions to her psychedelic folk. [Feb 2023, p.92]

Improved fidelity aside, the song remains the same. [Aug 2004, p.88]

Surely the sweetly sour bubblegum album of 2015. [Sep 2015, p.86]

The sense of isolation, longing and homesickness are palpable. But he's also wry and darkly funny, self-referential, and self-deprecating too. [Sep 2012, p.95]

He sublimates his playing to the whole throughout, his swerving tones and arching lines ducking and diving through cracks in the strings. [Jan 2019, p.88]

A record sensational only in the best ways. [Jun 2006, p.103]

By turns, raw, sophisticated and sublime. [Sep 2006, p.104]

It's absorbing stuff, even shorn of the images. [Aug 2023, p.87]

Winterval has glimpses of Walls' hypnotic, frostbitten, ambient beauty, but equal airtime is given to funkier, tech-leaning tropes. [Dec 2012, p.86]

Gigi Masin bathes us in pure sunlight for 90 minutes. Emotional, but never over-wrought. [Feb 2020, p.91]

Strong new jams. [Feb 2020, p.96]

Black Messiah is an exquisite realisation of what D’Angelo does best.

Still adept at spectacular, if somewhat opaque intimacy, he enchants on My Red Little Fox, with its baroque recorders. [Nov 2023, p.85]

What separates this album from the 14 he's made before is the involvement of Adam Granduciel, who produces luminously, plays guitar, synths and more, and enlists his bandmates for much of the remaining instrumentation. [May 2025, p.87]

This is LaVette's album, start to finish: heterodox song choices, rearranged verses, tweaked lyrics--none of it gratuitous. [May 2018, p.90]

A melancholic late-night album, then, but one that really sounds beautiful. [Mar 2014, p.91]

It's a perfect mix of expertise and lightness of touch. [Jul 2025, p.87]

It doesn't equal their Back Stabbers/Ship Ahoy period but it comes close. [May 2019, p.90]

It sounds so authentically mid-to-late 1960s that Dear Patti - a song about missing an opportunity to play on the same festival bill as Smith - could almost be a lightly warped vinyl pressing from the era. [Aug 2025, p.76]

Heaves with harmonic charm. [Oct 2003, p.111]

There are gothy antecedents here – Baby Blue Movie sounds like the ’80s Cure over-medicated in the Hollywood Hills – and if it sustains a certain moodiness, X’s adheres to a tonally one-note atmosphere. [Aug 2024, p.82]

This is Toumani's best work since 200o8's The Mande Variations. [Jul 2014, p.88]

These songs have an impressive vehemency, whether showcasing uncanny AI balladry on Soul With Me, industrial wall-of-sound on Speak To Me and People Are Good, electro-pop dissociation on My Favourite Stranger, or hydraulically pumped Brel-drama on Don't Say You Love Me. [May 2023, p.85]

Doomed to the shadows of Flying Nun's more famed exponents, this box set should finally rehabilitate the band. [Sep 2015, p.103]

[A] rich and complex album. [Sep 2012, p.95]

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]

End Of Everything surface gloss barely conceals a raw intensity. [Jun 2023, p.90]

A rich, bright sounding record, albeit etched with Ward's lyrical ruefulness and voice of crumbling, lugubrious regret. [Oct 2006, p.111]

A powerful mix of dramatic, slow-moving sound and Walker melodies and narratives. [Nov 2014, p.99]

They remain wholly beholden to Liam Fray’s songwriting, but they’re assisted by contemporaries: upwardly mobile Scottish soul singer Brooke Combe offers depth-giving harmonies on Sweet Surrender, as does Pixey on the unusually sweary First Name Terms. Solitude Of The Night Bus skirts too close to Arctic Monkeys, but Fray is developing apace. [Dec 2024, p.85]

A crop of high quality songs and instrumentals played with dazzling finger-picking. [Mar 2017, p.90]

Signs & Signifiers is an utterly irresistible, slicked-back triumph. [Jun 2012, p.82]

Another damn good album from the Texan, as convincing on songs of country heartache as on roadhouse swagger. [Aug. 2011, p. 97]

Nuanced writing, full of tender challenges to lost souls, and Shelly's warmest sound yet. [Jul 2022, p.92]

This fifth album, produced by Dan Auerbach in his Nashville studio, captures The Clams' girl group sound with soulful feeling. [Apr 2018, p.92]

Second time out, they've all but eradicated the gauzy abstractions, in favour of a cards-on-table, powerpop sound, which, i tandem with impressive melodic directness, should make them on e of 2018's hastiest crossover bands. [May 2018, p.90]

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

Alight Of Night is devoid of current context, making for a weird timelessness. A treat. [Mar 2009, p.108]

Relatability charms never harmed Dolly Parton, and that's who you think of as these gargantuan melodies shimmer and soar. [Jun 2020, p.88]

Their slightly shambolic and unapologetic pop-fused sound works, though, and looks likely to speed Los Campesinos! to the cult canonical Brit-indie status reserved for the other outsider troupes like Belle & Sebastian and The Cribs. [Mar 2010, p.96]