Another hip-rolling, dabke masterclass. [Jan 2020, p.92]

Promising debut. [Jan 2020, p.92]

A soaring Here In Spirit joins reincarnation musing Who Am I? at the pinnacle of its daft-genius. [Jan 2020, p.92]

The sound of a band untethered, revelling in their resurrection. [Jan 2020, p.98]

This is a mellifluous and hook-laden, brimming with Russell's quotidian snapshot lyrics. [Jan 2020, p.99]

This vivid, confident collection cuts across the UK bass continuum, mixing abstract house and no-rave with moody mysticism. [Jan 2020, p.91]

While dark moments abound, Bad Wiring is also thick with the evergreen anti-folkie's charm. [Jan 2020, p.92]

At times Little Common Twist seems to misplace its destination, but it's also warm and embracing; not so much ambient as aural amniotic fluid. [Jan 2020, p.91]

Sounds reassuringly expensive. ... Decent instrumental takes on Lao Schifrin's The Cat plus Fiona Apple's elegant Don't Worry 'Bout Me make this more than the stocking-filler that won't unnerve Aunt Norah. [Jan 2020, p.90]

Spotlights the songs' grit and humanity, albeit still substantially finessed by mixmaster Bob Clearmountain. [Jan 2020, p.90]

Ultimately, The Band raised all stakes, and a half-century later, musicians are still striving for its excellence. [Jan 2020, p.90]

Pollard's lyrics are characteristically oblique, but persistence pokes through as a theme. [Jan 2020, p.90]

O'Hagan has taken apart what he's known for and put it back together in an entirely fresh ways. [Jan 2020, p.89]

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]

A fitting culmination of the run that began with Old Ideas in 2012. [Jan 2020, p.88]

An album hitting some dead ends, as other avenues open up. [Jan 2020, p.88]

It's frustrating to hear them bringing so much to material that doesn't quite coalesce, it's something like listening to holograms of actual songs. [Jan 2020, p.85]

When harnessed, Taylor Hawkins' energy is the right stuff. [Jan 2020, p.85]

Though making the common mistake of over-investing in the frame of guitar and piano licks and bodging the big picture of the song, Ron Wood's tribute is not the worst in the world. [Jan 2020, p.84]

Matt Maltese's second album persists with velveteen schmaltzy AOR; like yacht rock on a budget. His graceful croon, though, is more jaded this time, combining with the hollowed-out production for a deluxe dose of remorse. [Jan 2020, p.84]

A poignant tribute. [Jan 2020, p.84]

13 evocative songs. [Jan 2020, p.84]

The combination of shimmering sonics and dislocated characters is what makes Hyperspace so holistic, and compelling. [Jan 2020, p.83]

A meditative, deliciously low-key collection produced by Lee Townsend. [Nov 2019, p.91]

Total fun for your brain. [Dec 2019, p.107]

A clutch of moving haikus. ... Knowing, experimental, hopeful, ironic, this could be Mary Margaret O'Hara--wringing your heart, engaging your brain. [Dec 2019, p.89]

Musicians writing and singing about being in the seventies is a rare thing in the Peter Pan world of rock--but The Who do it exceptionally well. [Dec 2019, p.92]

The songs about hurt, hardship but also hope are sung in raspy voices with sparse guitar and farming tools used as percussion. [Dec 2019, p.88]

The working drafts may have comprised a more direct, accessible album. But this monument to Clark's troubled masterpiece shows how deep and far he was willing to go to capture--and share--the salvation in a song. [Dec 2019, p.107]

No Treasure But Hope is further refinement of what they've been doing in the past. [Dec 2019, p.89]

An uncomfortable listen, especially the Big Star's Third-esque When I Think Of You, but also an album imbued with acceptance and dignity. [Nov 2019, p.93]

It's a challenging listen, but more exhilarating than pretentious. [Dec 2019, p.95]

Its instrumental first disc a foreboding seas of sputtering synths, dislocated drums and disorienting ideas. Yet rare moments of beauty peak through. ... A similar wilful primitivism pervades disc two. [Dec 2019, p.95]

It's really a nightmare world Oldham describes, but he cloaks it in tender beauty, slight-of-hand that remodels human failure into heartening endurance, a consoling story against the cold. [Dec 2019, p.88]

The Sisypheans is measured and reflective. [Dec 2019, p.91]

Beat-less but involving standouts like Memphis Helena, with its plangent lead line intimately tracked by Nelson's hushed hazy intoning, and elegiac, rippling acoustic guitar-propelled Muriel Spark are as inexorable and immersive as a high summer sunset. [Dec 2019, p.92]

It's a good album, but the standout track is just him alone on Beograd, a swirling big-room French house track, where he is beautifully lost in the beats. [Dec 2019, p.93]

Profligate, self-indulgent and, against all oddly, hugely satisfying. ... [The single-disc] Sampler Edition is a handy 58-minute entry point to the mad endeavour. [Dec 2019, p.90]

Girl Ray's metamorphosis is still ongoing, and that their true final form may resemble something darker and more substantial than Girl's neon reveries, diverting though they are. [Dec 2019, p.94]

His most complete artistic statement to date. [Dec 2019, p.93]

Wildcard marks a brilliant reassertion of Lambert's magnetic wit. [Dec 2019, p.89]

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

From Out Of Nowhere is a stronger, better focused set than its predecessor. [Dec 2019, p.84]

It is a hazy path through a dusty landscape of sadness and enlightenment that never arrives at answers or certainties, but shimmers with an eternal mystery. [Dec 2019, p.90]

It's a damn good listen, all of it. Generous and revelatory, to borrow Rosanne's words, and at times mind-blowing. [Dec 2019, p.100]

A meditative record that flutters elegantly and throbs with delicious menace. [Nov 2019, p.95]

There are certainly treasures here if you sift through Guv's prolific unburdening. [Dec 2019, p. 94]

Twigs plants words with tenacious deliberation and care, but sometimes the result is over-studied, a gentle industrial emo. [Dec 2019, p.93]

Nursing you back to equilibrium with its sumptuous balm of laid-back growers, Up On High is a near-perfect hangover record. [Nov 2019, p.93]

Tense, rewarding, avant-garde jousting abounds. [Nov 2019, p.96]

Whatever the sonic weather, Gira's spiritual austerity remains unimpaired.[Nov 2019, p.89]

Alex Menne's Dolores O'Riordan-ish yodel still dominates and can overwhelm the songs, but Big Thief fans should take note. [Dec 2019, p.96]

Alongside jay Berliner's guitar lines, meaty chunks of organ, grooves aplenty and a soulful collection of new songs, it's a convincing performance. [Dec 2019, p.86]

With swaying synths, popping drums, synth melodies and wistful lyrics, it's Depeche Mode for the juicing era. [Dec 2019, p.96]

It all thumps along agreeably with a brio seldom found in rock today by artists a quarter of his age. [Dec 2019, p.92]

The fervid prog punk of Flesh Fondue, the synth collision of 65 Million Years Ago and the trippy Nets Of Space are further high-points on this constantly regenerating trip. [Nov 2019, p.94]

They approach the tradition with an awe and wonder that especially percolates into the instrumentals. ... Their most extreme statement yet. [Dec 2019, p.89]

This sounds raw and mighty, but somewhat same-old. [Dec 2019, p.94]

A lysergic brew of dust-blown ballads, thumping punk rock and shimmery psychedelia. The jarring stylistic clash is often part of the charm. [Dec 2019, p.88]

They remain ridiculous, but thunderingly good fun. [Dec 2019, p.91]

Highly engaging. [Dec 2019, p.96]

Krlic has created a world in which the music of ancient tradition works like a sonic virus that simultaneously soothes and eats away at your very soul. [Dec 2019, p.95]

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

Meredith's precision helps control the fun, but this is another buoyant invention from her musical lab. [Dec 2019, p.95]

Embellishments frame soul-searching songs about dislocation and romantic ill-fortune--think a grittier Brendan Benson--which soon demand frequent revisits. [Dec 2019, p.86]

Almost everything here sounds pre-designed for drone-shot driving sequences in a slow-burning indie film, but in a very good way. [Dec 2019, p.86]

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]

It still vibrates with Warren Ellis's ominous, cosmic-radiation synthesizers and loops, but Ghosteen is less tightly coiled and knotted. ... Cave finds a way to reach out, and reach through. [Dec 2019, p.87]

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

There's a surfeit of hushed intros building to emotional crescendos, but the feeling is all real. [Nov 2019, p.96]

It's an engrossing set with nine reflective soundscapes. [Nov 2019, p.89]

Colorado feels more focused than Pill, especially so the backing vocals. [Nov 2019, p.87]

One Step Behind shifts the goalposts, compromising a 32-minute title track and the eight-minute Heart And Soul, an elegant, soulful comedown in the mould of Music From Big Pink. [Nov 2019, p.94]

Joyful and, at times, unpredictably good fun. [Nov 2019, p.90]

Bid renders the album's picaresque litany of devious noblemen, murdered knights and debauched bishops with typically knowing aplomb. [Oct 2019, p.89]

Thrilling, unpredictable and often inspired stuff. [Nov 2019, p.86]

A decent album, but perhaps not the one some of us were hoping for. [Nov 2019, p.95]

Part 2's brittle, somewhat alienating production isn't exactly subtle. ... Foals sound like they are overreaching themselves a little. Two highly ambitious, thematically-linked albums in six months was always a big ask. [Nov 2019, p.86]

[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]

Elbow reflect an unruly world here, but if they sometimes lose faith, they never lose heart. [Nov 2019, p.87]

Lanegan brings dependable authenticity to these savvy pop songs; dire admonitions, but also an abundance of swagger and fun. [Nov 2019, p.94]

The group are definitely branching out, but they've not quite reached Zabriskie Point yet. [Nov 2019, p.91]

Sparer but equally powerful record [to U.F.O.F.]. [Nov 2019, p.90]

No Home record offers few tunes you could whistle, but at it's best Gordon's no-wave din and take-no-shit snarl offer unabashedly militant thrills. [Nov 2019, p.87]

OEH are a more intriguing venture when confident enough to aim for the universal. [Oct 2019, p.86]

Exudes confidence as it cleverly tweaks harmonic principles and discreetly unveils its dramatic arc. [Nov 2019, p.93]

Though brief nautical ballad Deck Chair is a skit too far here, there's a great bubblegum-pop song fighting its way through the exploded theatrics of Heavy Metal Lover, while silly song of thanks for the six-string We Are The Guitar Men is a virtuosic hoot. [Nov 2019, p.89]

A beautiful, comforting lament. [Nov 2019, p.95]

Apocalypse rears its head in bare-bones instrumentation, reverberating synths and lyrics that hunt for a meaningful future. [Nov 2019, p.89]

Carla Dal Forno's newest release sounds strangely fragile and vulnerable. ... Interspersed with exquisitely forlorn Eno-esque instrumenetals. [Nov 2019, p.95]

Soroor is the star of this set. ... Her pre-relocation stuff--even her Afghan Star audition is online--is always interesting, but this is a whole new level. [Oct 2019, p.86]

Its uvowedly less manic, but uknowhatimsayin¿ still cuts deep. [Nov 2019, p.93]

The duo shine as a beacon of warm and quirky outsiderdom in a rising tide of cookie-cutter Nashville Americana. [Nov 2019, p.90]

Worth the 10-year wait. [Nov 2019, p.91]

This is a sparse, minimalist ode to joy. [Nov 2019, p.88]

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]

Anderson's typically earnest, if uncharacteristically earnest, readings of Buddist sutras punchuate proceedings, and a pervading transcendence lingers long after the music has ceased.[Nov 2019, p.89]

It's an absorbing listen. [Nov 2019, p.108