Gripping and energetic record. [Nov 2019, p.91]

Isn't quite a match for last year's career-topping Broken Stay Open Sky. [Nov 2019, p.86]

The album's schizoid ruse is neatly summed-up by Make Art Not Friends, which makes its wondrous metamorphosis from lithe dance track to all-American rocker in just under six minutes. [Nov 2019, p.86]

Giles Martin hasn't dug up Abbey Road; but his subtle improvements have smoothed out the odd bump. [Nov 2019, p.103]

With its transforming moods and quiet beauty, Stars Are The Light might just be Moon Duo's finest to date. [Oct 2019, p.83]

Interesting as the Wallace mixes are, the band is most compelling thrashing through Talent Show and I Won't, live in Milwaukee. [Nov 2019, p.102]

The lack of personal revelations that brought nuance and light to 2016's Made In The Manor often makes these vivid, grim depictions of inner city strife uncomfortable listening. [Nov 2019, p.89]

Morse Code is more concerned with our collective lost soul rather than individual anxiety. [Nov 2019, p.86]

Armon-Jones's fiery soloing is intrinsic to the headnoddable whole. [Oct 2019, p.91]

An experimental and deeply idiosyncratic record. [Oct 2019, p.90]

[Alice Moki Jayne's] one-hour length is rather testing. The 29-minute 8 Spring Streeet is more structured and achieves a thrilling momentum. ... 35 minutes in [Galaxies (Sky)], the 12-strong, 12-string "guitar army," directed by Moore hit a breathtaking peak. It feels like a spectacular end, but then there are still over 20 minutes to go. [Oct 2019, p.86]

The Talkies is a scarifying, perverse noise-rock treat. [Oct 2019, p.85]

Radiating breezy melancholic warmth and lonely midnight chills. [Oct 2019, p.89]

A second set of tuneful snark. [Oct 2019, p.92]

It's tasteful and meticulous throughout, but the longer, more adventurously songs exert a greater grip on the imagination. [Oct 2019, p.91]

Everything on Sinematic is huge, layered, expertly grooved and overladen with Robertson's parched voice hamming up lyrics which offset the standard portentousness of a rock great sermonising from the Mount with underspun True Crime yarns like I Hear You Paint House, Shanghai Blues and the Orson Wells tribute, The Shadow. [Oct 2019, p.84]

These are stories about patterns of behaviour, like dreams that keep returning, or won't end. The way out, these songs counsel, lies in relinquishing. [Oct 2019, p.85]

Jamie is a giant leap forward: a testimony of liberation, creatively uncompromising but just as accessible as Howard's old music. [Oct 2019, p.80]

This sad skewed pop with shades of Momus, Sakamoto, L. pierre and Bjork weaves its magic on the fluttering yet forthright Salty, vocal tapestry of Come Behind Me, So Good! and raw emoting of Meo, but palls a little before its haunting apex on spaced-out sign-off Coyote, with spectral echoes of Kazu's complicated past. [Oct 2019, p.86]

Terms Of Surrender presents a man sinking on the edges but bullishly so, not countenancing change. The effect is disquieting, uncomfortable, especially with Aaron Dessner's sumptuous production giving these songs a contrastingly romantic sheen. [Oct 2019, p.83]

Hval deals in big cerebral questions, but these songs--intimate, intricately fleshed out--have roots in both body and mind. [Oct 2019, p.86]

The Return could do with some editing as it's unwieldy 78 minutes risk losing the audience before its finest songs: the epic, autobiographical title track, and the redemptive, gospel-soaked closer Made Us better. But Too much of a good thing is nothing to hold a grudge over. [Oct 2019, p.89]

This is Black Star Riders' best work yet. [Oct 2019, p.88]

The best new tracks' confidence boosts the band's emotional clout. [Oct 2019, p.88]

It's a familiar world they inhabit, but still a deeply odd one. [Oct 2019, p.82]

Real heart pulses behind the earwiggy riffs, the lyrics tracing ideas of love from first stage to last, more nuances being revealed on each play. [Oct 2019, p.85]

There are a few other naff moments, but Gallagher's voice carries everything, sounding fantastic, high and bright in the mix. [Oct 2019, p.82]

The result is charged and post-apocalyptic. [Oct 2019, p.90]

Pang! doesn't just look forward to a blazing global meltdown. Beneath the modernist sheen, Rhys roots these songs in something older and wiser. [Oct 2019, p.83]

Groovy and moving, in all the right directions. [Oct 2019, p.88]

A gently rambling rumination twinkling with congas, shakers and bird-like flute. [Oct 2019, p.92]

He is so clearly in his element that you can just hand over the controls. [Oct 2019, p.97]

This whole album is a desert rock classic. [Oct 2019, p.82]

If not quite a match for Gainsbourg's ticklish masterpiece, it's a partial return to the stringy artistry of 2003's Friends Of Mine. [Oct 2019, p.83]

Meditative Time (You Got Me) sets the pace: a gently rambling rumination twinkling with congas, shakers and bird-like flutes. [Oct 2019, p.92]

Free, in a good way, resembles his more esoteric work from that time, such as 1999's brooding Avenue B. [Oct 2019, p.88]

Rubberband sounds too much like jazz's great disrupter chasing black-radio approval via The Human League. ... Rubberband is not a Great Lost Miles Davis Album. But it has a lot of great Miles Davis on it. [Oct 2019, p.101]

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]

It's pleasant but ultimately inessential stuff. Way better are the tunes where the tape echo effects kick in. [Oct 2019, p.82]

There is humour to the harsh, spangly electropop of tracks like Feel For You and Vampires, but in places the concept is a little too arch and pumped up, sounding like a teen Netflix drama. [Oct 2019, p.82]

Her queasy, pitch-shifting sound aligns with labelmate Flying Lotus's high-end head music. [Sep 2019, p.96]

An ass-shaking blend of disco, house, '80s pop with apparent self-awareness. [Oct 2019, p.92]

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]

There's a cosmic/romantic wisdom to highlight One Way Or Another and Two Dreamers' sunshine classicism. [Sep 2019, p.96]

Crow sounds wholly at ease, but for all the vocal variety Stevie Nicks, James Taylor and a rueful Vince Gill bring, she doesn't sound wholly inspired. [Oct 2019, p.89]

While there's a suspicion that the album format isn't their natural habitat - only the melancholic shuffle of (Vi-Vi) Vicious Games veers away from the acid template - the sinewy, skeletal intensity here has a creeping allure. [Oct 2019, p.90]

The S.L.P. might be a one-off, but right here, right now, he sounds liberated. [Oct 2019, p.85]

Forever Turned Around tows the if-it-ain't broke line, a choice justified by nuggets such as My Life Alone and Before I Know It. [Oct 2019, p.89]

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]

This album engages out minds while it explores, but as it raises questions, it still comforts. [Sep 2019, p.92]

Any agitation on Katherine Paul's second LP is gently expressed. [Oct 2019, p.92]

Tucker has created an album that should endear her to those who still raise the outlaw flag while also appealing to hard-edged pop-tinged rock believers. [Oct 2019, p.83]

There's social critique and black humour in spades, though the blanket-warm harmonies often smother The Rails' tougher messages. But if you want comfort in trying times, wrap up here. [Sep 2019, p.90]

Once again Tucker demonstrates his knack of creating simple, incantatory, almost folky vocal lines, which pivot around a few telling chord changes and lodge in the memory long after the music stops. [Sep 2019, p.91]

Twelve Nudes' unbridled howl, mania and joy is on the nose. [Sep 2019, p.95]

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

Their needling attack punctures fevered egos on There's No One Like You, and cooks up some pleasingly wonky acid-rock, but best of the bunch is the closing flourish When Do I Get To Sing "My Way." [Sep 2019, p.88]

There is sweetness--Shuffling Stoned's hyperfocused vignette; the title track's mystical George Harrison drone--but August feels like the product of a wandering mind deliberately slipping through the cracks. [Sep 2019, p.89]

This is a different sounding Billy Childish. Not Radically different, but enough to notice that something's going on. At the root is personal tragedy: he had a nervous breakdown last year, and lyrics, written more like prose than punk missive, deal with mortality and the passing of time. [Sep 2019, p.88]

This is a sweet entry point. [Oct 2019, p.92]

The bluesiest tracks are best (Beat The Drum; Witness). [Oct 2019, p.92]

i,i never sounds less than excellent, with wide-open acoustic/electric audio structures allowing pizzicato strings to waft through and rising clouds of horns to blow in unexpectedly. It really is bleeding edge stuff. [Oct 2019, p.90]

Her first album since 1968's Kufunta on Immediate. The former Ikette's voice is little changed since those days and still rooted in powerful gospel. [Aug 2019, p.88]

Spontaneity suits him; weaving jangly groove-grit with melody and just the odd overly-earnest lyric. [Sep 2019, p.96]

It all adds up to the heavy, heavy sound of extinction rebellion, King Gizz developing themes they first explored on 2017's Murder Of The Universe. [Sep 2019, p.94]

A questing, festering record, Face Stabber isn't for the faint-hearted, but its lows are outnumbered by exhilarating highs. [Sep 2019, p.95]

A first strike of the match before they burn their own path forward. [Sep 2019, p.94]

The Center Won't Hold sounds like a band urgently resetting their course, putting their fury and fear ona war footing. At times., it's on a industrial scale. ... There are gorgeous pop songs here, too. [Sep 2019, p.84]

Respite is infrequent with Blanck Mass, but when it arrives, its effects are heightened. [Sep 2019, p.91]

Succinct and entirely self-preformed, Regan's typically poetic sixth album conjures a singular, almost meditative mood via fingerpicked guitars, backwards-recorded instruments and subtle textures. [Sep 2019, p.95]

His rare talent for corralling emphatic musicians into his rhythmically intense, entrancing vision adds a whole new spin to the Indo-jazz continuum. [Aug 2019, p.91]

The whole soundtrack comes downbeat, mum-like fusion of standard instruments and glitchy electronics run throughout all the atmospheric instrumentals. [Sep 20129, p.89]

A chequered beast swiveling between ill-fitting newe adventures in growling rock electronica and hazy, '80s-throwback dram pop. It's somewhere between that Safe Place seem happiest, Eternal Recurrence, Jump Jet and End Game revisiting hazy, propulsive Ride territory of old--complete with the odd crap lyric--but the laidback, Syd Barrett-like Dial Up and arrhythmic, big-sounding In This Room show they still have genuine class. [Sep 2019, p.86]

To most ears, this late-night, whipcrack-sharp chooglathon, finally unveiled, sounds astounding. What were they like on a good night? [Sep 2019, p.107]

While six of these 19 tracks are intricately wrought miniatures, it's the supreme confidence of four-minute relative marathons Peel Free and horn-pricked parental paean Bloom Wither Bloom that shine. [Sep 2019, p.91]

Her eerie, seductive first solo outing takes your brain to a new plane. [Sep 2019, p.93]

A stopgap isn't quite what The Hold Steady need right now, but as a holding exercise it's hard to fault. [Sep 2019, p.89]

Sprawling yet rewarding, Blume is a sprightly, athletic consolidation of the journey so far. [Sep 2019, p.93]

Each of the album's 10 songs is a downbeat, dreamy, ultra-melodic yet angular nugget. [Sep 2019, p.90]

Enter a floating world of the surreal, of gently uneasy listening, warped strings and distorted brass, as if Chris Montez led an Indian mariachi band. [Aug 2019, p.93]

Derretirse displays a consistent fondness for gauzy shimmer and hypnagogic atmospherics. [Aug 2019, p.93]

Some of the lyrics that should sound like cliche feel more legit as we hear Segall wade earnestly into the aches and joys of existence. [Sep 2019, p.90]

An incantatory history of the acoustic guitar, as instrument of devotion, dance and lament, at times The Borametz Tree also feels like a book of incantations, spells for the universal elixir of joy, conjured up by a master alchemist. [Jul 2019, p.93]

The piano's push into poignancy is occasionally too much, but Yawny Yawn largely feels like new information, a clear-sighted re-vision of a tremendous set of songs. [Sep 2019, p.86]

Clark has incubated this elegant, eclectic collection that shuttles between haunting modern classical and folktronica, complex sound design, brutal beats and scabrous noise. [Aug 2019, p.93]

A poised and expansive record. [Aug 2019, p.90]

All in all, Duck is the sound of a band trying way too hard. [Sep 2019, p94]

This intimate 2013 show at Los Angeles' storied Wiltern Theatre--beautifully shot for Blu-ray--is proof, revisiting tracks from throughout their catalogue, opening with a searing, gloriously sludgy grind through Incessant Mace. From there, they showcase their many facets. [Sep 2019, p.107]

This comes together perfectly as he preens and stalks and sneers, like a sulky, world-weary Bowie. [Aug 2019, p.90]

There's something rather comforting about finding them wholly unchanged after four decades and nearly 10 million album sales. [Sep 2019, p.89]

The result is a funk-filled bundle of fun populated by a polyphony of farcical political figures, where anger is tempered by something more potent: satire. [Sep 2019, p.88]

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 Stockholm-based composer edges into metallic wave-like dissonance, using organ and guitar to explore points at which sonic clarity starts to mess with our spatial awareness. [Sep 2019, p.91]

KoKoKo! wield improvised technology with the deftness of touch to create the kind of pop music you'd expect to hear in the best post-punk disco in heaven. [Sep 2019, p.94]

This is long-form drone perfection. [Sep 2019, p.91]

Pure Bloom is a cleaner, more austere work, yet just as emotionally overpowering. [Sep 2019, p.95]

The group's fusion of emo-core anguish, riot grrrl rancour and bruised indie-rock is the perfect vehicle for songs channelling heartache, rage and betrayal, but the ban's true gift lies in fashioning this catharsis into well-crafted songs. [Sep 2019, p.90]

Even though her dreamscapes are surreal, there are moments that jolt. [Sep 2019, p.90]