It's an adrenalin rush to experience rather than listen to, and the 11 tracks are over too soon. [Nov 2020, p.81]

[The tracks] are stripped back, letting the raw essence rise to the surface and evoking the strength of feeling that comes through their live performances. There’s the swing of Sam Cooke at the Harlem Square Club, the search for ecstasy of the Family Stone at Woodstock, the power of Aretha Franklin at LA’s New Temple Missionary Baptist Church and the fervour of Mahalia Jackson and Mavis Staples at 1969’s Harlem Cultural Festival. [May 2025, p.82]

Barnett doesn't quite equal this deadpan reportage [as Avant Gardener on 2013's A Sea of Split Peas] but navigates similar terrain in charming style. [Apr 2015, p.88]

The unlikely MC tag team's incontestable third rages hard over bass-driven beats positively thrumming with vitality. [Apr 2017, p.95]

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

It's a beauty. [Oct 2025, p.81]

A claustrophobic, mesmeric soundscape akin to My Bloody Valentine and Spacemen 3's early work. [Apr 2003, p.114]

Stories is a leaner, less experimental-sounding record than 1998's Is This Desire, its chips stacked on visceral power and vitalising vocals.

Has a[n] unhurried Southern swing that pulls like an undertow against the emotional freight of confessional songs like Solitaire and Nature's Child. [Aug 2025, p.82]

These are out-of-reach glimpses of environmental paradise; hazy, transient, atomised, and, like the technological future they presaged, their expiration in-built. [Mar 2019, p.105]

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

Big Time doesn't feel like a definitive transformation - it's still tender and unfurled in places - but it does have a new clarity, a sense of masks peeling away, veils dropped. [Jul 2022, p.84]

Fans disappointed at the resolutely unexpanded LPs should be aware; the upgrade makes revisiting them a supreme enjoyment anyway. [Nov 2011, p.110]

It's obvious that the Chicago-born, multi-instrumentalist bluesman is about to add yet another Blues Music Award nomination to his already impressive tally. [May 2017, p.96]

It's a wonderful listen, and the joy in creation that is obvious in these 15 tracks, is nearly enough to wipe out the sadness of his loss. Nearly. [Aug 2019, p.102]

A suite of songs involving a character returning from a near-death experience, it works just as well without the plot. Still, there are twists and turns aplenty. [Jan 2021, p.91]

While Mollestad is at her most formal, this album's power and deep cultural roots bring a resonance akin to that of the work of Nordheim. [Jan 2022, p.88]

Any sense that the listener is being short-changed is blown away by the sheer quality of the writing and production on offer. [Dec 2022, p.84]

Hawk's stentorian baritone croon is almost irony free and his freewheeling songs blossom because of it. [Mar 2023, p.93]

With these songs, though, Cilker is building a beautiful place of her own. [Oct 2023, p.86]

Reminiscent of early Nathaniel Rateliff and John Moreland, and prime John Prine, there's no reason here to doubt Martin might one day eclipse them all. [Dec 2023, p.88]

Astonishingly innovative. [Mar 2025, p.89]

Moments of odd musical cosplay, meanwhile, are outshone by such hits as Silly Love Songs and Let 'Em In. [Jan 2026, p.96]

Pyramids’ borrowing of Chuck D’s mantra “I don’t rhyme for the sake of riddlin’” is emblematic of his still-abrasive mood, whether dissecting the prison system’s failures on A Bigger Picture Called Free or unleashing his most heartfelt rallying cry on the thrilling Robert Glasper-produced, Stevie Wonder-starring title track.

A record you don't want to turn your back on in any way. [May 2019, p.93]

While the comparisons to Springsteen's Nebraska and Gillian Welch's Time (The Revelator) are obvious, they don't do justice to Jurado's wholly original craft. [Jun 2003, p.98]

Newcomers won't fail to be charmed by an album that channels all four Velvets albums at different moments, in the process of locating YLT's own unique voice. [Feb 2015, p.102]

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

Ultimately, what redeems Letter To You from notions of idealised nostalgia is the rigour of its performances, particularly those of Springsteen himself, who for the second successive album is in the singing form of his life. [Dec 2020, p.78]

What makes The Complete BBC Sessions so compelling is that it's mostly work-in-process, and Zeppelin veer played a song the same way twice. [Oct 2016, p.107]

A nearly flawless set of left-field folk. [Jun 2004, p.106]

A gorgeous reverie. [Sep 2001, p.99]

As ever, his chord changes and arrangements betray an inventiveness seemingly borne of brilliant instinct. [Nov 2004, p.92]

Kala is where the album explodes into life. [Jun 2015, p.93]

Booze and heartache are constants, but the mood is never morose, borne aloft by Lenderman’s guitar playing, which is primal but emotionally lucid. His tender lyricism is another big plus, locating laudable empathy for his cast of lovable losers. [Oct 2024, p.90]

Both artistically and in terms of a new business model, In Rainbows is a necesary masterstroke. [Dec 2007, p.96]

In all, a cherishable tribute to the vitality of the right-on gospel group whose strides into soul still echo today. [Mar 2020, p.103]

[They] have made an evolutionary leap in rock. [Jun 2005, p.108]

EURO-COUNTRY is everything great pop music should be: smart, subversive and tremendous fun. [Oct 2025, p.88]

Only God Was Above Us feels like a record made by a band once more comfortable in their skins. [May 2024, p.86]

This small brick of a box set housing 22 Isley Brothers albums, many of them essential to any soul-funk library, astonishingly does not include something like a dozen tracks that any sane person would suggest were key to the band's story. This is not a complaint, merely a fact to illustrate the broad sweep of their career. [Sep 2015, p.104]

What Now is no less discursive, plundering so many styles that it might instead be called What Next. But working with co-producer Shawn Everett in a series of top-tier Nashville hubs, Howard makes it cohere not only through the prayer bowls that clang and drone between tracks but also through the way she captures the wild vacillations of falling in and out of something that’s possibly good and potentially terrible. [Mar 2024, p.84]

It's all tinged with, real communicable melancholy. [Nov 2012, p.85]

Beautifully arranged, its four pieces amplifiy Sunn O)))'s signature drone rumble. [Jun 2009, p.96]

Wednesday sound in total control of the world they've build here. [Nov 2025, 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 is resilient, tough, exultant music that just didn't push thorough a t the time. [Sep 2011, p.113]

A richer feast, from more humble ingredients, could scarcely be imagined. [May 2012, p.82]

Its 10 fuzzy, through-the-bottom-of-a-whiskey-glass intimacy, with Anthony's acoustic guitar and rich baritone voice conveying songs of existential wonder and lament. [Feb 2013, p.93]

The dark matter of his fall that holds The Graceless Age together is formidable stuff. [Jun 2013, p.85]

Fantastic stuff. [Feb 2014, p.102]

Lavishness their deep influences merits. ... Endless Indian summer. [Feb 2020, p.107]

There's often an old-world gravitas and a contemporary lightness of touch at play simultaneously, the tangible lineage of these story-rich, often long-form songs reaching deep within you. [Nov 2022, p.89]

The finale to an exemplary act of curation. [Jan 2023, p.102]

songdreaming is by no means perfect; Lee’s version of Black Dog And Sheep Crook comes on a little too much like Dave Brubeck’s Take Five, and his Anglicisation of Robert Burns ballad Aye Walking Oh feels a bit unnecessary. However, Lee does unaffected loveliness very well (case in point: the closing Sweet Girl McRee), and his intense empathy – for the bees, the trees, the birdies and his fellow man – shines through. [Apr 2024, p.80]

Boone delivers these stories like she's divorcing a husband, morose but defiant, while guest Cory Gray's keyboards help turn parochial into widescreen. [Mar 2025, p.90]

The tempo is up, the brass arrangements individual, and St. Paul's extraordinary voice is swooping effortlessly between falsetto and gravel. [Dec 2025, p.86]

Their follow-up sees them crank everything up to the next level. [Sep 2018, p.94]

Crackling with radio-primed hooks, whipsnap breakbeats and Boucher’s helium-pitched vocals, Grimes’ third album makes a convincing strike for playlist ubiquity, with a healthy dollop of the oddball chucked in.

The scope and breadth is startling. [Oct 2004, p.94]

It's all pretty essential stuff.

This is tough, honest, uncompromising beauty and the next great voice in music. [Apr 2005, p.86]

Delivers a top-grade high. [Jun 2006, p.104]

Forgoing cynicism, she looks out on the world with unbound curiosity and zeal, every coruscant melody and glowing harmony another discovery. [Nov 2024, p.93]

Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You is both an album of admirable ambition and a mantra worth repeating until its mysteries are revealed. [Mar 2022, p.81]

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]

[An] Extraordinary album. [Apr 2022, p.92]

Unearthly. [Jul 2024, p.91]

Overall, it's a gently entrancing and quietly elegant album. [Sep 2025, p.80]

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

If you need reminding, it demonstrates what a good singer she is. [Dec 2018, p.90]

This panoramic attempt to make sense of life's one certainty beyond taxes flutters far above the digital static of 2008's breakthrough Los Angeles into twisted, ethereal jazz territory. [Nov 2014, p.89]

Its sure-footed '60 psych, garage and country is potently rendered. [Aug 2022, p.89]

Beautiful and surprising album. [Jul 2019, p.88]

Believe it or not, there's room in the desert for yet another serious contender. [May 2019, p.91]

Multifaceted and consistently brilliant. [Jun 2023, p.84]

Its essence remains constant, as post-punk, soul and Southern rock collide in an ever-delectable succession of hyper-melodic bangers – sunny online-trolling satire Flash Bare Ass, and faith-keeping marital romancer Light On surely count amongst JP’s career-best. [Jan 2025, p.82]

Isolation doesn't get more splendid than this. [June 2008, p.100]

Heavy though it is, the songwriting remains remarkably light and agile. [Mar 2024, p.88]

There's a sense in almost all the songs of open roads, either beckoning or closed in, or both. [May 2015, p.99]

Brilliantly executed with Shirley Bassey-like surety in an arresting, always distinctive, lyrical voice. [Mar 2024, p.89]

It's a record of fierce seriousness, a demand for engagement as inescapable and immediate as somebody shaking you by the shoulders. [Aug 2023, p.82]

A string quartet, reverby backing vocals, and Kraut keys crowd the songs like weeds strangling a once hearty plant. [May 2001, p.104]

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

Everything Harmony us certainly a darker chapter in the Twigs' story, but their songwriting has become more nuanced. [Jun 2023, p.90]

Lahai is less introspective and far from lonely, its persuasive positivity carried by a contained riot of euphoric synths, swelling violins, Chic guitars and skittering percussion. [Dec 2023, p.90]

What did we get for our 20-year wait? Something substantive, something deeply considered. [Jan 2024, p.87]

This is not a record that wants or needs to be solved, but the clues and traces it leaves behind are so compelling it's difficult to let it alone. [Oct 2015, p.86]

The sense of wonder in Fleet Foxes' songs is matched only by the discipline and talent that created this adventurous, evocative record. One which is already shaping up as an album of the year. [July 2008, p.98]

She repeatedly refers to her inability to express her emotions fully--which is exactly how Dirty Computer leaves you feeling. [Jul 2018, p.88]

New Adventures In Hi-Fi holds up well now. ... CD2 consists of all previously released material. Fun of you've never hears R.E.M. saunter through Wichita Lineman, but completists will see this one as a massive opportunity missed. [Dec 2021, p.98]

Throughout the record, there are audible seeds of the sublime AOR sound that Nicks and Buckingham-era Fleetwood Mac would further finesse. .... It's also easy to hear why Frozen Love - the proggy, shape-shifting holy grail of Fleetwood Mac's most combustible couple - so impressed Mick Fleetwood. [Nov 2025, p.96]

It signals the charged completion of a circuit, the final bridging of a gap between conductors. [Aug 2012, p.91]

Baroness's second full-length somehow tops their powerhouse debut for riffs, songwriting and cohesiveness. [Feb 2010, p. 101]

With Callahan's romantic certainty comes rare writerly confidence: several tunes bask in this miraculous feeling. ... Outright classic. [Nov 2022, p.86]

Immediately and huantingly familiar, it circumvents pastiche courtesy of a mischievous cut'n'paste aesthetic. [Feb 2008, p.108]

This is manna for hip hop fans starved of basic but ballistic beats-and-breaks fare in an increasingly litigious age. [May 2004, p.102]

Like the original, Twin Fantasy 2017 transports us to a unique and fully formed world, where this time the physical geography is still more affecting. [Mar 2018, p.96]