The Glass Bead Game sees him broadening his palette to even greater effect. [Aug 2009, p.96]

Indelible, compulsive, flecked with genuine brillance throughout, it's as good as any of the acknowledged clasics from the Clan's '93-96 peak. [Nov 2009, p.95]

Akron/Family's seventh album proffers 10 diversely arranged slabs of leftfield clamour, all of them shot through with a contrasting pop-classicist melodic sensibility. [May 2013, p.90]

Surprisingly much more accessible than the idea first sounds. [May 2003, p.106]

Stubborn Persistent Illusions may be their best yet. [Aug 2017, p.96]

It's the chiming guitars of album centerpiece, A Swallow In The Sun, that really underlines a sense that The Cautionary Tales Of... operates in the same ballpark as Sea Change--Beck's 2002 work of staggering heartbreak. [May 2014, p.91]

Gedge's throaty warble remains his band's only real constant, but this is a rollercoaster ripe for re-evaluation. [Oct 2025, p.97]

Three years ago, Africa For Africa felt like a career highlight: this isn't far behind. [Aug 2013, p.96]

Loma are quite capable of drawing listeners in with their own perspective. [Dec 2020, p.86]

All the components that make the Arcade Fire such a gripping live proposition remain intact on this full-length debut. [Apr 2005, p.96]

Its class is unmistakable, surpassing even the low-slung gait of 1995's previous career milestone Smokers delight. [Dec 2021, p.89]

Nepenthe finds Julianna Barwick's already established wash of angel tones and free-floating radiance newly influenced by the breathtaking, often alien wonders of her host country. [Sep 2013, p.90]

The album's dozen essays zigzag with the same unpredictability as Veirs's vertiginous melody lines, everything united by her compellingly aerated vocal tone and Tucker Martine's deep focus production. [Sep 2013, p.88]

Donaldson keeps refining what is essentially one song. ... Fortunately, Donaldson's undeniable homage is exquisitely on the nose, one comforting swoon after another. [Mar 2022, p.86]

An album that opens full of tension, riot and discord--before the acoustic gospel of Peaceful Dream leads into strong pleas for universal love and understand and quests for personal redemption. [Dec 2017, p.94]

There's not a bad song here but, more to the point, Fogerty Sr's voice and guitar sound as potent and commanding as ever. [Jan 2021, p.88]

It's inspired genre-hopping and relentless invention resulting in a substantial and brilliantly sung career-best. [Nov 2012, p.85]

Lengthy spoken-word soliloquys (in German), sonic paintings of air raids and oracular avant-classical minimalism sit alongside more familiar Laibach Strum und Drang - the group's disorienting way with reframing materials makes for an unnerving experience full with violence, trauma and insight. [May 2022, p.86]

Soft-focus memories echo through all 88 minutes. [Dec 2012, p.89]

His overall grasp of what he is doing has never been surer. [Dec 2014, p.93]

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

Here are 13 reasons why we don't need another Pixies record. [Apr 2008, p.101]

Clark and Squarepusher's more radical deconstructions expose deeper enigmas at play in GGP's source material. [Jul 2021, p.90]

An eerily rootless modern drift through the electronic depths of Tarkovsky's Zone. [Feb 2015, p.96]

An intriguing LP that balances inner existential turmoil with external grace. [Mar 2014, p.96]

Tune out the background media noise and immerse yourself. [Mar 2012, p.94]

Yellow scatterguns through P-Funk, Alice Coltrane, gospel, Sun-Ra, electric-era Miles Davis and '70s jazz-fusion with glee. [Aug 2021, p.85]

So rich is their vocabulary of subtly shifting textures ad discreet melodies that lazy ambient cliche or factory setting keyboard predictability are entirely eschewed. [Jul 2017, p.92]

The resulting sound is high-contrast, with graceful melodic resolutions, slippery pitch-bends and experiments with form. Curios that hit at once, but can also withstand lengthy unravelling. [Mar 2024, p.91]

It's rocky Americana: swaggering and infuriatingly satisfying. [Apr 2011, p.97]

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

It's the insular intimacy of Korkejian's songs, like Zephyrs whispered in your ear, that make this debut such a triumph. [Aug 2017, p.95]

The wild times end on a poignant, giddy high with Parful - a house-y banger raving about everyday hedonism transcending sectarian violence - an irresistible distillation of Kneecap's peacetime party music. [Jul 2024, p.94]

Savour John Darnielle singing. [Dec 2020, p.86]

It wouldn't be a Ray Wylie album without an anthem and the title track is a good one. [Nov 2017, p.97]

The guitarist has made the best and most honest of his outside raids, freshening his classicism with a hard stare at payback and mortality. [Oct 2015, p.91]

Except for hitting the odd unfamiliar note, as on an exquisitely lap-steel and fingerpicked Galveston, the singer's vocals sound unchanged, still keening and honey-pure. [Aug 2013, p.89]

The album’s overriding mood is captured by the title track’s gospel choir sample: “daylight, sunshine, dance, embrace.” [Aug 2024, p.82]

Though shorter and lighter than 2018’s magnificent Dirty Computer, it delivers its full measure of pleasure. Doing just what it says on the tin, a 21st century pop peak. [Sep 2023, p.89]

A relatively orthodox live recording. [Dec 2014, p.92]

Johannsson's austere musical settings continue to conjure up a world in which the old trade union slogans which give these pieces their titles .. are not so much throwbacks to a lost ideal of altruism, as mantras that we all might still live by. [Aug. 2011, p. 93]

The diversity and quality of his songwriting should be even harder to ignore on this second. [Dec 2013, p.84]

This assiduously produced package is a thrilling summary of Sigur Ros, the first 14 years. [Dec. 2011 pg. 95]

Ne So is a thing of delicacy, it's a silky, immersive grooves and intertwined guitars weaving a subtly seductive canvas against which Traore's smoky vocals, often couched in close harmonies, waft. [Apr 2016, p.92]

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]

This album is barefaced '90s revivalism. [Mar 2012, p.97]

Stott again collaborates with opera singer Alison Skidmore on decaying digital laments, warped twilight anthems and claustrophobic club bangers; stuttering songs of mourning for 21st century club culture. [Jul 2016, p.93]

A boldly fresh album that veers between lithe wit, sinister landscapes, big choruses and coolly adventurous instrumental arrangements. [Jul 2018, p.90]

What could of been a sedentary stopgap has become an heroic attestation to the thrillls of music fandom. [Apr 2010, p.104]

Their orchestral meditations on aging are convincing and beautiful. [Jun 2011, p.96]

Immensely satisfying. [Jul 2013, p.92]

More robust moments provide the necessary shift but, with all its delicate finesse, Forgetting The Present largely prefers to take its oblivion lying down. [Aug 2014, p.86]

An hour of absorbing rhythmic transport, The Visitor fully satisfies the brief. [Aug 2013, p.84]

Highlights a voracious creative appetite and their relationship's enduring strength. [Dec 2020, p.87]

Cruel, sexy and offhand by turns. [Jun 2004, p.114]

A glistening hybrid. [Dec 2020, p.87]

Gregg's vocal technique was remarkably intact despite his illness, as was his trademark ability to convey love, honesty, anguish. [Nov 2017, p.97]

The edges of 2019's Candy Colored Doom have sharpened: her voice and guitar sheer off into abrasion on Metal Bird. [Feb 2022, p.85]

A reverberant, high-octane treatise on the transcendent power of love and loud music. [Dec 2018, p.94]

Mehldau takes the listener on a memorable musical journey. [May 2022, p.92]

Crudely put, it is the sequel to Love And Theft, which is to say that a great deal of it is split between 12-bar treatises about love and lust and croonsome ballads about much the same themes.... That said, it is not quite as sharply focused as that record. [Oct 2006, p.94]

These are certainly boss songs – Easter Lily feels like the strongest collection of material U2 have mustered in at least 20 years.

A thrilling 90-minute swansong. [Oct 2023, p.93]

Less electronic in feel than its predecessor, this is music on a truly human scale in terms of its inspiration, delivery and undeniable emotional punch. [Mar 2019, p.97]

She delivers intelligence and sensuality like she never saw a line between them. [Mar 2016, p.98]

It's funny, touching, thoughtful, more than a little weird....and rather wonderful. [Feb 2013, p.89]

Imbued with harmonies, melody and some hard-edged dynamics that draw on Led Zeppelin, this is what the pastoral Pink Floyd of 1971 might have done next. [Apr 2016, p.91]

Challenging it may be at points, but absorbing and complex too. [Dec 2013, p.94]

His own voice is a marvel too, heartfelt and luminous. [Apr 2016, p.96]

Kids In The Streets sounds joyous, reflective, nostalgic and even grateful in places, with an upbeat swagger that comes from knowing you're making the album of your life. [Jul 2017, p.89]

Ignoring the meek opener Looking For A Fight and any rote lyrics, the instantly likable Outta My Mind and Dead in Your Head are a master class in girl group jangle pop. [May 2013, p.95]

This cool and stylish record should make the jazz best-of-year lists. [Apr 2024, p.90]

A sometimes disturbing, but often breathtakingly lovely record. [Oct 2002, p.98]

Titles like Telekinetoscopes and After The Visions are as gripping as the levitating grooves and flickering pulses that accompany them. [Jan 2023, p.93]

Bleach sounds liked a valiant manifesto for something new that succeeded beyond anyone's wildest nightmare. [Dec 2009, p.112]

This is spare, emotionally charged piano music which always errs toward the melodic side of melancholy. [Mar 2010, p.99]

The Magic Place is her most fully involved album, suffused with the warmth of fond memories and a deep, dream-like resonance. [Jun 2011, p.96]

A follow-up that finds the pure-toned Montreal-based singer painting with a wider palette, thanks to backing from pianist Felix Fox-Pappas and Toronto jazzers BADBADNOTGOOD. [Mar 2023, p.89]

In conception and execution, Concrete And Gold stands as Foo Fighters' most beguiling record to date. [Oct 2017, p.88]

Beautifully skewed gospel-folk songs. [Aug 2004, p.101]

clipping.'s finest refinement yet of their abrasive horror-rap. [Dec 2020, p.87]

L.A. Witch is brief, ultra-basic, not particularly varied and all the better for it. [Nov 2017, p.97]

An unpretentious euphoric debut. [Sep 2013, p.95]

Newbies Jet Pac Boomerang and Went To A Party zing with his best, quality control being the soul of wit. [Oct 2024, p.88]

Reggae/dub comes no more vital, nor far-sighted, in 2019. [Jan 2020, p.85]

This is exciting, audacious work from a band yet again on the edge of a new future. [Oct 2013, p.84]

Mind-expanding stuff. [May 2017, p.106]

Frazey Ford undeniably models here new album on those delicate masterpieces [Ann Peebles' I Can't Stand The Rain and Al Green Is Love], but it really works. [Dec 2014, p.90]

These are big themes that provoke corresponding emotions. [May 2021, p.87]

Capture Jackson at his very best. ... These eight songs are both questing and healing. [Jul 2022, p.89]

The delightful, multi-mood Commontime is just shy of an hour, opens things out and is more personal [than 2012's Plumb]. This might be the sound of maturing. [Mar 2016, p.96]

Wintry, ethereal and strangely bewitching, it feels both ancient and modern, rooted in the raw Appalachian landscape of Leigh's childhood and the contemporary language of confessional memoir. [Apr 2016, p.91]

Patina exists on an arc where grunge, the rave era, Britpop et al never occurred. What would have happened if the second half of the '80s had defined much of what came next? Tallies provide the answer - these nine tracks are that good. [Sep 2022, p.94]

Death, love, the ghosts they leave behind: these are grand themes, and Hegarty channels their spirit with magical grace. [Nov. 2010, p. 100]

Funny, bleak, cathartic and brave, with a winning redemption arc, in all but design Weirdo is a blues album - transforming unbearable pain into deeply affecting, original art. [Jun 2025, p.86]

A relentless, unstoppable beast of screeching, pounding ascendancy. [Mar 2012, p.97]

Act Surprised's high yield of killer songs hardly suffers for its absence of oddball filler. [Jun 2019, p.90]

His quiet, reasoning delivery works beautifully, and reminds one of the singer's instinctive ability to transform a song. [May 2013, p.91]