An album like this could be relevant at any time, really, but it takes the past couple of years to make it quite this livid. [Oct 2018, p.91]

The Dubliner's fourth album of original material is his most varied sonically, yet is perversely his least fussy, happy to let a simple melody be carried by his distinctively sweet, slightly prim diction. [Oct 2018, p.84]

Emanon is unequivocally a visual treat but in purely musical terms, it's nothing less than stunningly breathtaking. [Oct 2018, p.88]

Their latest warms the electronic pot with quirky pastoralism--brass, melodica, clattering-teacup percussion and tangible emotional warmth. [Oct 2018, p.94]

While never the greatest singer, Escovedo's lyrics more than compensate. [Oct 2018, p.91]

The Goon Sax have created a glorious pop album that perfectly captures those awkward confusions on the road to adulthood. [Oct 2018, p.90]

Almost flawless record. ... It alights on an entirely new air of depth and fascination, in keeping with its author's age and experience. [Oct 2018, p.85]

This London quartet's third LP avoids indie cliche, taking various routes to achieve electro-pop lift-off. [Oct 2018, p.94]

Kravitz's stylistic schizophrenia remains on Raise Vibration, whether in the early-80s electro-beats of Who Really Are The Monsters? or the What's Going On moves of It's enough. [Oct 2018, p.87]

Coates uses an eccentric blend of rich strings and muffled hardcore rhythms that are seductive, haunting and deliciously weird. [Oct 2018, p.87]

While the playful spirit and precise progressions of his previous albums linger, it's demonstrably darker entries that capture Gonzales's disarming craftsmanship best. [Oct 2018, p.91]

Its dense analogue assault envelopes you like a pea-souper. [Oct 2018, p.87]

It's more varied and interesting: angular, Cure-guitar shapes, echoing shapes. [Oct 2018, p.94]

He's still a whiz with a tart lyrical couplet, too. [Oct 2018, p.94]

Overall, Love, Loss, And Auto-Tuned is a deviant masterpiece. [Oct 2018, p.92]

Kingdoms In Colour is a bright, pan-global musical jaunt delivered as a glitter cannon explosion. [Oct 2018, p.87]

Driven along by a renewed sense of urgency and purpose, this may be Richard Thompson's most creative album in decades. [Oct 2018, p.92]

Monsters Exist feels like a stadium rave washing machine, stuck on infinite cycle. [Oct 2018, p.88]

Glenn Jones's repeated trips to the well of John Fahey's American Primitive legacy seem to yield even more refreshing results. [Sep 2018, p.90]

His commitment is palpable, the sequencing deft, and whole wilfully hit-free bombast-fest commendable, if scarcely palatable to anyone apart fro card-carrying Suede-heads. [Oct 2018, p.93]

Her lyrics draw you in, as she explores the chemistry of attraction on the title track to an appropriately sexy descending chord sequence, while a fly-by-night lover gets his comeuppance on Easy Street. [Oct 2018, p.84]

Material arcane yet relevant, as well as freshly minted. [Oct 2018, p.90]

Some of the vocal processing, though pushed to the extreme, will be a little familiar to Bon Iver fans/sceptics. Persevere, though, and yet more classic Low songs emerge from the post-apocalyptic murk. [Oct 2018, p.87]

Another inspirational triumph over adversity. [Oct 2018, p.90]

Every song puts a tap in your toe, a worm in your ear and a smile on your face. [Oct 2018, p.85]

Dissolution doesn't break character, but there's a sharper focus to the writing--and more sweeping melodies. [Sep 2018, p.88]

Every song is arranged beautiful but it feels like an accomplished assemblage rather than a living, breathing whole. [Oct 2018, p.85]

A soaring, feverish conflagration of sense and sensuality. [Sep 2018, p.90]

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

It's a tense, grace and often euphoric listening experience that simultaneously lacks the grit, drama and disquiet of their finest work. [Oct 2018, p.91]

A psychedelic soft rock treat that peaks with the uncanny, ethereal chord-changes of the sleep-walking Meet Me in The Air, but Poignancy, tunefulness and feeling abound throughout. [Sep 2018, p.94]

Negro Swan is more consolidation than the ext great leap forwards. [Oct 2018, p.91]

There's more to the differences between the two versions, however, than a valve amp versus the original's solid state, with over 30 years of musicianship and experience bringing the songs up to modern speed. [Sep 2018, p.92]

Songs feel shy of messing with the familiar. [Sep 2018, p.94]

Performance is White Denim's most produced album, thickly textured with brass, keyboards and studio atmospheres. Play it loud, though, and you easily imagine the euphoria at the bar after every track. [Sep 2018, p.84]

Beautiful songs studded with dissonant eruptions of noise. [Oct 2018, p.94]

A keeper. ... This is still a terrific entry point into a band who repay obsession. [Oct 2018, p.87]

It hangs together and, indeed, convincingly documents fragmentation of the individual. [Sep 2018, p.94]

There are nods to Scissor Sisters with some honky-tonk disco and references to the demi-monde. But there are also extraordinary tracks of looped beats and grainy heartbreak. [Oct 2018, p.84]

The intervening nine songs jump between genres with varied success, with a fee whimsical tracks sticking out like sore thumbs. [Oct 2018, p.88]

It works as a powerful artistic statement. [Oct 2018, p.88]

This is taut, Blondie-cool guitar-pop with a finger on the self-destruct tab. [Oct 2018, p.90]

At its core, this is pop music of a rare assurance. [Oct 2018, p.91]

Go To School is a misstep--the sound of talented young musicians over-reaching to the point of unlistenability. [Oct 2018, p.93]

Another strong set. [Oct 2018, p.94]

At Weddings quickly coalesces into an utterly compelling presence. [Sep 2018, p.88]

A Broke Moon Rises sheds a gentle but persistent light in the darkness. [Sep 2018, p.86]

It's always good when, after 30 years as a music critic, the hairs on your arms stand on end. [Sep 2018, p.89]

Slightly mannered vocals; odd but good. [Sep 2018, p.96]

Coup De Grace may not radically change skeptics' perception of Kane as Turner's lesser-half. ... But dig deeper and you'll find Kane's finest work so far. [Sep 2018, p.86]

A sweet, herbal fug hanging over proceedings, Zebra joins the dots between blissed-out Balearica, trippy kosmische, Eastern and Afro vibes and spacey jazz. [Sep 2018, p.91]

Younge's Axelrodish take on orchestral soul dominates. [Sep 2018, p.96]

They know their limits, and while they are prepared to test them, gently, Marauder isn't in the market for revelation. With songs this subtle and steely, though, reinforcement is good enough. [Sep 2018, p.87]

Both parties in this collaboration have been firing off great records at will lately: here's another. [Sep 2018, p.88]

If at times things veer towards needy, the sum of the set is saved by how real it all feels. [Sep 2018, p.92]

A notably mature-sounding record full of gnarly guitars, scrunchy Hammond organ and tuneful innocence lost. [Jun 2018, p.92]

Elaborate, sometimes sneakily poignant tunes. [Aug 2018, p.93]

11 songs thematically linked by a search for realty in an increasingly virtual world. [Sep 2018, p.90]

The follow-up has richer, dreamier contours, but the mood is gaunter. [Sep 2018, p.94]

Occasionally, the album threatens to go Spinal Tap-ish. ... But when Dwyer steeps the prog in garage frenzy, the pot boils. [Sep 2018, p.92]

These songs are solid. [Sep 2018, p.90]

There's an agreeable robustness to proceedings. [Sep 2018, p.91]

Minimal beat-logic and a new-age-ish ability to work below pop's usual emotional horizons sets them apart. [Sep 2018, p.96]

If there's a sense that the material has yet to coalesce to its strongest and most consistent point, there's much that bodes well for High Water II, due in 2019. [Sep 2018, p.86]

What follows is like an eccentric, audacious musical collage that somehow hangs together. [Sep 2018, p.93]

We should've seen this one coming. And still it's a gut punch. [Sep 2018, p.89]

Never quite hits that million-streaming sweet spot. [Sep 2018, p.86]

Tennessee roots rockers ease off the barroom brawl piano blues for a more reflective, more modern sound. [Sep 2018, p.96]

Nau's adept handle on lachrymose soft-rock, meanwhile means even when treading water, the album charms with its soft-focus ambience. [Sep 21018, p.90]

The folk comes juxtaposed with industrial creaks and eastern drones, the virtuosity tempered with scrabbling wildness. [Sep 2018, p.96]

Disc four's unreleased assortment holds little for Wobble-Levene obsessives. More noteworthy: a disturbingly atonal Banging The Door, two abstract thumpathons from '81-83's "lost" fourth album, some speculative Album demos, and a n instrumental stab at Led Zep's Kashmir. [Aug 2018, p.102]

Brilliant throughout. better than the official Stage with an art-rocking sound he never quite bettered. ... An essential purchase for Bowie fans. [Aug 2018, p.102]

The blend of lushness and rusticity is beguiling. ... Still, for all its accomplished loveliness, there's also a suggestion that Nash's sense of wonder is a little less wild eyed than it once was. [Sep 2018, p.89]

The fractured electronics of his homespun-sounding dispatches give way to freewheeling keys that smack lightly of Thelonious Monk, Herbie Hancock and Bill Evans. [Sep 2018, p.91]

It proceeds funereally, as if in the suspended animation of a nocturnal hallucination, like sleepwalking through a dark and empty airport, but also right there in the room as Wave Pics' on-the-fly magic unfolds. [Sep 2018, p.93]

Louris and company have created a soothing balm for overly neurotic and trying times. [Sep 2018, p.89]

With the less auspicious intrusions of Petra Haden's '80s rock emoting, and Meyer's cliched whiskey-waffle, it's harder to discern where Williamson's heart lies. [Sep 2018, p.88]

With its shuffling drums and strong tune, Microclimate has a song-like feel, while the title track is very different in mood as it gently pulses with restless rhythmic tics and a melancholic, meandering keyboard line. [Sep 2018, p.93]

In its early stages, Joy feels not at all slight, dashed-off or inferior, launching out on a series of acoustic-rattling, inescapably Syd-Barrett-esque pop tunes whose wonky brevity is a virtue. [Sep 2018, p.93]

A more structured back to basics approach really works for them. [Sep 2018, p.94]

A major step up, until Nas fluffs the rhyme ball spouting credulity-testing conspiracies. [Sep 2018, p.96]

Anderson's playing is simultaneously muscular and relaxed, defiant and heartfelt, a new nomadic American music for her own troubled times. [Jul 2018, p.91]

For all her professed preference for slower, gothically-inclined blues, it's old-time rippers like Sometimes There's Blood or land speed banjo record attempt, Oh, Command Me Lord!, where she really excels--and, critically, excites.[Aug 2018, p.88]

Yet for all the invention and undeniably impressive groove control, there are lulls when their meditative update of '70s fusion stars Lonnie Liston Smith, Herbie Hancock and Roy Ayers slicks into something wallpapery, doodly and unselfconsciously by-numbers. [Aug 2018, p.95]

The result is a dreamlike state of unease and wonder, in which you don't know where you are, or what's coming next. [Aug 2018, p.94]

They sound in rude health to me. [Aug 2018, p.96]

It's a judicious match-up. [Jun 2018, p.96]

Hyper-tense, but worth it. [Aug 2018, p.91]

An album of swooning, soft-lens electronica that is firmly of the Eno/Aphex Twin lineage. [Jul 2018, p.95]

Longstreth still doesn't make it easy on the listener with his frenetic arrangements. But, this time around, the sense of plainly expressed emotions is strong. [Aug 2018, p.91]

[The Trinity Session was] An alt-folk classic--and this might be one too. [Aug 2018, p.93]

Best consumed in small doses. [Aug 2018, p.91]

Sonically rich and lyrically intense. [Aug 2018, p.94]

Sculptor yields centre-stage to Randell's haiku-like celebrations of human spirit and suburban transcendence. [Aug 2018, p.94]

It's hardly news that soft rock and heartache go hand in hand, but Johansing's version is particularly seductive. [Aug 2018, p.89]

Seemingly ramshackle songs with deceptively shrewd arrangements, like the woozy, Beta Band-ish Paper. [Aug 2018, p.96]

A first album since 2006 reflects interim activities. [Aug 2018, p96]

The result is a meditative set full pf surprises, and songs that haunt. [Aug 2018, p.90]