Might well be their strongest, most brain-mulching statement to date. [Aug. 2011, p. 106]

After 33 years of intuitive playing together they are able to show you their close-up sculpted technique, as if revealing their workings, and then do something so transcendent, so miraculous, that it causes you to believe in magic once again. [May 2020, p.90]

These 10 acoustic pieces hold a certain stillness within the variety of tempos, instruments and inspirations. [Apr 2016, p.89]

The Watsons' approach is softer, and more affecting, than wry, tack-sharp Lewis. [Aug 2008, p.114]

Times feels like a valedictory vista - across time, money, sex and space travel. [May 2025, p.91]

Wyatt has a knack of making happy song sound melancholic, but conversely brings some wry levity to the lovelorn ennui of jazz standard. [Nov 2001, p.103]

Koenig is a formidable lyricist, and behind the music's occasional larkiness lies a record of high seriousness. [Jun 2019, p.88]

Haunting, unsettling hybrid. [Jul 2020, p.83]

Delivering a deliciously unsettling and artful listening experience. [Sep 2021, p.83]

It is an easy album to like. [Apr 2012, p.85]

With a gift for creating memorable melodies allied with a strong storytelling narrative, he comes across like a sophisticated jazz version of Bill Withers. [Apr 2012, p.94]

Polar Bear remain gratifyingly dislocated from the mainstream. [Apr 2014, p.91]

Their albums from this period were a little low on magic, but this is the real deal, an organic sound full of strange, shadowy moods and adventurous and melodic playing. [Nov 2022, p.104]

He's boosted by a heart-and-soul R&B ensemble, but every hard-earned wrinkle on that still fierce visage remains in working order. [May 2013, p.90]

Kane, like his Puppets partner, is fast becoming one of Britain;s landmark composers. [Jun 2011, p.102]

There's no mistaking this advent of a genuine original, the woozy, whacked-out linguistic precision of A Sufi And A Killer resisiting all efforts at summary. [Apr 2010, p.105]

The aural palette is as wide as ever... but in the service of songs that might be sung on the morning train, under stars on a moonless night or even in the bath. [Apr 2002, p.116]

The Bravest Man impresses on a steadily rising graph as Womack's soul-soaked voice humanises the machinery in ways rarely heard these days. [Jul 2012, p.84]

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]

Pure class. [Jun 2012, p.92]

With the excellent Roots backing her, she recasts many of the dominant black music sounds of 30 or so years ago on a set of songs which address concerns that are clearly in the here-and-now. [Aug 2012, p.92]

This is miffed and exemplary metal. [Jul 2003, p.108]

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

To dismiss Heroes to Zeroes as a mere exercise in rock homage underestimates The Beta Band's charm. [Apr 2004, p.102]

If Not Now... goes a long way to pinpointing just why Marling, Ryan Adams and Ray LaMontagne, among others, keep calling on his services as both musician and producer. [Mar 2013, p.96]

Reflective but brimming with aching melody. [Nov 2016, p.88]

This darker edge lends substance to some of Vile's best songs to date. [Oct 2015, p.94]

You have to go back to Costello, The Beat or Smiths to find a catalogue simultaneously as hummable and as disturbing as McCabe's. [May 2006, p.102]

This handsome 3-CD box contains both concerts in their entirety for the first time. [Jan 2017, p.104]

A weave of sublimely lysergic folk-pop. [Feb 2017, p.99]

The music is as sharply observed as the writing. [May 2026, p.84]

It's conceived, written and designed for the loud appreciation of sweat-drenched pill-poppers at a 'nitespot' nowhere near you. And as such, it succeeds in magnificently silly style. [Feb 2007, p.100]

Well-crafted and unfussy. [Sep 2023, p.92]

Any band that can record something as impressive as the gently swelling Radiation deserves to be taken on their own merits. Even Elbow may have to doff their hats this time. [Sep 2010, p.106]

Having grown in style and confidence with each album and displayed a flair for charting life's ever-changing weather patterns, here they do so with real, deeply-lived insight and dazzling pop expertise. [May 2021, p.82]

A second album that's brimming with pop hooks and instantly memorable choruses. [Apr 2018, p.96]

Clever and cool, Season High is a career high. [Jun 2017, p.90]

He's walking away on style, delivering a collection of distinctive songs. [Nov 2009, p.97]

Fourteen tracks long, The Road... is almost overwhelming, like overdosing on chocolate truffles, but even after all this time, Philippe's compositions are only getting stronger. [Jun 2025, p.89]

This is a rariety--bright, soulful and (yes) clever pop. [Mar 2009, p.114]

Frank and redemptive, it's a journey of small Texas towns and wide open spaces. [Nov 2022, p.89]

It's a seductive lesson in understated beauty. [Apr 2012, p.86]

While its parent album's themes of grief, ageing and mortality don't naturally transfer themselves to the dancefloor, it's often that juxtaposition that makes these reworkings so effective. [Jul 2024, p.78]

If midlife crisis haunts the 40-year-old Skinner, encroaching mortality is re-energised by juniors like neo-soul sister Greentea Peng's soporific vibrations on I Wish You Loved You As Much As You Love Him. [Aug 2020, p.93]

An unshamedly fun album. [Sep 2009, p.104]

As a triple record, there are tracks that are less necessary than others, but remarkably it all flows as a cohesive whole, and never loses the listener's attention. [Nov 2025, p.80]

A third album bursting with intense energy and sparkling invention. [Nov 2025, p.85]

Whether it improves on 2010's First Four EPs compilation is debateable. But as Morris would doubtless observe, 'progress' is but a bourgeois vanity. [Jul 2012, p.85]

Short but definitely sweet. [Aug 2024, p.94]

This is a fine record, a real grower, but it also sees a group comfortably adrift. [Sep 2005, p.89]

Another mesmerising, profound, excellent record. [Jul 2023 p.86]

It's Holmes who provides the spark throughout Cypress Grove. [Feb 2020, p.94]

A short, dynamic return to form is similarly earwrenching. [Nov 2012, p.95]

Despite the lulls, the resistance to ending songs, Reflektor lets Arcade Fire shed expectations along with a skin, an act of rejuvenation few at their level manage with conviction. [Nov 2013, p.82]

It's easily Body Count's finest hour. [Jan 2025, p.82]

The songs on Enter Now Brightness, however, suggest no dulling of Reid’s songwriting senses, just an acute desire to keep moving closer to seeing the light. [Mar 2025, p.85]

This act of restoration convinces as a good Tony Joe White album that could have been plucked from anywhere during his career. [Jun 2021, p.80]

It's a generous and potent fix of Pollard eccentricity. [Apr 2018, p.94]

Buoyed with emotional heft and supernova guitar riffs, their second album is wired around a maturing songcraft and the studio savvy of grunge producer Butch Vig. [Aug 2008, p.112]

Against this highly contemporary but ever-wacko sonic backdrop, the Upsetter orates magisterially. [Sep 2008, p.98]

Joan Wasser's second covers set finds romance in Prince's lust-blind Kiss and innocence in the Strokes' Under Control. [Jul 2020, p.88]

A lugubrious but fresh, genre-bending take on modern club music. [Nov 2021, p.91]

A New York studio may not be the ideal place to summon up the atmosphere of the Wild West, but these desperadoes on Barry Adamson's lable make a pretty good fist of it. [Dec 2009, p.101]

The delivery is relentless. [Jun 2014, p.86]

[A] fine and discerningly lean album. [Sep 2016, p.93]

Their anarchic spirit is captured over the original LP's 11 tracks. [Sep 2015, p.92]

In this filmic offering, all commentators observe our crumbling landscape. .... On the dark, drum-lead chant Baby Roe, DiFranco sounds like Billie Holiday as she upbraids the overturners of Roe v Wade (“We’re so wigged out/Yeah, we’re so devout”), before pleading for “the path of least suffering”. [Aug 2024, p.89]

Though no Pet Sound, this album, at its best so wistfully reliving out golden yesterdays, ranks up there with Today! [Aug 2012, p.92]

A colourful, catchy and quietly impassioned record. [Oct 2016, p.90]

[A] gloriously sensual record. [Sep 2015, p.93]

The new approach... lets them explore their lyrical side. [Sep 2005, p.94]

Confident and expansive, yet intimate and subtle, Bonny Doon are in a good place here. [Aug 2023, p.81]

A set glorying in its sensual exoticism. [Jan 2007, p.102]

This pared-back sonic trip sings with freshness and immediacy. [Sep 2023, p.89]

Visitations may just be their finest half-hour. [Dec 2006, p.108]

Stylistic touchstones veer toward the William Blake's 7 weird of Julia Holter, Henry Cow and Julie Tippetts' prog-jazz outlier Sunset Glow. Incomprehensible/irresistible. [Sep 2023, p.87]

The strangely beautiful bounty of Mogadisco reveals more telling detail with each listen. [Feb 2020, p.103]

The combination of Schultz's desperately appealing voice and Fraites's lonesome but poppy piano still hits hard. They're still doing things right. [Mar 2025, p.88]

Impressively, he makes it all his own--at times it feels like the songs might have been written by, or for, him. [June 2008, p.115]

It exudes an organic, direct feel from which it gains its considerable charm. [Feb 2008, p.112]

These 10 compact songs work both as intimate affirmation of Jurado's current brilliance and a hushed elegy for his too-soon-departed friend. [Jun 2019, p.89]

A gloriously nuanced embellishment of the band's timeless virtue. [Apr 2015, p.91]

Those inimitable Laibach humours look set to endure. [Apr 2014, p.92]

Despite such flamboyant touches, the songs here are more caustic than camp. [Oct 2003, p.120]

Weiss weaves his way through a songbook that encompasses olde-tyme rock, jazz, R&B and Cajun sounds. [Jun 2014, p.90]

[A] polished second set by the Swedish '70s-inspired blues-psych outfit. [Sep 2016, p.99]

It's a noticeably urban record, an irritated rebuttal to the notion that dance music is dead. [Jun 2005, p.98]

Vibrant, vividly colourful and high spirited. [Jan 2006, p.146]

Louis Carnell crafts grime's own I Hear A New World. [Dec 2015, p.91]

Yet if neurosis, despair and paranoia remain his materials, here he uses them well. In as impressive voice as ever been. [Apr 2026, p.84]

Rich, understated and resonant. [Feb 2017, p.97]

It's hard to imagine a record more original or full of life, from any artist of any age, emerging this year. It's that damn good. [Nov 2007, p.91]

The quality dips and pitches, occasionally stuck at third on the bill at the Bill And Gate. There are tiny revelations too. [Mar 2016, p.104]

Kushal Gaya's vocal hooks bristle with political fury as polyrhythms jostle with George Crowley and Pete Wareham's brass riffs. [May 2020, p.95]

She gives each song an unforced intimacy. [Feb 2009, p.115]

Brainy, jazzy, prescient. [Aug 2021, p.88]

A brave, stand-alone release that lays her talent bare, it's a beautiful unreal entrancement you'll find hard to stop listening to again and again. [Dec 2023, p.91]

It's not much different (from their first album), and that's no bad thing with Holly Golightly and Lawyer Dave's self-produced duets recalling Leadbelly and Jimmy Reed, as well as the gospel recordings of Loretta Lynn and Nancy & Lee. [Nov 2008, p.109]