Though some Lemon Twigs fans might miss Michael's edgier, thornier songwriting, big bro's serial melodicism and multi-instrumentalist nous across everything from penny whistle to cello slays. [Apr 2025, p.80]

Coming Home has a timeless quality. [Jul 2015, p.87]

[An] engrossing paean to wrestling's heyday.[Dec. 2011, p.93]

Wabi-Sabi is as becalmed and warm as it's wracked and haunted. [Feb 2016, p.94]

Kurt Vile's slacker star continues to rise on Bottle It In. [Nov 2018, p.89]

An epic ambition that bolster Nona Marie Levine's lightly burnished vocals. [Nov 2012, p.96]

10 well-crafted, progressive rock tracks that transcend schlock-rock trappings. [Oct 2015, p.98]

For all their assiduous construction and heartfelt subject matter, Sheff's songs struggle to match the abundant hook-line quotient of his youthful influences and inspiration. [Nov 2013, p.88]

Another damn good album from the Texan, as convincing on songs of country heartache as on roadhouse swagger. [Aug. 2011, p. 97]

For every infectious pop song, there's a lengthy, piano-and-synth-based epic, and everywhere a lust for life. [Oct 2012, p.83]

Moving from deliciously tense cop-show rhythms to echoing guitar feedback and pure-signal electronic buzz. [Jan 2013, p.98]

Hiatt sounds throughout as if gargling a box of frogs in some eternal late-night New Orleans backroom. And it's glorious. [Aug 2014, p.90]

It's an album of soothing '80s-style motorik synth-pop given just enough bite from contemporary dance music to avoid becoming pastiche. [Mar 2015, p.97]

Hackney Diamonds feels like a self-aware, historically mindful party, Jagger’s remarkable vocal thrust utterly unimpaired.

Homme has gone on to make sexier records, but for sheer creepy sensuality QOTSA is the definitive article. [Apr 2011, p.112]

Their sixth album shows them shaping the grim thoughts of The Animals and The Island into poised, potent songs. [Mar 2019, p.96]

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

Impressive, beautifully poised stuff. [Jun 2014, p.93]

Pleasing, odd. [Apr 2015, p.98]

Joe Henry's production is spot on, giving Crowell's vocals ample breathing room while acknowledging his excellent support team. [Oct 2008, p.106]

To Believe doesn't rush along the cutting edge, but after 12 years absent, it hits this particular spot in time and space: sombre, tense, watchful, looking for calm, but gathering storms. [Apr 2019, p.92]

Asgeir's voice is the first thing that grabs you. [Feb 2014, p.91]

Payseur's vocals might still sound diaphanous, his lyrics still concerned with small moments of sadness and pleasure, but there is now a structured professionalism here that will delight and confound others. [Jul 2023, p.82]

Sisterworld's art-pop is perhaps more accessible than much of Liars' discography, but it's a sound this most restless group will likely tire of long before you do. [Mar 2010, p.98]

Slowing down, but in no need of the hard shoulder. [March 2011, p. 97]

Lanegan brings dependable authenticity to these savvy pop songs; dire admonitions, but also an abundance of swagger and fun. [Nov 2019, p.94]

Notwithstanding the occasional banjo and flute intrusion, in essence this remains flamboyant, '60s-tinged guitar pop, forever poised equidistant between accessibility and inscrutability. [Apr 2015, p.93]

He's made a dramatic leap between first and second album as profound and unexpected as that of John Grant. [Feb 2014, p.96]

Treacherous lapses notwithstanding, there's enough vim and invention here to suggest that Foals may yet prove themselves champion thoroughbreds. [June 2010, p. 96]

Impermanence resonates like a lullaby, or a prayer. [Mar 2017, p.90]

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]

Regardless of language, it’s substantive synth-pop with broad appeal. [Oct 2024, p.91]

Regardless of these felicitous connections, however, Hoop remains her own invention and the appeal of her biographical details doesn't lie so much in the glitzy endorsement of Waits as in the fact they chime so perfectly with her melding of Kat Bush sensuality and Mary Poppins whimsy. [Dec 2009, p. 95]

Her ideas and unabashed sexual allusions, certainly, are a good deal more interesting than her inflexible retro-electro rumble. [Oct 2015, p.92]

Threat levels peak on Sewer Blues' ominous, John Carpenter reverberation. [May 2017, p.98]

This parade of audacious flops is a powerful introduction to this great band's pleasures, should you need one. [Jul 2017, p.104]

Girl Band play ugly noise with a charisma and energy to drag them from the no wave ghetto, to somewhere bigger. [Nov 2015, p.89]

Bows & Arrows might seem like the ideal rock'n'roll yuletide soundtrack--and it is, but only for those who spend their Christmases in dive bars with nothing but a gold-hearted hooker, bottomless highball glass and volume of Bukowski poetry for company. [May 2004, p.100]

After a corkingly good start with 'Don't You Wish It was True?,' the album dips into Creedence by the numbers for several cuts with only the gospelly 'River IS Waiting sounding fresh. [Nov 2007, p.92]

Raskit junks its predecessor’s egregious schmaltz for marauding bass and spartan trap backings. They amplify a biting double-time flow his nearest rivals would readily trade jaws for, Dizzee slaying his competition on Focus and Wot U Gonna Do? and literally eating them for dinner on Space (“Can’t find enough time to dine on rappers / All these MCs are looking like tapas”). There’s depth, too.

A singular voice, in more ways than one. [Dev 2017, p.90]

Strip off the rock'n'roll trappings of Spiritualized circa Pure Phase, or tune in to Terry Riley at his most horizontal, and you are close to the immersive pleasure here. [Jun 2021, p.85]

Each note feels laser cut, accompanied by the bellowing bass keys that have long characterised Geist's work. [Oct 2022, p.87]

10 elegantly rendered tracks, uncovering an intersection of The Clientele and Waxahatchee. [Jun 2023, p.91]

Frisell is travelling a unique, but to old admirers, rather familiar path here. [Apr 2026, p.91]

The album isn't defined by what is on the record but what's missing, and sometimes less is just, well, less. [Oct 2014, p.94]

Jones's playing is inventive throughout, comparing favourably to his work with the M.G.'s. [Sep 2013, p.86]

It's in a familiar lineage [of meditative alt-rock]--shoegaze, Sigur Ros--but very much at the quality end of the spectrum. [Oct 2013, p.87]

Hersh still transmits a visionary quality through her songs, her writing only adding to the sense of compulsion. [Dec 2013, p.88]

A deep, powerful and satisfying album. [Jul 2021, p.82]

Apart from the more lightweight yarning of In Electric Blue, each track on this album takes you further into her brave new world. [Jun 2023, p.94]

Wild Beasts' stripped down songs have developed incrementally into a more electronic direction and these finely detailed arrangements feature twitchy kit and synthetic drums, sequencers, abstract sonics, '80s keyboard stabs and guitars occasionally let off the leash. [Sep 2016, p.95]

His innate genius for transforming base building blocks into rhythmically compelling, humanist dance gold shines through. [Aug 2015, p.89]

Elegiac Montreal collective's relatively orthodox sixth album. [May 2010, p. 97]

A remarkable record. [Dec 2014, p.100]

The autobiographical lyrics on offer here make for intimate listening. [Jun 2006, p.108]

All told, a spellbinding journey. [Mar 2014, p.100]

Less direct than its 2012 predecessor The Shadow Of Heaven, Suicide Songs collects richly arranged reflections which climax with A Cocaine Christmas And An Alcoholic's New Year. [Feb 2016, p.96]

Gately's soft vocal melodies audible through the layers of madness, leading you to points of strange beauty and lyrical wonder. [Jan 2017, p.97]

A striking stop-gap for Krug and Siinai. [May 2012, p.87]

What's new, though, is how Taylor has pushed his music's most rousing dimensions to the fore. [Oct 2023, p.84]

They are a fuller-sounding group in 2013. [Apr 2013, p.91]

Even though Marathon is rife with such oblique, ominous trails (Safety offers "Compleete us/King snake ringed with rust"), it still feels like a personal and revealing testimonial. [Apr 2026, p.93]

[Ladytron] have evolved into a dark behemoth, trading much of their Moogy plinky-plonk poise and gentle subversion for ominous rock thunder. [Sep 2005, p.96]

The result is a brilliant modern singer-songwriter record, full of wit and musical variations. [May 2009, p.100]

Disturbing. [Feb 2012, p.102]

She further unleashes her psyche in a voice of throaty, Diamanda Galas-style intesity. [Jan 2022, p.88]

They wear their ideas on their sleeves, certainly, but under all the layers, a heartbeat is sometimes hard to find. [Feb 2008, p.104]

With his trademark gothic drawl, Patterson Hood limns close highway calls with perspicacity, then mourns the compatriots he's lost to foibles and vices alike. Perennially underrated Mike Cooley, meanwhile, hands in some of his sharpest-ever writing. [Jul 2022, p.86]

James's reputation as one of electronic music's most daring, inquisitive artists grows record by record. [Dec 2022, p.91]

This is thrilling, intelligent stuff. [Dec 2002, p.122]

This has more than enough beauty and character to stand on its own. [Mar 2009, p.107]

Despite the record's impromptu genesis, its results sound endearing. [Apr 2014, p.93]

Though the battering ram thrust of Sad But True takes some beating, other highlights are James Hetfield solo with orchestra on The Unforgiven III, and on (Anesthesia) Pulling Teeth, SFS principal bassist Scott Pingel paying tribute to Metallica's Cliff Burton, who died in 1986 aged 24. [Oct 2020, p.86]

Welfare Jazz finds them dropping through the gears and settling on a sound that often resembles the frazzled nocturnal grooves magicked up during Josh Homme's Desert Sessions. [Mar 2021, p.90]

The overall effect is a bit off-key, ill-defined and generally incomprehensible yet warm and attractive. [Mar 2007, p.100]

Meticulously constructed. [Nov 2006, p.114]

The best of the original bunch is still the frantic rockabilly charge Wearing And Tearing from the Polar Studio sessions.... What gives this new Coda its edge are versions of Four Sticks and Friends recorded in 1972 by Page and Plant in Bombay with local musicians who'd never heard a Led Zeppelin song before. [Sep 2015, p.98]

By the closing traditional, Fair Annie (Child Ballad 62), much of the atmospheric murk has lifted, revealing a radiant kinship with the like of Trees, similarly uncanny folk-rock alchemists from the cusp of the 1970s. [Dec 2018, p.88]

The constant, keenig purity of Ohiona Molina's vocals save all this from becoming too relentlessly dispiriting. [Aug 2009, p.104

Its aim is true, uplifting and yes, mighty persuasive. [Mar 2024, p.80]

They've carved a bleak and beautiful album; their best, in fact. [May 2004, p.106]

Finds them fine-tuning their class act, Dickon Hinchcliffe's choice string arrangements underpinning a typically careworn set. [Jul 2003, p.107]

While on occasion disappointingly heavy handed, the more wistful moments shine through the murk. [Nov 2002, p.105]

Their most accessible, and arguably best, long-player yet. [Apr 2003, p.112]

His songwriting has rarely sounded so acute. [Apr 2004, p.109]

Ultimately proves hard to get a handle on. [Jul 2015, p.96]

Time's Arrow is Ladytron's equivalent of Simple Minds' early-'80s heyday, where burnished synth-pop meets the hyperreality of travel. [Feb 2023, p.87]

The box set's main selling point is the inclusion of a completely different version of Never Let Me Down, recorded posthumously. [Nov 2018, p.100]

Nuanced lyrics and striking melodies. [Nov 2016, p.96]

It's a huge step forward on their earlier recordings. [May 2015, p.95]

The bold Old Fears is more than a side project. [May 2014, p.89]

He might still be too unashamedly oddball to conquer the charts, but this is another work of warped brilliance. [Dec. 2011 pg. 95]

Much of The Ruminant Band comes sunny side up. [Sep 2009, p.90]

NOW is a pretty intense 31 minutes. But while Locks and co's intent is radical, it's never forbidding. Instead, a punchy accessibility informs even their wildest excursions. [Jun 2021, p.88]

Sus Dog is the sound of Clark finding his voice in more ways than one. [Jun 2023, p.95]

Pretty, but pointless. [Feb 2006, p.95]

Second time out, they've all but eradicated the gauzy abstractions, in favour of a cards-on-table, powerpop sound, which, i tandem with impressive melodic directness, should make them on e of 2018's hastiest crossover bands. [May 2018, p.90]