But from the off, the sounds here always convince. [Oct 2010, p.96]

The more elemental moments - Sour Flower's mournful rustle of handclaps, cymbals and Fender Rhodes, or the intimate, guitar-led Green Papaya and Can't fight - are understated, introspective and more powerful. [Aug 2020, p.84]

For all its filigree detail, Spring Eternal is a big philosophically questing record, a velvet glove hiding a death-like grip. [Mar 2024, p.90]

The result is laidback and chilled. [Apr 2003, p.104]

It's not morose--his voice is too engaging, his songs (and band) too good. [Jul 2013, p.92]

All in all, with its pervading doubts and joyful release, Glowing In The Dark is very much for these times. [Mar 2021, p.86]

This album makes good on the promise of earlier benchmarks like Ease Down The Road and Master And Everyone. [Oct 2006, p.102]

Introspective, electic brain-groove of the month. [Dec 2012, p.86]

Open's success lies in its final effect on the listener, an enveloping state of reassuring calm. [Dec 2013, p.84]

Periodically dormant they may be, but it's clearly a tactic that works for Jane's. [Nov 2011, p.93]

His 20th album has production that sounds home-made, as if he's singing besides you on the sofa while the bass player, drummer and peep-y keyboard player are playing in the empty attic upstairs. [Jun 2021, p.87]

The music is too futuristic--and, more bizarrely, too rooted in Indian Ocean folk roots--ever to get weighed down in heaviosity. [Mar 2015, p.96]

The New Yorkers' debut is retro but refreshing. [Dec. 2010, p. 106]

Simpson invests this bold, widescreen music with such heartfelt and real pathos and joy that it announces him as a major talent, and makes A Sailor’s Guide To Earth so rewarding.

Capturing his bad life choices, regrets and hopes at their most immediate. [Aug 2021, p.84]

A clear-voiced statement of pop intent. [Apr 2013, p.97]

Her ability to dominate a room with minimal musical movement is astonishing; this record lowers the temperature, heightens the sense, slows down life, frame by frame. [Mar 2024, p.85]

Junip's second album is enchanting enough to sell cluster bombs. [May 2013, p.88]

The songwriting's uniformly exceptional, the messaging on-the-nose and inspiring - and boy, can he still play guitar. [Apr 2024, p.82]

Genders' decision to forsake his husky tones for a forthright falsetto immediately adds an unsettling nuance to Throws' twisting tales and burrowing melodies. [Jul 2016, p.93]

Warren's razor-sharp lyricism - and her ability to deliver hard truths and cold comforts s gracefully - ensure Lessons For Mutants is endlessly compelling. [Dec 2022, p.85]

As well executed as the latter half is, it can feel a mite unsatisfying compared to the stripped-down stuff that sits at the top of the album. [Jun 2013, p.85]

Lewis hits peak saxophone artistry here. [Mar 2023, p.89]

A fine collection from a timeless song craftsman. [Mar 2023, p.84]

For a genre whose young bands are increasingly concerned with girls and girls only, the Alkaline Trio have delivered an album offering far more than the pink blush of awkward adolescence. [Jul 2003, p.108]

Strong Stones in the '80s vibes set the tone. [May 2023, p.95]

The resulting sound is suitably celestial, mysterious and awe-inspiring. [Sep 2017, p.93]

By turns numinous and spectral. [Feb 2026, p.81]

Where the comic thesp rabbitholes back to 1980s telly music, with sincere, library-esque 'ommages. [Dec 2018, p.94]

Strange Life warrants recognition, Stein and co's passion undimmed. [Mar 2026, p.80]

Seductive and meditative. [Jun 2026, p.93]

Their best album in 30 years. [Dec 2014, p.92]

This album has everything and it works. [Feb 2019, p.89]

Byrne filters grace, wonder and apocalyptic portent through his fractured worldview. [Apr 2018, p.95]

There's an early Daptone feel to this strong set. [May 2020, p.96]

A good 'un, finely balancing his roots with his modernism. [Mar 2019, p.92]

Clara is neither ostentatiously glitchy, nor overburdened by its conceptual heft. [Jul 2021, p.87]

2 is a special new chapter, inspired and beguiling. [Jul 2025, p.79]

Roadsinger really does pick up where Cat Stevens left off back in the late '70s. [Jun 2009, p.103]

Uninhibited, Wrecking Ball misses a star here only because two love-among-the economic-ruins, This Depression and You've Got It, don't quite fit the big-theme fierceness - deep feelings to draw together whoever may listen. [Apr 2012, p. 89]

Lean and timeless sounding, it's also as truthful as Everett's sobering autobiography, Things The Grandchildren Should Know. [Jun 2009, p.104]

Producer Joe Henry complements Toussaint with respectful production and respected guests including Charles Lloyd, Van Dyke Parks and the thrilling trilling of Rhiannon Giddens. [Jul 2016, p.94]

She sounds like a full band as vamping pianos, rubbery double basses, freeform vibes and skittering beats collide. [Sep 2020, p.85]

This is exhilarating stuff. [Mar 2003, p.111]

A wealth of gorgeous melodies and hallucinogenic kitchen-sink orchestrations. [Dec 2001, p.98]

It's early days yet, but Fenne Lily might just be a major talent in the making. [Oct 2020, p.89]

These sings might inhabit unsteady mental states, but each component could have been places with tweezers and a jeweller's loupe. [Aug 2015, p.86]

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

Golden Ticket is a diverse treat. [Sep 2015, p.93]

There is an inflammatory urgency here that reminds you of why Kurt Cobain considered Black an almost saintly figure. [Feb. 2001, p.88]

They've come within a hairclip's breadth of producing the rock'n'roll riot they always promised. [Dec 2004, p.114]

The Darkness have regained much of the joy, silliness and virtuostic songcraft that made their 2003 debut Permission To Land such fun. [Nov 2017, p.96]

It's one of the most thrilling rocksteady albums to have been made since the genre emerged in the late '60s. [Nov 2016, p.89]

O'Donovan has a fragile, heart-melting voice and is a fine songwriter. [Sep 2013, p.88]

Lucid lyrical imagery punctuates the muzzy near-consciousness. [Sep 2013, p.96]

Uninhibited where "()" felt constipated. [Oct 2005, p.99]

There's a distinctly Mitteleuropa aura to her enigmatic Nico-like vocals. [Nov 2016, p.96]

Under Hval's microscope, the seemingly straightforward is anything but. [Apr 2022, p.83]

Martin Courtney's music is unsurprisingly like Real Estate's in that it comes at an unhurried tempo and sounds deceptively simple. [Nov 2015, p.94]

Although some of his lyrical tricks might sound a little familiar this time round, he remains one of Britain's great storytellers. [Jun 2006, p.104]

Appaloosa Bones is prime Isakov. [Oct 2023, p.81]

Alongside the adolescent energy, they also give vent to decidedly adult passions. [Nov 2011, p.93]

A slightly more cohesive album - a complement to 1978's Comes A Time rather than a first take, perhaps. [Apr 2025, p.97]

Occasionally, the histrionics and faux-biblical warnings of this guitar-drum duo tread a fine Spinal Tap line, but they do its majestically they can only be admired. [Mar 2015, p.95]

This harder edge suggests a long, bounteous road into the future. [Nov 2022, p.93]

Another self-titled album is a risky statement of intent. The Bad Plus pull it off with pith and swank. [Nov 2022, p.91]

Sounding this simple is not always easy and for fans of pop with depth, Pete & The Pirates are a treat. [Jun 2011, p.100]

Toronto punk sextet's third LP is an epic soundtrack. [July 2011, p. 104]

An album of straight-up, dazzlingly well-realised British pop. [May 2004 p.92]

Driven, hooky, moving. Better than Prozac or a sunny day. [Aug 2015, 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]

Love Chant might also be described as scrappy, vulnerable and heartfelt, but it is also loose, exuberant and animated in a manner that seems faithful to who Dando is today. [Nov 2025, p.84]

Kokoko! again deliver a banging, agitational rave-up that’s impossible to stay a wallflower to. [Aug 2024, p.87]

the Krautrock gene that moulded 2012's brilliant debut Free Time! still dominates the album's early passages. [Sep 2013, p.88]

There's an often harrowing conviction to Rewind The Film's primarily acoustic arrangements and elegant melodies, heralding a new level of artistry for this unique band. [Oct 2013, p.87]

Nancy Andersen sings like a chillwave Sade, her understated poise more histrionic vocalists couldn't access. [Apr 2022, p.89]

His own three songs blend in nicely. [Apr 2006, p.90]

On a par with McCraven's similarly sprawling and revolutionary Universal Beings--and that's no mean feat. [Jan 2020, p.89]

Ford still has a country rasp to her voice, but doesn't over-sing, and her method of expressing emotion is deft rather than melodramatic. she can build up power, too. [Mar 2020, p.87]

Creativity sometimes croaks when domestic bliss walks in, but not here. [Sep 2010, p.96]

What could have been a confused, trying-to-be-hip mish-mash is instead a re-playable collection of extremely strong songs, Paul's most interesting, varied and soul-baring in years. [Dec 2013, p.84]

This fluidity of their eighth album becomes a virtue for this project. [Nov 2011, p.93]

Interlaced with songs of celebratory surrender are darker tracks that delve into anxiety and neurosis, and these are the most powerful. [Apr 2025, p.83]

Dreamy and cacophonous. [Feb 2013, p.98]

Sustaining a dreamworld mood throughout, Changephobia is a quiet beauty. [Jul 2021, p.87]

It is full of sublime moments. [Mar 2015, p.97]

There's a peculiar tension in the way the stripped down electronic and acoustic percussion and Shemie's reverby incantations work together. [Mar 2013, p.89]

With high-gloss production, shameless retro references and big-thumbed slap bass, Kindness's album is frequently preposterous. Great pop music often is. [Apr 2012, p.89]

The music and mood's emotional connection makes the Furnaces a band to love at last. [Sep 2009, p.95]

Realised with friend Chet JR White in San Francisco on reel-to-reel tapes, the songs grab from Phil Spector, Beatles, Beach Boys, JAMC and Spiritualized, and are all the more enticing for it. [Jan 2010, p. 103]

It's audacious, experimental and, unsurprisingly, resists literal interpretation. [Jul 2016, p.94]

Throughout, singer Ellie Roswell is a compelling presence, and the result is Wolf Alice's best yet. [Oct 2025, p.80]

Wasted Light finds Foo Fighters at their boldest, their most vivid. [May 2011, p.101]

The mind-boggling multiplicity if voices on Key Markets, the sneaking sophistication, and the beyond-colourful language, serve up a currently unrivaled feast for the mind. [Aug 2015, p.89]

There's nothing bland about this fervid, ideasy album. [Sep 2015, p.90]

Unwieldy on paper, it comes to life through odd, prickly phrases, but the music cuts deepest. [Aug 2014, p.93]

Worth the 10-year wait. [Nov 2019, p.91]

Chock-full of elegiac, beguiling earworm melodies. [Aug 2014, p.92]