The frankness of yore remains intact, but his focus has shifted, and the intimacy that once sometimes made Barlow's solo work a white knuckle ride now amplifies the tranquility of these strums. [Jul 2021, p.81]

Riotous takedown of eco-hypocrisy and corporate greenwashing to the accompaniment of rhythms so wildly exuberant they could rearrange loins. [Aug 2021, p.89]

U-Roy remains on form throughout, delivering everything in his relaxed yet confident style, all testament to his enduring talent. [Aug 2021, p.87]

A 50/50 new/old split: reworkings, questing solo turns and a rare all-out rocker. [Nov 2021, p.94]

The sound of a man stretching out... What breadth of vision McCaughan has. [Nov 2021, p.86]

Things could have easily slipped into a kitsch pastiche by this stage, yet La Luz continue to find fresh avenues to explore. [Jan 2022, p.85]

The highs of Fade, Queens and Better Love variously recall Arcade Fire and The Flaming Lips in euphoria mode, while the lows plumb eerie depths akin to Big Star's Third. [Feb 2022, p.89]

His voice surprises. [Jan 2022, p.88]

Shimmering debut. [Mar 2022, p.90]

There is a confidence and intensity at UCLA that explains why that concert was an under-the-counter favourite. [Jun 2022, p.96]

What makes it great is something else - an energy and a vibe that give the strange sensation you're there with them. [Oct 2022, p.84]

CookUp highlights Gendel's daring interpretative strengths. [Apr 2023, p.87]

Has much nuance to gild its inimitable energy. [May 2023, p.88]

Her most beautiful [music] in decades. [May 2023, p.87]

The emphasis more on fractured, abstract improv rater than frenetic carousing. Interesting stuff, for sure. [May 2023, p.89]

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]

The 10 tracks of Brain Worms don't outstay their welcome, but as the title suggests, they do linger. [Aug 2023, p.84]

Coming in at just 28 minutes. .... But the grand old man of Afrobeat is on fine form throughout, challenging the horns and bass to follow his lead. [Aug 2023, p.83]

Hatfield eschews radical reinventions, but her peeling away of the more finessed layers surrounding Lynne's indestructible melodies/chord sequences works a treat on Can't Get It out Of My head, Strange Magic and Telephone Line. [Nov 2023, p.92]

Musically, the spectral sound lies between Fever Ray at their least forbidding and the shadows cast by David Lynch soundtracks. [Mar 2024, p.90]

With percussionist Sam Clayton growling the vocals here,they bathe in the blues, immersed in classics by masters Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon and Little Walter. [Jul 2024, p.89]

Maisha builds on the old man's legacy by digging deeper into their background while allowing British producers Oli Barton-Wood and Tom Excell to add further layers in the mix. [Jul 2024, p.86]

Ultimately, the only benchmark springing to mind is the similarly-styledearly-'80sFranco-Belgians Antena. Feu De Garde is that good. [Jun 2024, p.88]

Fielding love songs, existential ruminations and anthems of solidarity and resistance, The Auditorium Vol. 1 finds rap’s self-proclaimed James Baldwin sermonising in the key of life on its every glory and struggle, offering hope amid the darkness and remaining a voice of mature wisdom in a rudderless world. It’s one of his very best. [Sep 2024, p.90]

Much of Ill Times Andrew Perry swings by like a more ’80s-fixated Black Keys (particularly yowler Fool For You), with Kenny-Smith unforeseeably excelling on the mike as a soul man, exorcising paternal bereavement (Dud) and the title track’s all-pervasive life agony. Old Transistor Radio busts out P-Funk proto-hip-hop, but there’s sufficient finesse here to make this team-up a keeper. [Sep 2024, p.93]

’60s Mod club faves including thrilling takes on The First Cut Is The Deepest and Angel Of The Morning. [Dec 2024, p.94]

Stein steers these heavy songs with an admirably light touch. [Jan 2025, p.89]

Add in lyrics that could make Brian Wilson weep and here is an album equally suitable for long winter nights and bright summer parties. [Jan 2025, p.89]

Aside from Jump Out's nightmare car ride ("Cell phone's dead, neighborhood is dark/what's the plan now?"), even the occasional rockers aim for atmosphere rather than combustion, yet Furman's trademark anger and angst find a way through. [Jun 2025, p.85]

Their onslaught harbours moments of intense, unlikely beauty, while theirs surface attack is a testament to hardcore's enduring power to shock and thrill. [Sep 2025, p.82]

Their ability to serve up soulful, clearly hard-lived songs - think bespoke merge of Gram Parsons, Glen Campbell, Todd Rundgren, Fleetwood Mac and Supertramp - without sounding kitsch is quite some feat. [Sep 2025, p.83]

Sherwood's most thrillingly exploratory solo album so far. [Oct 2025, p.83]

Intergalactic longing underpins Banh Me, its closing synth solo reaching blindly, hopefully into the endlessness of Space, while Out In The Black finds his Captain Curt using his isolation amid the stars doe some powerful internal reckoning. [Oct 2025, p.84]

There are meanders and lulls. Yet for a record intended to reflect and connect Lateral and Luminal, Liminal stands up on its own, not so much a final destination as a buzzy, fluid crossing-place for Eno and Wolfe's ideas. [Dec 2025, p.79]

The results are sometimes sublime, like the numinous drones and electronic eddies of Do, at other times unsettling and vaguely dystopian. [Nov 2025, p.89]

An album that's rarely short of lovely. [Dec 2025, p.78]

Few can match The Cribs for their facility with bruised melodies and crunchy dynamics, perfecting here a transatlantic noise that draws equally on Smithsian jangle (the jaunty Never The Same) and Sonic Youth squall (Dark Luck). [Mar 2026, p.86]

Starts with a raw, retro-rock song with a big, catchy chorus - one of several swaggering electric guitar numbers (Strange Companion; Loyalty; On fire) But there's a lot more going on in these 12 songs. [Mar 2026, p.87]

Befitting the audiophile sonic explorer that Vernon is - sound reliably excellent. [May 2026, p.86]

This album feels like a reliable harbour. [Jun 2026, p.87]

Sparkling banjos arpeggios; freak-out saxophjone; John Parish's inventive production; a wealth og strong, beautifully-enunciated vocal melodies--tons has gone into the latest work from Kate Stables, aka This Is The Kit, and all of it is good. [Aug 2017, p.91]

The Western lands proffers a winning cocktail of shimmering guitar harmonics, grand sweeping choruses, drums that avoid funk like the plague and solemn, psychogeographi lyrics from the Ian Curtis school. [Oct 2007, p.94]

The stage is small, the set short, but as ever, The Bad Seeds contain multitudes. [Jan 2014, p.96]

Shows a good deal more focus than their last two studio efforts. [Nov 2005, p.104]

A compelling exercise in craft. [Jul 2005, p.96]

This is not a Big Rock Record. Instead it's intimate, multi-layered and uplifting. [Apr 2005, p.86]

The snotty attitude of MIA's incendiary globalist skipping rhymes has never been better balanced with first-rate pop hooks. [Jan 2014, p.96]

This is a great record for and about New Orleans and one of the best the two men have ever made. [Jun 2006, p.96]

Stranger Me is accurately titled. It's both intriguing and entertaining throughout. [Sept. 2011, p. 106]

For a record about a lonely planet, it makes all the right connections. [Sept. 2011, p. 96]

Beguilingly, knowingly rendered debut. [Jul 2023, p.92]

Vividly of-the-moment, rich in melody and wry optimism. [Mar 2007, p.104]

You certainly feel stimulated, but as with those frenzied, uber-detailed set pieces on modern-day CGI animation movies, there's almost too much to process. [Mar 2019, p.91]

Their strictly modal, contemplative soundscapes have rarely sounded more compelling. [Mar 2006, p.93]

These 11 songs brim with images of armed men, noxious air and entitled egotists, intermingled with notions of self-liberation and community solidarity. But the sonics too often seem stuck in Garbus's past. [Jul 2025, p.83]

This ragged, feverish concoction, fortified by choppy-bar-band tropes as Sensor mirrors Paul Westerberg's disillusioned bonhomie. [Aug 2017, p.90]

Painkillers suggests their frontman really was holding his best songs back. [Apr 2016, p.88]

It's another absorbing, sonically rich record, albeit one lacking a chunk of the charm that marked out its predecessor. [Dec 2013, p.89]

Generous handclaps and a beautifully thrumming guitar buoy The Loneliness & The Scream. Living In Coulour, meanwhile, is a statement of intent, chiming pianos and a reeling rhythm pushing things along, typifying an album made by a band happily at the peak of its powers. [mar 2010, p.90]

An intense, slightly avant chum. [Aug 2021, p.86]

Cassadaga is an album to warm souls, rally minds and break hearts in equal measure. [May 2007, p.110]

No self-indulgence, no grandstanding, just excellent. [Mar 2004, p.100]

An arresting cocktail of post-punk angularity and instinctive pop savy. [Feb 2004, p.102]

Manages to provide a more coherent and enjoyable listening experience than mainstream dance bods like Daft Punk and Basement Jaxx have delivered of late. [Album of the Month, April 2002, p.94]

Alluringly odd. [Mar 2002, p.112]

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]

Little Rope carves space for the well-worn mind, offering sharp perspective on moments when everything seems blunted. [Feb 2024, p.84]

Most of these 12 songs... fall within the wistful to enchanting range. [Oct 2006, p.96]

Clean, reverbed electric guitar chime and twang gorgeously and the production is simple and simpatico, but it's Berman's strange yet archetypal-sounding tales of gulible skinsmen and prisons built from sweets that keep you coming back for more. [July 2008, p.108]

The end result just about captures the riotous, magical bustle of their live shows, so seek it out. [Jun 2009, p.101]

Those of a certain overcoat are assured a Proustian rush: distorted guitars, windswept austerity and Butler's rasp set to Triple Action Strepsil. [Jun 2020, p.95]

[A] deft combination of emotional intimacy and musical ambition. [Oct 2005, p.108]

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]

Retains the gum-tingling pop harmonies and guitar-throttling riffs of previous albums, but their reedy punk sinew has swollen into rock muscle. [Jun 2004, p.112]

12 fascinating electro-symphoic constructions informed by dubstep and Delia Darbyshire's BBC Radiophonic Workshop experiments. [Nov 2011, p.103]

[The album,] at first, seems suffused in the same late-summer glow as The Beach Boys' low-key '68 LP Friends. But this brightness soon fades, the album becoming a beautifully solitary journey into night. [Feb 2014, p.95]

A tad more conventional than Liz Harris's ongoing work as Grouper, despite roots in C86 shambling and early-90s shoegaze, Helen's hazy, half-grasped songs are still several left turns from any standard indie fare. [Dec 2015, p.86]

Working '80s influences like Sade and Loose Ends into highly textured romantic anthems set in a London town shimmering in high summer. Stacked vocals, keyboards and old-school synths underscore the plentiful solos. [Aug 2025, p.84]

Lovely. [Nov 2007, 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]

Desire Lines is the immaculately conceived album they've always threatened to make. [Aug 2013, p.92]

Nas's fifteenth is a heap of comfort food for old-school rap fans. [Apr 2022, p.90]

Singing with a sweet weariness, Kline can seem bemused by her melancholia, her resigned acceptance given an appealing warmth by a band whose gentle sway lends her pop miniatures depth. [Aug 2025, p.78]

Ripped + Torn attests to the sophistication of their songwriting with this brutalist form. [Aug 2025, p.80]

Part 1 veers from the abrasive, Stooges-style rock that characterised much of 2015's What Went Down. [Apr 2019, p.86]

Smelts the classic rock canon (Madness, Blur, Bowie, Small Faces) into an infectious, head-spinning punch. [May 2005, p.109]

This Is The Sonics emits the same primal heat that's inspired successive generations of garage-dwellers, from the Cramps through Mudhoney to The White Stripes. [May 2015, p.90]

It's exquisite ghostly piano and hypnotic loops transport you to a gauzy, fantastical netherworld. [Jan 2018, p.96]

Tries to understand where to go, and whether he's already there. ... Life is a casket. And it's golden. Both are true. Brock apparently has figured it out. [Aug 2021, p.80]

After the laboured Driving Rain, a welcome return of that definitive, love-it-or-hate-it McCartney effortlessness. [Oct 2005, p.98]

What Orton has sacrificed in terms of post-clubbing appeal she has replaced with grit and poignancy seldom heard since the LA canyons were in their pomp. [Mar 2006, p.96]

Brass blasts and strings reveal cinematic vistas. [Jun 2017, p.95]

Hendra might deal with life's compromises, but there's no disappointment here. [May 2014, p.92]

Allison's verge-of-tears delivery is another sign that Clean's grown-up vibe can't hide the vulnerable teen within. [Apr 2018, p.94]

It's when Marr stops thinking "big festival rock sound" that this LP shines. ... Ultimately, it's all about the angle of his jangle--ever unimpeachable. [Jul 2018, p.88]

Its claustrophobia is total, unique, spellbinding. [Mar 2005, p.106]

it's unashamedly full-on, Cro-Magnon stuff, but this chaos is often glorious. [Apr 2020, p.87]