A mind-blowing creation merging the high period Dungen of Ta Det Lugnt with its more straightforward predecessor, 2002's Stadsvandringar. [Nov 2022, p.91]

Ronson and Wainwright have dressed these songs to kill, not just to impress. [May 2012, p.84]

Their music has a heavier gait, like a cross between a crazed Triffids and a stroppier Bad Seeds. [Oct 2006, p.102]

The Waterfall II comes fitted with escape hatches and launch pads. ... Those in search for a 2020 anthem, meanwhile, could do worse than the gorgeous calendar-collapse of Spinning My Wheels. [Sep 2020, p.86]

At times they resemble The B-52's having a bitter row, at others a particularly violent Femmes. [Jul 2005, p.110]

[The album is] spare, poignant, dark and dry. [Jul 2013, p.92]

Prim they may appear at times, but their offer of comfort in sound is impossible to refuse. [Nov 2012, p.90]

Daniel conveys an expert melancholy. its ups always just on the brink of an elegant down. [Mar 2024, p.88]

Moonbuilding 2703 AD proves that his space academy can still churn our excellent results. [Aug 2015, p.88]

Presence is the best of the three [remasters].... The deluxe edition's bonus track, a soft, piano-led instrumental titled Pod, reiterates how dark and gnarly the rest is. [Sep 2015, p.98]

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

Inspired stuff, though its slightness feels like a tease, and leaves us hungry for more. [Aug 2018, p.88]

This long-rumoured debut is a thing of stark intimacy, rendered by just Pearson's rustic voice and roughly picked guitar, with an occasional smear of wintry violin or doleful piano. [Apr 2011, p.100]

This band's charms are elusive, indeed, but uniquely compelling. [Dec. 2010, p. 99]

It all adds up to the heavy, heavy sound of extinction rebellion, King Gizz developing themes they first explored on 2017's Murder Of The Universe. [Sep 2019, p.94]

Its successor emanates a similarly yeasty authenticity, stretching songs into epic ballads, its acoustic guitars, bass and drums ornamented by a lattice of deftly plucked and strummed things. [May 2009, p.105]

It's Converge's energy that impresses first, their brutal, full-blooded fury, the sheer physical assault; listen closer, however, and you'll find a group as inventive and progressive in their riffage as Slayer or Metallica at their early apex, a compulsive complexity to their chaos. [Feb 2010, p. 100]

To The Bone keeps its pop and prog influences in a near perfect balance--flash and flamboyant at times but with some lovingly crafted big tunes. [Sep 2017, p.86]

A rich score of chamber melancholy and electronic disquiet. [Mar 2016, p.97]

With her soaring, passionate voice the wail of a spectre, she's the incubus Kate Bush. [Aug 2013, p.88]

While there are shades of Berninger’s day band in the propulsive Nowhere Special, for the most part it’s a more laid-back affair in the stylistic vein of R.E.M.’s Automatic For The People, or a country-tinged The Blue Nile. [Jul 2025, p.86]

Stalking drumbeats collide with lush chords and Joel Cadbury's smoky vocals for an emotionally fragile record. [May 2004, p.104]

Cex moves slightly away from his former snot and swagger towards more humble inflection. [Jun 2003, p.108]

It's ever so nice, except for the nagging feeling that a disembodied voice is about to say, "I'm going to count backwards from five and, when I snap my fingers, you will wake up and remember none of this." [Sep 2002, p.106]

Sonic Nurse is not... a classic rock record. And it's not a classic Sonic Youth record. It's an excursion, into corners weird and corners familiar. [Jun 2004, p.100]

Miraculously, it succeeds as a rambunctious, unruly grenade of largely unmitigated spleen, a hail of words set to music. [Sep 2002, p.96]

This [album] finds her with a steelier determination in her country soul and an inclination to rock out that she's only previously hinted at. [Nov 2004, p.116]

Unpredictable and stylistically chameleonic, Deerhoof's clamorous noise and freak-out rifferama seems perfectly attuned to current world flux. Still there is joy here too. [Jun 2025, p.80]

The rest, it must be said, is extremely dull. [May 2011, p.108]

Volta bristles with life. [Jun 2007, p.102]

An effortless conflation of over-amped belligerence and feisty pop mellifluousness. [Mar 2012, p.94]

If aging has robbed the 86-year-old of anything, it's not audible here. [Aug 2019, p.96]

San Francisco art-rockers deliver the perfect prog-pop hit. [Feb. 2011, p. 100]

Swearing At Motorists are drunk'n'roll successors to The Replacements and Guided By Voices. [Mar 2006, p.102]

It's a scream, as we would expect from a musical humorist ranking only behind Randy Newman on the LOL-meter. And rivaled only by Tom Waits as a gloves-off DIY soundscapist in wood, steel, and string. [Sep 2012, p.87]

No duffers here, never a dull moment, satisfaction guaranteed. [Jul 2005, p.100]

The Strokes come across as a world-sized band that's tethering itself.... Nonetheless, this record is good. [Nov 2003, p.124]

Fizzing with energy and invention, distilling influences into vibrant new hybrids, this is a must-have insight into an ever-fertile, increasingly global scene. [Jun 2013, p.92]

OOIOO create a continually changing mandala of sounds somewhere between Boredom's sky-high orchestrations, Can's idiosyncratic ethno-experiements and the world-jazz fusions of Don Cherry. [Aug 2014, p.88]

With musical modes brilliantly elevated by his occasional producer David Mansfield, Wainwright nails the exigencies of old age through the medium of rockabilly, the quest for parking spaces in Manhattan via cabaret klezmer, and the gloating joys of i-ding a faithless girlfriend dead in a deep freeze with cheery Vaudeville sing0along. [Aug 2014, p.90]

The results are largely persuasive. [Apr 2015, p.96]

Black Rivers is an excellent surprise. [Mar 2015, p.94]

Musically simpler and less baroque than The Graceless Age, the album's autobiographical arc is conversely harder to glean, its lyrics more oblique. Murry's greatest ability, however, is to make the listener wince uncomfortably while peeking through their fingers at his captivating, compulsive honesty. [Aug 2017, p.88]

Admirably obtuse, Slug put the odd into prog odyssey with style. [Jun 2018, p.93]

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

As always, S&R stress character studies, from the envious and deluded guy in Mississippi Nuthin' to the broke-down elder in Hammer. [May 2019, p.94]

Her songs are beautifully, tentatively constructed, the arch quirkiness of her early albums now replaced by the lush writing of songs. [Nov 2020, p.88]

Despite omitting anything from FFS, their career re-booting alliance with Sparks, this is as good as introductions get. [Apr 2022, p.95]

The best moments - Where The Water Clears The illusion's untethered vocals, for example - come with an edge of unease, pushing Prochet onwards, upwards, and out of her beautifully suspended animation. [May 2022, p.86]

Nelson's trademark rough vocal edges suit the rustic vibes of this Southern folk music and yet the ensemble also ventures into more experimental newgrass turf. [Feb 2024, p.88]

It's to the band's credit, then, that Only You Left spins in its own unpredictable orbit, pulling out new mysteries from their off-centre helix of goth, shoegazing and post-punk. [Apr 2026, p.85]

The glitchy future R&B of Playing House is evidence of Active Child's depth, but it's the emotional blood-letting of tracks like dark hymnal Way Too Fast which gives this record a gravitas most popular music never achieves. [Jan 2012, p.92]

The old fight is there on the unrepentant The New You, but a sense that she's over thinking these songs lingers. [Aug 2014, p.94]

For all its cryptic lyrics and melodic complexities, the revelation it constantly seems to promise never quite arrives, but repave remains a grand gesture. [Oct 2013, p.95]

And the songs? Urgent, instant, bolshie mostly, with a stronger individual melodic sense than, say, Greendale, but without the intense beauty of, say, Ohio. [Jul 2006, p.112]

This is cerebral yet genial fare. [Oct 2012, p.91]

In the end it seems that the clearing of the elliptical fog has produced the quartet's most cohesive and rewarding album. [Jun 2014, p.90]

Ancestral Star finds Barn Owl alchemising those touchstones into new sonic vistas evoking either nocturnal desert chill or fathomless cosmic expanse. [Dec 2010, p.97]

Emmy's most effective tool is a sense of place, and her journey from experience to the finished work, saturated in detail, is often a lot darker than her measured delivery suggests. [Mar 2016, p.94]

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]

They've added anger to their traditional wall of ferocious sleekness built on sizzling guitars and unyielding electronica. [Jul 2021, p.80]

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 Cherry Thing is quite a brilliant combination, with its creepy, freaky sound and clever reinventions. [Jul 2012, p.92]

With his amiable croak and humour warming his observations, Manhattan is no bitter mope. [Dec 2015, p.90]

Production is dense, grainy and atmospheric, with Corby's layered vocals to the fore. [Apr 2016, p.94]

One of this unlikely old master's most hauntingly satisfying works. [Dec 2016, p.90]

Now he only resembles himself--a distinctive and exhilarating vituperative voice celebrating anything from glam rock to beans on toast. [Jan 2017, p.102]

He [Scott Mogan] references Phillip Glass, anti-humanist literature and aerial photos of industrial pollution. [Jan 2017, p.104]

Born on a Gangster Star is the more accessible volume. ... The result is a thrilling excursion, possessing an otherworldly ambience and substance you'll spend months decoding, every spin yielding something new. [Aug 2017, p.88]

A somewhat arid listening experience. [Jul 2018, p.104]

Carla Dal Forno's newest release sounds strangely fragile and vulnerable. ... Interspersed with exquisitely forlorn Eno-esque instrumenetals. [Nov 2019, p.95]

A record which is less abrasive and more measured, if slightly wishy-washy from time to time. [Sep 2013, p.96]

Portland's college-rock heirs downsize with Peter Buck-featuring sixth album. [Feb. 2011, p. 106]

Scratchily downbeat, this is a true artist's vision in that Hood can remove himself from the pain without stinting on the honesty. [Oct 2012, p.82]

With a shrewd selection of material by the likes of Tom Waits, Josh Ritter, Eliza Gilkyson, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Anohni and Zoe Milford, some effectively subtle, engagingly tasteful arrangements and an immaculate production by Joe Henry, it all sounds of the day for the day. [Apr 2018, p.95]

An account of how virulent idealogy can draw in the most rational people. [Jun 2016, p.97]

The sound is '80s indie, air and water. [Apr 2019, p.96]

While Riddick doesn't boast the vocal chops of his heroes, telling interventions from Q-Tip, Leon Sylvers III and The Doggfather himself flesh out his questing intergalactic creations with charm to spare. [Oct 2015, p.89]

There is a levity to Uniform Distortion that differentiates it from all James's previous work. Indeed, work is the last thing it resembles. [Aug 2018, p.86]

The album pays in cleft between Darnielle's left and right brains and strikes the perfect balance between wild imagery and plaintive sentiment. [May 2011, p.112]

Few Pretenders albums have honoured the classic line-up's template so faithfully or successfully as Hate For Sale. [Aug 2020, p.86]

An ongoing reconnection with the experimental dandy in the mirror lends his latest work's stylistic pinballing a fun quotient that compensates for it's unevenness. [Apr 2012, p.84]

No one said living "woke" was gonna be easy, but Thick turn the friction into furious, satisfying pop. [May 2020, p.95]

Mann's voice remains exquisite, her lyrics cinematically vivid, often painfully so, but the album possesses a chimerical looseness, a fuzzy aimless drift that is simultaneously haunting and somniferous. [Dec 2021, p.87]

As the plot inexorably winds on to its tense denouement, the depth of tempest's storytelling ensures the album yields more with each further play. [Jul 2014, p.88]

She delivers twisted, nostalgic jazz, flanked by her Spanish husband's eerie Portuguese guitar.... Lovely. [Mar 2016, p.98]

It's when they change gear, on the likes of Old Stuff, New Glass, which goes into a funk workout reminiscent of ESG, or on the Orange Juice-flavoured likes of 48 Percent or Blue Suitcase (Disco Wrist)--whose reverb and chiming guitars leans towards post-punk idea of reggae--that The Orielles excel. [Mar 2018, p.97]

A boundlessly inventive and occasionally quite bonkers record that draws heavily on the input of its myriad guests. [Jun 2017, p.88]

Occasionally meanders into lift muzak for people who only ever travel in really cool lifts. [Mar 2003, p.103]

What with that album title, a wistful opening waltz, entitled Oh, The Divorces! and a beautifully resigned lament called Singles Bar ("Can you tell how long I've been here? Can you smell the fear?", the theme of mid-life crises hangs heavy over these 10 simply arranged vignettes. [June 2010, p. 92]

Plumb is a delicious tasting menu of rock history. [Mar 2012, p.103]

It'll surely rank as British alt-rock's finest debut of 2012--genuinely fit for a place in Dougall Sr's pantheon. [Oct 2012, p.88]

Afrucaine 808 have perfected a highly effective remedy to standing still. [Feb 2016, p.94]

The Scots post-rockers who will outlast them all. [March 2011, p. 100]

This is one darkly alluring trip. [Mar 2006, p.108]

Simple stuff, sparsely rendered, with a weighty undertow. [Dec 2014, p.93]

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

Some of the 11 songs have a rich band sound with strings and strong piano, and others a spare contemplative tone. [Nov 2012, p.88]