An intermittently discomfiting record, tinged with sadness and beautifully composed. [Oct 2021, p.97]

What follows is like an eccentric, audacious musical collage that somehow hangs together. [Sep 2018, p.93]

Whether this is post rock, space rock or ad hoc it's hard to say, but who needs taxonomy when music feels this good? [Jan 2012, p.97]

The sixth full-length is a more modest affair, but also one of their finest. [Nov 2021, p.88]

Skinner and band navigate uncharted waters with sass and skill. [Dec 2025, p.82]

The Art Of Forgetting swings between joy and darkness with a boldness and coherence that is a marvel. [May 2023, p.84]

Hard to avoid thinking of Neil Young and Crazy Horse at the peak of their '70s powers. [Feb 2005, p.95]

Frenetic take on Radiohead's Street Spirit aside, the tightly arranged songs here are pleasingly Queen, AC/DC, Lizzy and Leppard-aware. [Sep 2012, p.86]

Guitars, sounding like synths, soar into the stratosphere, and intense crescendos linger over delicate, breathy passages. [Aug 2005, p.94]

With barbed lyrics and messy, thrumming guitars a Honeyblood speciality, things never get overly pretty on thes 11 tales of "horror, lust and laughs," while new Honeyblood drummer Cat Myers, successor to Shona McVicar, has bedded-in nicely. [Dec 2016, p.90]

There's much more depth to the sequel. [Oct 2012, p.91]

An Earth reborn, then. [Oct 2014, p.90]

A fittingly weighty document of their emotional heft. [Nov 2015, p.105]

Stands as both love letter and elegy and encompasses the deeply held emotions of both. [Aug 2023, p.86]

Yielded their finest collection to date. [May 2026, p.87]

It's a beautifully recorded and unmistakably classy outing that resonates deeply. [Feb 2018, p.95]

These 41 short, snappy but entirely involving instrumentals generously reaffirm Dilla's inimitable way around chopped-up vocal samples, waspish, distempered synth lines and spacey unquantised drums. [Jan 2016, p.104]

One of the year's best. Which year? Any year. [Mar 2017, p.92]

A winner. [May 2007, p.106]

It flits between rigorous, tricksy composition and kinetic improv. [May 2021, p.78]

Hours of fun at your lockdown kitchen disco. [May 2021, p.97]

The unlikely MC tag team's incontestable third rages hard over bass-driven beats positively thrumming with vitality. [Apr 2017, p.95]

In another world, Andy Warhol would want to manage them, but on this evidence, Horsegirl have pop down to an art by themselves. [Mar 2025, p.86]

Briitsh Sea Power's third album proves once again there's more to them than stuffed owls and a facination with odd geological landmarks. [Feb 2008, p.100]

[The album] is suitably haunted and becalmed. [Mar 2013, p.98]

The results are terrific, harking back to The Black Album and Strawberries, with lots of Phantasmagoria-like gothic pop and '60s-via'80s garage a la Naz Nomad. [May 2018, p.96]

A personal statement that is simply too accomplished to fall into pastiche. [Apr 2015, p.96]

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]

Rhys’s melodies stay with you, and his wordplay is as pleasingly idiosyncratic as ever. [Feb 2024, p.89]

It's utterly convincing and frequently ace. [Nov 2022, p.87]

Seemingly ramshackle songs with deceptively shrewd arrangements, like the woozy, Beta Band-ish Paper. [Aug 2018, p.96]

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]

A two-hour 2-CD trip, hanging free in reflective well being. [Jul 2013, p.96]

Theirs is a refreshing opaque, charmingly fumbling sound world. [Aug 2012, p.92]

It's clear that The Pop Group are back in full swing. [Dec 2016, p.90]

This time, the quieter moments are more keenly affecting. [Jan 2020, p.89]

A timely reminder of how speculative and exciting American alternative rock was before it discovered Duran Duran and money. [Nov 2005, p.100]

Meticulously constructed. [Nov 2006, p.114]

What Los Lobos's thirteenth long-player lacks in surprise it makes up for in groove and mood. [Oct 2006, p.103]

Hums with profound, eerie power. [Feb 2025, p.91]

From the Top is a mix of folk and rock and Americana, but James bends them all into new and daring shapes. [Jan 2013, p.95]

Lovers of their earlier electro-cumbia won't be disappointed, but nor will reggae fans or Garifuna aficionados. [Mar 2016, p.98]

This time, this sound pitches harder and faster between the troubled and te transcendent, the mystical and the physical, but Greentea Peng is still dispensing powerful medicine. [May 2025, p.85]

Django Django confound because they sound gloriously, unpredictably new, but also recall past bands and sounds gone. [Feb 2012, p.98]

A fuzzed-up Pixies-worthy melodic high. [Jun 2017, p.95]

The 11-song tracklist forgoes perennials such as Touch Me I'm Sick for lesser-spotted nuggets like Fuzzgun '91, a splenetic thrash through Roxy Music's Editions Of You and the Heart-sore epic Broken Hands. [Feb 2018, p.90]

Iechyd Da documents a period of intense anguish with careful understatement and smart musical references. [Feb 2024, p.87]

The full-tilt, punk-like intensity manifested on the band's first two long players is further honed and sharpened. [Aug 2009, p.109]

A modestly sized, nine-track snapshot of the singer in a more appealingly inward phase.

Wolf People can play and on NRR have just enough Sabbath-styled hard riffing to appeal to the basest rock fan. [Jun 2013, p.92]

Delicate yet powerful, and utterly compelling. [Feb 2023, p.92]

The songs are charged with love for both the music and Molina. [Oct 2025, p.80]

It is a lot like Teen dream, but novelty is hardly the point: if Beach House are your type, then Bloom is unlikely to see the attraction wither. [Jun 2012, p.93]

This is the album to prove that great Afrobeat doesn't have to be a Kuti family affair. [Sep 2012, p.97]

It's a thematically and musically complex record that encourages wonderment. [Jun 2023, p.92]

There are 10 songs here, most of them slow; with a smoky nightclub intimacy that makes it a great late-night album. [Jun 2023, p.88]

It's a giddy, breathless swirl of different sounds and styles. [Dec 2016, p.91]

It's a punishing listen certain to prove divisive among his fan base. [Oct 2012, p.95]

This is music for smarter dancefloors. [Mar 2021, p.89]

Here and there you can hear a touch of JJ Cale breeziness and, on Ballad Of An Unknown, urban cowboy noir with socio-political lyrics. [Apr 2022, p.85]

In line with the album title, Richard reins it in, as if she’s singing torch songs, but the emotion is palpable, her lyrics freighted with trauma. [Nov 2024, p.87]

There are 14 songs here, without chaff. [Jan 2017, p.94]

Professionally recorded with a slightly altered song order (no Down By The River). There is a definite air of victory lap. [Jun 2022, p.96]

This is Smoke Fairies' strongest, most urgent album to date. [Apr 2020, p.93]

Sprawling and dense as it may be, but amid its deranged lyricism and brutal soundscapes, 8 Diagrams vindicates The RZA's devotion to the collective ethic. [Feb 2008, p.100]

Vocal melodies take a back seat to the overall 'vibe', but it's a groovy corner of the musical universe to spend time in. [Apr 2025, p.87]

Shine justifies John Legend's signing of her to his Homeschool label and finding producers she could inspire. [Mar 2008, p.112]

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]

Skittery clicks and manipulated samples add heat and light to plucked guitar and breathy voice on songs that evolve in space-time. [Mar 2013, p.98]

An exquisite, sometimes spectacular achievement rich with emotive resonance. [Jun 2025, p.80]

A slushfest it isn't....Melodically sussed, wryly observed post-60s pop nuggets are humorous, trenchant and reflective. [Nov 2008, p.104]

Kaleidoscopic yet reassuringly familiar to '80s indie fans. [Apr 2015, p.98]

Worth the wait. Her voice is on excellent form and her band has its understated arrangements down to an art. [Sep 2025, p.82]

There isn't quite as much gleeful taboo-baiting on this second set, as they dig further and harder into the absurdity of being a young woman in America, and still make it catchy and fun as well as angry and melancholy. [Jun 2015, p.93]

It's the first time in the history of the Missy-Timbaland team-up where, having delivered the goods early on and earned the space to do whatever theheck they like, they tread water instead of pushing things forward. [Album of the Month, Jan 2003, p.90]

Their thrilling music rooted in old country with touches of blues and gospel can't help but remind you of Jack and Meg and Johnny and June. [Jun 2013, p.93]

The guests never distract from or overshadow the Malians. [Oct 2020, p.88]

A sleight of hand that transforms its low-key, elegiac ruminations into defiant affirmation of life. [Aug 2017, p.93]

Male Bonding brilliantly transpose their neighbourhood's scrufffy, rule-breaking fashion ethos into an exhilaratingly melodic breed of post-hardcore punk rock. [June 2010, p. 96]

The on-stage versions bring genuine human warmth--healing even--to Vulnicura's raw emotional truths. [Sep 2016, p.99]

O'Neill has locked into humanity's flawed relationship with nature. But there's celebration too. [Mar 2023, p.92]

Georgia Blue's diversity of Georgia sounds sits well with its campaign for inclusivity. [Jan 2022, p.86]

The overall message is of gentle positivity. [Nov 2020, p.80]

Passage surges, subsides and enthralls like a Gothic Sigur Ros. [Jun 2012, p.93]

Everything Harmony us certainly a darker chapter in the Twigs' story, but their songwriting has become more nuanced. [Jun 2023, p.90]

They may be musical magpies but what they build from their stash is gold. [Oct 2012, p.95]

Their anarchic cut'n'paste confections can baffle on first exposure, but with repeat listens the inventiveness of their compositions come to the fore, savvy hooks materialising from the seeming chaos of loops and samples. [Jul 2023, p.84]

U2's strongest album this century. [Jan 2018, p.86]

Baroque pop at its most exhilarating. [Mar 2021, p.89]

Quite stunning. [Jun 2006, p.112]

Other artists covered include Gnarls Barkley, Tom Waits and Neil Young, but this is Bettye's record, these are her songs now. [Nov 2012, p.86]

[The 50 outtakes] are not fore the casual listener.... The big find is the rambunctious Mardi Gras party-style I Shall Sing, a small 1974 hit for Art Garfunkel but never released by Morrison until now; Van unsurprisingly give the tune a more soulful treatment. [Nov 2013, p.98]

Hubbert's ornate acoustic fingerpicking and flamenco flourishes are an ideal foil for Moffat's un-showy storytelling skills. [Jan 2019, p.92]

On Fenian they back that shrewdness with songs of depth and substance. [Jun 2026, p.90]

Delicate, inventive and deeply, deeply touching. [Mar 2019, p.95]

It's sonically deeper and more emotionally engaging, from start to finish, than any previous SOK release. [Jun 2021, p.83]

While these tales may have been found in far-flung places, they all ultimately belong to the same deep tradition--and one where unvarnished simplicity enhances the material's uncanny potential. [May 2018, p.94]

Their full-length follow-up to 2007's "Burning Off Impurities" is a multi-textured out-rock masterpiece. [Jan 2008, p.101]