An image-rich rumination on Scotland past and present. [Aug 2014, p.86]

The thrilling sound of these enthused new voyagers is equal parts sweetness and butchery. [Aug 2014, p.94]

Even with a groundswell of atmospheric guitar sounds and ghostly keyboards,the album's slow-burning style never fully ignites. [Aug 2014, p.91]

[A] sturdy, panoramic critique of modern rap mores. [Aug 2014, p.92]

Most compelling on the looser, less slick numbers. [Aug 2014, p.96]

Their sixth also has a twinkly eye, and Cartwright's songwriting is never less than a joy. [Aug 2014, p.96]

Nash and long-time CSNY associate Joel Bernstein have produced the set with reportorial faithfulness, arranging the songs to mirror a typical marathon night and leaving the scars intact.... You also hear the group's genuine power and competitive fury at its height as the four rotate the spotlight through their individual songbooks. [Aug 2014, p.103]

We're not talking SFA psychonautry but Gorky's Zygotic Mynci's verdant valley of romantic pop innocence. [Aug 2014, p.92]

A good listen. that slightly misses the debut's exuberant cohesion. [Aug 2014, p.86]

World Peace is unquestionably the most subtle and decorous Morrissey album for many years, possibly since the hallowed Vauxhall And I. [Aug 2014, p.84]

The result is a tender and engaging listen. [Aug 2014, p.93]

Former Miles Kane sideman McGuinness concocts his fifth solo record with solid powerpop. [Aug 2014, p.96]

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]

In its dreamy, fluttering loops and Sian Ahem's brittle, deliberately understated vocals it possesses a brace of powerful tools. [Aug 2014, p.91]

Lavish second release from Welsh synth-pop artist Rod Thomas. [Aug 2014, p.96]

At a couple of number shorter than its predecessor, Lazaretto packs a hell of a punch. [Jul 2014, p.84]

Ultimately, Futurology is brave and unexpected, and though some of it galls, much is magnificent. [Aug 2014, p.87]

Add winners selected from the songbooks of Billy Joe Shaver, Vince Gill and Bill Anderson and you have the best Willie package since he signed with Legacy. [Aug 2014, p.86]

Early Riser is a special album that pulls you deep into its alternative universe. [Aug 2014, p.92]

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

If inherent heaviness is the ultimate aim for any metal band, then Mastodon only partly succeed. Fortunately, they hit the right combination between brutal, epic, progressive and endless wild soloing. [Aug 2014, p.92]

Her band is spare and empathetic, and she's a smart enough writer to avoid mawkishness and dramatics. Which just makes it grab you harder. [Aug 2014, p.93]

Jaded & Faded offers a series of fleetingly thrilling, anti-everything songs that pulse with the kinetic energy of New York street life. [Aug 2014, p.92]

The latest outing from the Icelandic quartet may not possess quite such drama [as John Grant's Pale Green Ghosts], but there's plenty to admire here. [Aug 2014, p.91]

If these last two [fire and freshness] are tough to keep up 15 years on, it doesn't show. [Aug 2014, p.93]

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]

More robust moments provide the necessary shift but, with all its delicate finesse, Forgetting The Present largely prefers to take its oblivion lying down. [Aug 2014, p.86]

On the surface, Beware The Fetish is like My Bloody Valentine or Metal Machine Music, as unbowed or compromised by trying to give the people what they want. Yet at its heart is a burning desire to make fantastic pop music. [Aug 2014, p.88]

[A] diverse new set. [May 2014, p.96]

The material is uneven. [Jun 2014, p.95]

Recorded using vintage hardware, the guitar sound is as rich as tiramisu. [Jun 2014, p.95]

Fluttering, arpeggiated melodies, ice-crisp percussion and muscular beats mean tracks like Ya Po kick hard and linger long on the palette. [May 2014, p.93]

Acute while charming, she captures the sadness and silliness of the months when she hightailed it out of Ortonvile, Michigan, pop. 1,442. [Jun 2014, p.95]

Bitter-pill catharsis. [Jun 2014, p.89]

This 1981 release was the middle and probably the greatest of Grace Jones's Compass Point trio. [Jun 2014, p.106]

Though true sub-notes of contemplation are hard to find in Noel’s initial tranche of songs, there’s vulnerability in his solo version of Half The World Away recorded live in a Tokyo hotel room on September 16, 1994, as Oasis madness spiralled in earnest. It’s this expanded edition’s one true unreleased gem. [Jun 2014, p.102]

There's alot of her here, and the connections are all her own. [Jun 2014, p.89]

For much of the album's remainder, Carthy sticks with the melting pot approach that he and Greater Mancunian peers like Rae & Christian helped codify over a decade ago. [Jun 2014, p.93]

[Leithauser] revels in letting his talent run free, outwith trad rock arrangements. [Jun 2014, p.92]

With songs about Slits frontierswoman Ari Up and their inspired use of carnivalesque steel pans and soaring Bollywood-styled strings, it also marches to its own beat. [Jun 2014, p.92]

The tune count is mainly healthy, with the super-exuberance of Is This A Breakdown, Grapes Upon The Vine's echoes of 1983's Porcupine, and a second-half pursuit of the epic culminating in the soaring, redemptive New Horizons. [Jun 2014, p.88]

[The album] is most notable for two typically saturnine contributions from unlikely electro diva John Grant. [Jun 2014, p.98]

At times you'd think she's finally stepped around her natural sophistication and freed her true nature. But then her rooted unwillingness to share, via comprehensible diction, the lyrics she's carefully crafted does step between the different intimacies of sound and sense. [Jun 2014, p.88]

Wrangler's is a twitching, throbbing, mildly dystopian sound-world of vivid analogue synthesizer tones, overlaid with heavily processed vocals. [Jun 2014, p.96]

Tiersen lays out nine densely dripping songs, full of lavish orchestration, indeterminate clanking and on the choral Midsummer Evening, a kind of Wicca-pop maelstrom. [Jun 2014, p.96]

Gentle, Andrew Bird-style ballads bump alongside histrionic prog pop and four-to-the-floor beats on Ritalin-phased second LP. [Jun 2014, p.98]

A sweet yet spiky soundtrack for our march into oblivion. [Jun 2014, p.89]

Eerily pretty if a little ponderous. [Jun 2014, p.98]

Seven Dials reminds us of the joy Frame finds in craft, its grateful rallentando endings, plum chord-voicing and exquisitely sung choruses elevating a work that seems part break-up album, part understated redemption story. [Jun 2014, p.94]

Whether melodic and mellow or blown out and busy, this exhilarating ride through rock's back pages offers irrefutable proof that these Nordic giants are currently operating at the peak of their powers. [Jun 2014, p.94]

This a masterful, emphatic stuff, brimful of poignant insights and unforgettable melodies. [Jun 2014, p.92]

The Amazing Snakeheads have delivered an album bristling with unapologetic rock'n'roll invective. [Jun 2014, p.91]

The tunes are a panorama of Crowell's favoured styles. [Jun 2014, p.91]

These are epic soundtracks for the lost adventurer within us all. [Jun 2014, p.91]

Despite berry's background in comedy there's definitely more of an air of homage than pastiche to this deliciously chilled album. [Jun 2014, p.90]

Weiss weaves his way through a songbook that encompasses olde-tyme rock, jazz, R&B and Cajun sounds. [Jun 2014, p.90]

The delivery is relentless. [Jun 2014, p.86]

Sung tentatively, a la Randy Newman. [Jun 2014, p.98]

The Shrine deliver a cantering second LP full of heads-down charm. [Jun 2014, p.98]

Taylor Hawkins indulges his '70s hard rock fantasy. [Jun 2014, p.98]

His songs are hypnotic but oddly clunky vocals keep it earthbound. [Jun 2014, p.98]

Canadian duo's smooth blend of yacht rock, disco, Rick James funk and late-90s French house with lyrics that aim to pastiche modern R&B tropes. [Jun 2014, p.98]

May's 10 songs are barely there yet carry genuine emotional heft thanks to Voss Romme's tremulous, close-up-and-personal vocal delivery. [Jun 2014, p.94]

There's a renewed vigour to its frugging mix of vintage synths, barking-dog bass stabs and jagged electric guitars. [Jun 2014, p.94]

Double Life, a thoughtful country-blues, is actually deeply touching, and Night At Lake Unknown is a soft, sweet Hank Williams Lament. the rest can be broadly summerised as Eeyore on Quaaludes. [Jun 2014, p.94]

At Asiatisch's heart is bass, gargantuan and window rattling, around which she builds an elaborate framework of complex rhythms and melodies using analogue hardware. [Jun 2014, p.93]

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

Shakedown and Sell Your Soul feel triumphant in a way indie-rock has rarely managed of late, while an intoxicating weirdness drives even their most anthemic moments. [Jun 2014, p.93]

Sheezus makes for the slightest of returns rather than a glorious resurrection. [Jun 2014, p.93]

Hyde and Eno's voices knit together well and the album is full of surprises. [Jun 2014, p.93]

Live Rain is a concert album like they used to be: prime Howlin Rain, only longer, louder and more full-blooded. [Jun 2014, p.92]

Anyone seduced by the standout Wounded Rhymes track Sadness Is A blessing will be left winded by the even more sorrow-stricken I Never Learn. [Jun 2014, p.92]

[A] gorgeously appointed escape from rock'n'roll's habitual savagery. [Jun 2014, p.89]

A more contemplative tUnE-yArDs? No bad thing when the goose-bumping post-punk gloaming of Time Of Dark is among the unexpected bonus. [Jun 2014, p.88]

Though songs including the shimmering So Now You Know and the Manuel Gottsching-like In And Out Of Sight maintain a stirring balance of shimmying pop appeal and experimentation, elsewhere the momentum is compromised and peaks are obscured. [Jun 2014, p.88]

While Bo Ningen often sound like they're flailing with chaotic abandon, the might of tracks like DaDaDa proves they also respect tension and restraint. [Jun 2014, p.88]

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]

An adult pleasure. [Jun 2014, p.90]

Given its length, trying to tackle To Be Kind n one sitting might feel like the musical equivalent of scaling Everest, but with so many dizzying peaks along the way the effort is well rewarded. [Jun 2014, p.90]

It's their immersion in multi-layered psychedelia that give Midnight Sun its compellingly ominous underpinning and complete two-sides-of-vinyl feel. [Jun 2014, p.91]

With its Magic Fly synthetic hustle, single Fever pulses with the same reductive pop genius, but doubtless deterred by the laws of diminishing returns the Keys have eschewed ab blanket reiteration--with mixed results. [Jun 2014, p.91]

An absorbing, enthralling effort. [Jun 2014, p.91]

Life is rarely more tellingly captured in music. [May 2014, p.89]

Eclectic whimsicality--chugging blues gets a stadium guitar intro; horns add even more uplift to engaging Fountains Of Waynesque Big Times. [May 2014, p.91]

Ziggy never quite manages to be his own man here. [May 2014, p.86]

It's astonishing how lyrical just two guitars can be. [May 2014, p.94]

[Black Women is] the key cut on a third album that shows he's maturing impressively. [Apr 2014, p.97]

It's all a bit similar, and amazingly unmoving, until the last number. [May 2014, p.92]

The indie poppers stay true to their roots with a tuneful balancing of high-tempo and the laid-back. [May 2014, p.96]

Embrace is schizophrenic stab at modernity, bolting synths and clattering drum patterns to forgettable harmonies, with limp results. [May 2014, p.88]

III is third time lucky in all senses other than sadly-departed guitar visionary David Hackney being around to share in the joy it brings. [May 2014, p.87]

John Schmersal's quirky falsetto lights up this debut. [May 2014, p.96]

It's all Iggy-growl motorik country-boogie and modal psychedelic blues jams. [May 2014, p.96]

Cavernous drones suggesting messages from a reverberant brutalist cathedral somewhere out in the California desert. [May 2014, p.96]

Very promising young London singer. [May 2014, p.96]

Pop songs at warp speed in the vein of say, All or early Lemonheads. [May 2014, p.96]

A late-night drift into the abyss. [May 2014, p.96]

[A] set of exhilarating if unrelenting Weezeresque thrash pop. [May 2014, p.96]