Heartstrings is a succinct outing that charms. [Jul 2014, p.86]

The songs effortlessly stand alone. [Jul 2014, p.86]

If the band's 2012 debut for the label, 119, attracted a certain amount of criticism from early-day fans due to its diversity, then No Peace is a more cohesive record. [Jul 2014, p.86]

Sometimes, the abiding mood is one of grand interstellar drift, an ancient exhausted spaceship cruising through deep space, leaving rippling waves of a strange blank intensity in its wake. [Jul 2014, p.95]

Sound Mirror is far more than an exercise of indulgence. [Jul 2014, p.94]

What makes everything tick is Berman's plausibly gooey hooks, matched by guitars sparkling like diamante--just the ticket for shiny, happy people. [Jul 2014, p.95]

The FB's ragged, slip-sliding DNA is too irreverent to make them true inheritors of The Band's mantle, and that hasn't changed. Neither has the way they're one minute bursting with exuberance and the next resembling a burst tyre. [Jul 2014, p.93]

Luck is more satisfying than Leisure Seizure, but it's still not throwing sixes all the way. [Jul 2014, p.90]

Not quite essential, unfortunately, and you might even long for a bit more shredding. [Jul 2014, p.90]

The resulting arrangements are masterful affairs that frame LaMontagne's material with great taste and flair. [Jul 2014, p.90]

Heal's molten flow of grandiloquent '70s rock and '80s electronica is unstoppable. [Jul 2014, p.88]

Initial listens may suggest contrived incongruity. Further spins reveal the affectionate smarts behind these acts of desecration. [Jul 2014, p.87]

Familiar BJM territory perhaps, but they still inhabit a different, more enticing cosmos to their peers. [Jul 2014, p.87]

This is a resolutely up record, for the most part. [Jul 2014, p.92]

The Soderbergs seize the day. [Jul 2014, p.91]

The songs are rigorously infectious. [Jul 2014, p.96]

More non-threatening folk-pop. [Jul 2014, p.96]

An album of rich, intricate grooves that use house and techno merely as a jump-off point. [Jul 2014, p.94]

This will thrill those who believe Pavement's best album was their first. [Jul 2014, p.86]

At root, it's a heart-warming little curio. [Jul 2014, p.86]

It's an intriguing new incarnation for Bauer: Om and pop. [Jul 2014, p.88]

Celebrating both Big Bill and the Alvins' shared boyhood, this genial collaboration throws a warm light on both. [Jul 2014, p.89]

[A] slower tempii dominate the first half of Emma Jean, leaving the lapel-grabbing soul struts until the second half of the record. [Jul 2014, p.89]

Tobin's songs offer a more lucid warmth. [Jul 2014, p.96]

The soundtrack to blissful bucolic afternoons threatened by the black clouds of the coming apocalypse. [Jul 2014, p.95]

Glass Boys' legacy will likely be the Fucked Up record fans praise for its songs, rather than the risk-taking. [Jul 2014, p.95]

Throughout, a world weariness and wisdom far beyond John Fullbright's 25 years. [Jul 2014, p.93]

There's always a soulful undercurrent to James's work, exemplified by album's deliciously dream title cut. [Jul 2014, p.92]

Krell sounds like ha has taken a step back, seemingly trading his experimentalism for a more traditional blue-eyed soul route. [Jul 2014, p.91]

Here's a quiet rhapsody of twining acoustic guitars, cherry-sad reeds and songs that feel solid for a bit then slip away into dying-fall bluenotes and the kind of lines that provoke romantic poetic recollection. [Jul 2014, p.88]

The scale of the latter achievements suggest Kasabian and 48:13 will get by nicely with their existing fanbase. Whether this means many new converts is less certain. [Jul 2014, p.87]

The results are generally spectacular. [Jul 2014, p.93]

In no way startling, but elegantly put-together all the same. [Jul 2014, p.92]

The title track is a thunderous grower with a tribal, kick-ass epiphany. And then...it's one mediocre ballad after another. [Jul 2014, p.91]

Beauty & Ruin--a lean, 12 songs in 37 minutes--finds Mould still monkeying with the formula. [Jul 2014, p.90]

CLPPNG is the work of hip hop auteurs delivering the shock of the new. [Jul 2014, p.88]

Await Barbarians reminds of Alex Chilton or even Liam Hayes's earliest music as Plush. [Jul 2014, P.87]

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

Restored to Johnson;s original running order, it closes with the dissociative dance of Giant, a final defiant gesture on a record that squares up to tomorrow and--against the odds--wins. [Aug 2014, p.102]

[Arto Lindsay's] languorous delivery and oblique lyrics feature on three songs--with balmy results on mooching, drum-machine-propelled opener Many Descriptions and languid, art-pop essay Classify, and in markedly meditate contrast to the ominous synthscape of Longest Escalator In The World. [Aug 2014, p.89]

Not so much the future of hip hop as a giant leap sideways. [Aug 2014, p.86]

The synths are always used imaginately, forming an intricately shifting mosaic structure on Sheen. [Aug 2014, p.91]

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]

Diving into yesterday never sounded so good. [Aug 2014, p.90]

#7885 is an ideal primer for the curious previously cowed by their considerable legacy. [Aug 2014, p.102]

[The album] features twisty, full-produced beats, but sounds more like a set of disjointed songs than a cohesive album. [Aug 2014, p.96]

Textured electronica and crafted melodies make for a dense and absorbing effort. [Aug 2014, p.96]

Above all, there's a genius for economy. [Aug 2014, p.94]

Nothing suggests that Parton has lost her touch as a writer. [Aug 2014, p.94]

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]