Goat Girl grapple with strings, makeshift choirs, electronics and mellotron in a quietly exploratory set of off-centre tunes and potent lyrical questioning. [Jul 2024, p.92]

The album gels and is unexpectedly airy: with its souffle-light facade and full-fat core, this is a delight. [Dec 2025, p.83]

A sensual, hallucinatory delight. [Jan 2022, p.86]

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

This is the sound of 19 different keyboards imagining a parallel world where the test record in every '70s hi-fi home was Wendy C micro-Mooging her way through the Sun ra spaceways. The combination highlights the innocence and beauty of both styles, like forgotten '70s TV themes soundtracking scientific experiments or lonely IBM computers hymning their own obsolescence. [Jan 2022, p.86]

Hard blues, soul and R&B take a back seat to pop tunes with a elegant turn. [Oct 2016, p.92]

This is an album of easeful warmth, the sound of an ever restless, exploratory musician coming home. [Jul 2013, p.94]

A clearer-headed Goulden has given eight of those under-loved songs the garage verité treatment they needed all along for England Screaming. [Dec 2025, p.82]

Gave In Rest is melancholy yet beautiful, slow spectral low-end devotional music: creating a complete world that calls for total immersion. [Nov 2018, p.91]

Their best in almost a decade. [Jun 2005, p.100]

Exercises is elegant, welcoming, if somewhat melancholic. [Oct 2012, p.95]

A great country music record. Nothing less. [Oct 2014, p.91]

The Mysterines' raw, gothic debut crawls under the listener's skin, thanks to singer Lia Metcalfe's impressive vocal range. [Apr 2022, p.88]

A deep, thrilling listen. [Jan 2020, p.88]

The Miraculous is complex and provocative. [Dec 2015, p.87]

Waking The Dreaming Body is both welcoming comfort and a surprising joy. [Apr 2021, p.82]

Welshpool Frillies maintains the high standard GBV since he reunited them six years ago. [Sep 2023, p.82]

The upshot shocks with unexpected new ground. [Feb 2015, p.93]

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]

Each member is the main player in their sphere, while remaining part of the whole. [Jul 2021, p.92]

A deep, powerful and satisfying album. [Jul 2021, p.82]

The album is crowned by the extraordinary, seven-minutes-plus Death Engine, where a gospel feel gives way to a lengthy, rolling, Bach-like coda. On an otherwise tonally unified album, this is where Linden's emotions are at their rawest. [Jun 2020, p.89]

It's slow to coalesce, but when it does, U.F.O.F. flies. [Jun 2019, p.86]

For all the ways these songs frenetically pinball into different corners, the nervous scratch and scrap of guitars tightening up and unspooling around obtuse angles and machine-gun rhythms, there's a deceptively complex musicality pinning everything together. [Nov 2022, p.89]

Hymnal flows like diaphanous silk, the Berlin-based artist's otherworldly vocals stitching a sensuous golden thread throughout. [Aug 2025, p.85]

This time Fussell has a full band to flesh out his vision, providing front porch grooves that carry the same kind of woody resonance as those of The band. [Jul 2019, p.91]

Here technology is merely a vessel for a sound that remains pastoral and beguiling. Truly, a class act. [May 2015, p.95]

The Beach Boys vault, though, is full of Dennis tracks, and Feel Flows makes a great showcase for that Wilson's unlikely gifts, and the inconsistent strategies that bedevilled the band. [Sep 2021, p.90]

Indigo Meadow is their first to perfectly balance melody with noise. [Jun 2013, p.94]

A better advert for time-share life it's hard to imagine. [Feb 2004, p.102]

Rich, but foreboding stuff. [Mar 2003, p.106]

Certain of her likable idiosyncrasies appear to have been straightened out [since 2009's Hunting My Dress]. But while big, booming choruses bookend the album on Born To and When I'm Asleep, that's about as easy as this listen gets. [Jul 2012, p.89]

Songwriter is indeed a by-product of music rendered on a digital frontier; it is a worthy effort because it reinforces the humanity of a star who, in his last days, could seem like some untouchable god. [Aug 2024, p.78]

Smith's best, most satisfying album to date. [Mar 2005, p.106]

This band played their earthly songs with far more gentle elegance than they deploy nowadays in their sporadic revival. [Sep 2012, p.102]

More diverse, howling dirges from the West Coast quartet. [Oct 2015, p.98]

Modern country-funk jams packed with slick guitar licks, springy basslines and endless hooks. [Mar 2022, p.90]

It's an even more pop-centric prism of West Coast folky radiance. [Oct 2014, p.92]

A difficult record for many reasons, but an ineffably beautiful one, too. [Nov 20224, p.89]

GENA craft deliciously anachronistic R&B, rewiring the lushness and melodic complexity of '70s soul and funk for the post-Dilla era. [Apr 2026, p.91]

Muse and David Campbell's melodramatic arrangements occasionally raise a smile, but if you like your rock symphonic and your vocals histrionic, The 2nd Law delivers. [Nov 2012, p.87]

Brutally honest lyrically and deliciously more-ish in its rhythmic, electronic intensity. [Apr 2020, p.94]

Ultimately, it's Woods and Elucid who provide the intense, erudite, funny through-line. [Nov 2023, p.93]

Nothing fundamental has changed, the attack is just more scrupulous. ... Hot Snakes' caustic, erudite commentary is more welcome than ever. [Apr 2018, p.88]

There's less reverb this time, but it all sounds great, befitting a set of excellent songs. [May 2025, p.85]

The results are as dreamy and swirling as Clouds Taste Metallic-era Flaming Lips, with Smith's unworldly vocals floating over the top. [May 2025, p.86]

What remarkable about the Roxy recordings, though, is the focus an power of the Santa Monica Flyers. ... The live performances a few days later are more robust, without diminishing the wired ambience. [Jun 2018, p.103]

Not a bad track here, but extra points to The Youngbloods' Get Together and excellent Woody Guthrie's Deportee. [Aug 2018, p.93]

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

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]

The flittering hooks of Whitty's first solo outing impact with tender grace. [Feb 2023, p.90]

A lyrically rich and musically colourful set of songs which is as emotionally exhilarating as it is often rawly painful. [Nov 2025, p.88]

Bracing, yet insidiously melodic. [Jan 2012, p.97]

A four-course meal of a record. [July 2002, p.108]

Discs 2 and 3 are essential if familiar, given they document sessions taped for the BBC, from an unreleased January 1972 Peel session to the version of Starman taped for Top Of The Pops in July. .... By contrast, everything on Disc 5 is fresh to this box. [Jul 2024, p.96]

[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]

Teardo's pizzicato arrangements lend Bargeld's melodic sprechgesang monologues a profoundly sinister undertow. [Aug 2013, p.90]

Nursing you back to equilibrium with its sumptuous balm of laid-back growers, Up On High is a near-perfect hangover record. [Nov 2019, p.93]

It is striking how old school and immediate it sounds. [Dec 2016, p.90]

Contains some of Broadcast's most adventurous music. [Sep 2006, p.118]

Further expands ambient pedal steel's possibilities, adding strings and piano. [Mar 2021, p.91]

Imagine a math-rock XTC fronted by Elliott Smith, illuminating the quiet corners of life. [Mar 2007, p.94]

She may not over-emote, but Elsewhere still has burn marks around its emotional edges. [May 2015, p.97]

The real star is Kingston MC Racquel Jones. [Apr 2017, p.99]

Big, warm music that doesn't shout loud, yet makes itself heard. [Apr 2017, p.97]

With producer Danger Mouse's nuanced psychedelic rock and soul backdrops, scintillating pop music with substance results. [May 2008, p.103]

Deschanel's light, Astrud Gilberto-style vocals float wistfully and when they collide with Ward's harmonies on Deirdre or with er own harmonies on Melt Away, it soars. [Sep 2022, p.94]

This is very much alright. [Apr 2025, p.82]

Earworms abound. [May 2020, p.96]

Painting Of A Panic Attack is easily FR's strongest album in years. [May 2016, p.89]

Soulful, moving music. [Apr 2012, p.91]

None [of the guest artists] crowd out Hitchcock's distinctive songwriting, though, nor his undimmed ability to reach through the existential murk and grasp a revelation or two. [Nov 2022, p.90]

They lurch between plaid-smothered unresolved chords and frontwoman Sadie Dupuis's verbose story-telling, delivered deadpan a la early Liz Phair. [May 2015, p.95]

It's clear Maal is still boxing clever. [Jul 2009]

Well-crafted third from the south London art pop duo with a playful spirit to match their impeccable post-punk influences. [Jul 2018, p.98]

'Just Breathe,' 'Amongst The Waves' and 'The End' make this one of Pearl jam's most satisfying albums. [Oct 2009, p.96]

Listen, Whitey! is quite simply ace. [Feb 2012]

Gravity Stairs is the most Crowded House thing that Crowded House have made in 30 years. [Jul 2024, p.90]

Up close and uncompromising, Exodus Of Venus elevates Cook into the top echelon of Nashville's new breed, an all-too-rare female voice among a a largely make elite. [Oct 2016, p.95]

Skirls of noise are layered like mille-feuille, bass drops hit with the muscular impact of a piledriver, and a cloud hangs heavy over the entirety of proceedings. [Jan 2022, p.87]

Their fourth LP might be their best. [Jun 2012, p.93]

All 12 songs have a warmth and, often as not, a jangle and sweet harmonies. [Nov 2017, p.100]

Sandman spent two years in his home studio experimenting with the band's dark, often minimalist sound and the result is this lusher, more fully realised album, whose brooding, narcotic Len-Cohen-goes-jazz title track is followed by songs that are variously cool, unsettling, sensual, personal and party-time funky.

This is an outfit broadening its musical horizon as the record spins. [Jan 2026, p.88]

Bailey has been constantly moving towards something truly great and Can't Take My Story Away gets her closer still. [Feb 2026, p.82]

A welcome drop in intensity. [Oct 2005, p.102]

Magnificently paced and candid, these 11 songs surface self-doubt and self-assurance as Marling learns to let parts of herself go. [Dec 2024, p.85]

Quite literally, a dream album. [Nov 2012, p.88]

At their most affecting and cohesive to date. [Dec 2015, p.91]

Multi-layered backing vocals and summery hooks tickle the spine with every listen. [Aug 2006, p.90]

Citizen Kane Jr. Blues has the challenged audio of a cassette machine hidden inside a coat or under a napkin. it also has the precious, authentic thrill of one-night-only magic. [Jun 2022, p.96]

Clocking in at under half-an-hour, the album proves a short, sweet delight. [Sep 2010, p.92]

An album that values discreet whimsy over Wicker Man portent, it succeeds on its own puckish terms. [Sep 2007, p.109]

It's something of a revelation. [Apr 2017, p.97]

The results are a triumph. Scott interprets everything in a manner that touches heart-strings. [Mar 2017, p.98]

The joyous next single, 'Let Me know,' along with dark gems such as 'Primitive' and 'Movie Star,' make this close to a modern synth-pop classic. [Nov 2007, p.90]

Stay Positive has consistently stronger material than its preecessors and, perhaps more importantly, is sequenced to maximum efficacy. [Aug 2008, p.100]

A mutant sound equal parts soft-pop, hard-fusion and psychedelic prog. [Jul 2020, p.80]