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]

Adroit instrumentation and elegant melodies from the NY quartet. [May 2014, p.96]

Unfidelity exhibits sonic DNA from all corners of pioneering electronica. [May 2014, p.93]

It peaks with the opulent nu-disco of Tempest. [May 2014, p.93]

Perhaps Terje pushes the eclectic envelope too hard, but dance albums are rarely this fresh, distinctive and evolved. [May 2014, p.93]

Ragan's fifth album is rock as much as roots. [May 2014, p.91]

[The Nocturne Diaries] is beautiful. [May 2014, p.91]

This is unashamedly traditional: committed, personal and really quite perfect. [May 2014, p.91]

Estoile Naiant is a work of excessive indirection and wonder that becomes terrifying only if you try to define its boundaries. [May 2014, p.90]

Mohawk finds him reaching an apotheosis. [May 2014, p.90]

What's lacking is the shock factor.... At its best, amid the oceanic dream-wave of melody and surreal verbiage that these reanimated Pixies still essay with style, Indie Cindy is worthy of full participation. [May 2014, p.90]

An album that falls between traditional and progressive country stools. [May 2014, p.89]

The band's bluegrass, country-folk and doo wop-informed debut packs a front porch charm. [May 2014, p.89]

Too often his songwriting is so tasteful that it can tend toward the anonymous. [May 2014, p.88]

This is very much Goodwin's record, the work of a man revelling in his own company. [May 2014, p.88]

The Soul Of The Hour rumbles onward with fearsome nocturnal dread, if paced with sufficient patience this time to allow the odd shaft of illumination to seep in. [May 2014, p.87]

The trio's gifts mesh to deliver a truly idiosyncratic attack, as refreshing and labyrinthine a hip hop debut as New York has delivered since Company Flow's Funcrusher Plus. [May 2014, p.87]

Much of Supermodel feels alienatingly dense. [May 2014, p.86]

Waterhouse's 2012 debut, Time's All Gone, combined strong songwriting with an impressive, hard-voiced approach, and this follow-up does the same again. [May 2014, p.94]

Hendra might deal with life's compromises, but there's no disappointment here. [May 2014, p.92]

This is a more expansive, rococo production than Callahan's Dream River. [May 2014, p.91]

They still sing some parts in unison, but here their voices are arranged more imaginatively. [May 2014, p.89]

The bold Old Fears is more than a side project. [May 2014, p.89]

Only a few moments--Happy, the Daft Punk-featuring Gust Of Wind and I Know Who You Are--sound truly out of the ordinary. [May 2014, p.86]

Nutini has grown up, and his music has grown with him: in a world littered with handsome young singer-songwriters who become obsolete some time between their first hit and first album, it's an admirable achievement. [May 2014, p.88]

Wildewoman is more of a patchwork quilt. [May 2014, p.94]

The deep soulfulness that always set The Afghan Whigs apart from the pack was no mirage, and on Do To The Beast, it has matured with grace and power. [May 2014, p.86]

Much is intimate and seductive, but Undress emphasizes the feeling Hoop is in a holding pattern which is increasingly hard to escape. [May 2014, p.91]

Cameron Neal earths this plangent guitar-rock with his anxious cris de coeur and admits to a teen Smiths crush, which helps explain the metropolitan jitters and Marr-like cadences that feed into Fear In Bliss. [May 2014, p.91]

What used to work well just doesn't any more, even though Finn still conjures street stories with a rank, raw conversational truth. [May 2014, p.87]

Occasionally tracks are achingly earnest; but overall this is light in the darkness, about love and death and bravery of all kinds. [May 2014, p.94]

It's the chiming guitars of album centerpiece, A Swallow In The Sun, that really underlines a sense that The Cautionary Tales Of... operates in the same ballpark as Sea Change--Beck's 2002 work of staggering heartbreak. [May 2014, p.91]

Timely stuff. [May 2014, p.88]

The Cordon Bleu-trained chef transforming humble ingredients into Michelin-starred delicacies at once melting, tender and sweet. [May 2014, p.93]

It's less effective on the bland troubadour pop of Here Today and The Man, which samples Elton John's Your Song and is already a US Top 5 hit. [May 2014, p.92]

The album's stand-outs come when they soften their stance. [May 2014, p.93]

Subtly psychedelic, intuitively clever and constantly challenging, Everyday Robots underlines that Albarn is an artist of originality and depth, a master of the haunting, insidious melody and--perhaps this needs no reiteration--a gifted, inventive musician. [May 2014, p.84]

The elements that make up Best Of times were all there before, but even the band concedes that they have finally found their true sound. [Apr 2014, p.90]

She sounds a tad daft masquerading as a feisty Harlem mama on the Pharrell-produced I Can't rely On You, but her uber-gutsy delivery still charms. [Apr 2014, p.90]

A nice little happy-ever-after. [Mar 2014, p.92]

Now restored to their original length, the Fillmore performances--characterised by lysergic avant-funk and tripped-out soundscapes--are incredibly powerful and a permanent reminder of Miles Davis's pathfinding genius. [Apr 2014, p.107]

Hallucinatory sonic landscapes that whistle, throb, sing and buzz like the heightened inner-space rhythms of the body. [Apr 2014, p.95]

At its best during the cinematic rock of Coming Home, the epic, plangent Roses and pugilistic opener The Factory Gates. It's less successful on the woozy stomp-alongs of Misery Company and Meanwhile Up in Heaven. [Apr 2014, p.92]

Man On the Rocks is better when he dials down the mawkish choruses and over-emoting vocals. [Apr 2014, p.97]

Her confidence as a performer is clear, as is her growth as a songwriter. [Mar 2014, p.93]

Sciubba turns in surreal, lo-fi rock, delivered with the drop-dead charisma of Patti Smith and in the dark-brown tenor of Nico. [Apr 2014, p.97]

JRW's third has enough honky-tonk brio to merit comparison with Kings Of Leon. [Apr 2014, p.98]

Thoughtful, slow-burning dream pop. [Apr 2014, p.98]

Sweet, then, but you wouldn't eat a whole one. [Apr 2014, p.98]

It's breathless stuff, but can feel homogenous after a while. [Apr 2014, p.98]

With the frustrating Violent Light, Wilson has surrendered his own persona. [Apr 2014, p.97]

If anything, it's darker [than Fenster's debut album], like clotted blood. [Apr 2014, p.97]