Aside from the occasional rote workout (Sweeden, enlivened only by Denys Baptiste’s squalling sax), Renascence finds Cymande firmly in the pocket. [Mar 2025, p.93]

The feel is sweaty, late-night techno, and while the Detroit clatter and acid squelch is more alluring this time around, it's Saoudi's lascivious persona that really pulls yoyu into the album's nether world. [Feb 2025, p.84]

She's found a gift for reinvention; the change suits her. [Mar 2025, p.84]

The songs are often slow (Boise, Idaho and One Of These Days (I'm Gonna Spend The Night with You) are lovely), sometimes more upbeat (smile-inducing Tonight With The Dogs I'm Sleeping; waltz-time Guns Are For Cowards) occasionally Doomy (Is My Living In Vain?). and all backed by a rich ensemble of Nashville "cats". [Mar 2025, p.90]

Stability and appreciation of life's little victories have rarely sounded more delightful. [Feb 2025, p.84]

It's all consummately executed, just lacking a burning lyrical purpose. [Mar 2025, p.86]

As well as less oft-aired selections from Stoogean days (I'm Sick Of You, a ferocious Death Trip), the Bowie era (Mass Production) and later solo outings (The Endless Sea, off '79's New Values), there's a trumpet-led singalong for The Passenger, and Loose rendered with a near-big band swing - weird but actually rather wonderful. [Feb 2025, p.85]

It's yet another beauty. [Mar 2025, p.93]

If you like Papa M and Nic Jones, prepare to be delighted. [Feb 2025, p.87]

Caribou meets late-period Madonna, perhaps, but given DIA's depth of melody and nuance, Minus might be the Phoebe Bridgers of Techno-pop. [Feb 2025, p.82]

As always, Genders writes beautifully strange folk songs that wouldn't sound out of place back in folk revival clubs like London's Les Cousins, except they pop and ping with Lindsay's lo-fi beats and organic samples. [Feb 2025, p.83]

This self-written, almost wholly self-played treasure trove of lavishly arranged widescreen epics owes as much to John Barry as John Grant. [Feb 2025, p.90]

There's a lushness to Dungan's layering throughout that reminds of William Tyler, Stuart Hyatt and labelmate Ezra Feinberg. [Mar 2025, p.90]

Rarely has ruminations on decline, in fact, sounded so vigorous. [Mar 2025, p.90]

A breathless, party-starting exploration of the connection between the Congo and cumbia. [Mar 2025, p.91]

Sensuous and calm, yet cut through with deep strumming guitar and a rolling lilt, it has a folk rock drift that's less ribald, less edgy than the theatrical spark of 2021's A Common Turn and in|FLUX (2023). [Mar 2025, p.90]

Booker has relocated to a more contemporary - and sonically speaking, far more interesting - place here. [Feb 2025, p.82]

One of those bracing, snarky, crafted and fun records that reminds you of a bunch of old favourites while simultaneously exerting its own personality. [Feb 2025, p.83]

In all, another most welcome Delivery from the Antipodes. [Feb 2025, p.84]

To call it a mature album would be to take away some of the perennially youthful spirit of Mogwai, but it certainly achieves a crafted, discerning grace. However hellish it may have been, a baptism in The Bad Fire has clearly proved to be a renewing experience. [Feb 2025, p.86]

It's a slow burner that catches fire. [Feb 2025, p.82]

Exquisitely intimate; the kind of emotionally articulate record Karen Carpenter might have made had she lived longer and fully discovered her own writing voice. [Feb 2024, p.87]

Héritage is a triumphant return, a complete rewriting of what their purpose and apprach were a decade ago. [Feb 2015, p.85]

Marries Gerald Clayton's vivid, painterly piano with Immanuel Wilkins' malleable alto sax and vibraphonist Joel Ross's heady melodicism, its internal poetry enhanced by Kendrick Scott's sophisticated drums and Matt Brewer's intricate bass. [Jan 2025, p.85]

As Hear My Song proves, she was never about the standard. An inability to rein herself in, to be anything other than Laura Nyro, remains the hallmark of her stop-start career. [Feb 2024, p.92]

Linderman owes what happened to her with this superbly honed musical novella. [Feb 2025, p.80]

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

Full Moon thunders on near-relentless sub-bass (Mntanami, about her absentee father) and post-dancehall Amapiano beats, with interludes of wishy-washy synthy vulnerability - a serviceable backdrop upon which this irresistibly raunchy personality reliably shines. [Feb 2025, p.88]

Nu-riot grrrls who may well be doing it better than anyone since Bikini Kill. [Feb 2025, p.91]

The overall feeling of lab-hygienic utility is clearly intended, but a pretty wistfulness also whistles down these wires. [Feb 2025, p.87]

It's a nuanced, multi-layered insight into Raczynski's increasingly becalmed world. [Jan 2025, p.87]

Franz Ferdinand's first album since 2018's Always Ascending finds them re-invigorated, if not wholly reborn. [Feb 2025, p.88]

His phrasing the rare product of a lifetime spent refining how to sing plain and true yet always with the hint of a raggle-taggle tune pulsing beneath the surface. [Jan 2025, p.84]

It's easily Body Count's finest hour. [Jan 2025, p.82]

Songs of experience, beautifully realised. [Jan 2025, p.86]

Studio-recorded in a single sitting, the Arkestra honour their mentor’s methods by keeping everything moving, seemingly to infinity. [Feb 2025, p.89]

Matt Berninger walks a distinguished line between control and catharsis, with only occasional collapses (Graceless, for example), but when the music falls away during Bloodbuzz Ohio, you hear a band carried on by both the roar of the crowd and the structural might of their songwriting. [Jan 2025, p.83]

With piano and dulcimer adding unforeseen acoustic texture, Trees Speak’s soundworld is ever-changing, often terrifying, but rarely short of awe-inspiring. [Jan 2025, p.90]

The waves that roll through Mosaic are chiller, more austere, but no less beautiful. [Feb 2025, p.89]

Ambient noise draws the threads of these songs together – distant chatter, the sound of rain – but it’s the night buses and pubs of Wonderlight that best catch The Night’s Victoria Segal muted glimmer. [Feb 2025, p.82]

Tuneful ’60s folk-rockers Lucky #8 and Mary Miracle raise the tempo while closer Fractal Canyon is a joyful epiphany of redemption. [Feb 2025, p.84]

Straddles the line between the jackhammer clattering pop of Girls Aloud (Sorry, Etc is almost a facsimile), the elusiveness of Fiona Apple and Chvrches’ own electro backdrop. [Feb 2025, p.88]

Though it’s not the recluse’s reverie that was 2020’s fine single-hander Monovision, Long Way Home also feels somewhat introverted. [Sep 2024, p.86]

Tropicália, Third to Six Soft Machine, Santana, Dungen, Alice Coltrane and Kamasi Washington seem to be in there. The Nick van Bakel-led, Melbourne-based art-popsters subsume all of this and more into the whole; a seamless coagulation. [Jan 2025, p.85]

As with predecessors Omega and The 7th Hand, Blues Blood brims with fresh harmonic ideas, but also an emotional potency that resonates long afterwards. [Nov 2024, p.90]

Add in lyrics that could make Brian Wilson weep and here is an album equally suitable for long winter nights and bright summer parties. [Jan 2025, p.89]

It’s a truly gorgeous record, capturing the grand contrarian at his happiest, living in the present and reworking the past. [Nov 2024, p.89]

Its essence remains constant, as post-punk, soul and Southern rock collide in an ever-delectable succession of hyper-melodic bangers – sunny online-trolling satire Flash Bare Ass, and faith-keeping marital romancer Light On surely count amongst JP’s career-best. [Jan 2025, p.82]

As fine as anything they’ve done, making a virtue of their shoestring gear and lo-fi recording tech to create minimal space-rock morsels focused on interior melancholy. Their melodies are sluggish, warm and desolate, their arrangements spare but affecting. [Jan 2025, p.90]

Tuttle locates the beauty, complexity, joy and decay within Chapman’s demos and opens them out into a new kind of collage-kosmische, finding the European psychedelic resonances in Chapman’s multilayered blues patterns and reworking them for some kind of grand, universal eternity. [Oct 2024, p.87]

Coleman is the revelation, a muscular, soulful conscience in the modal frenzy, raw and swinging like a barroom Coltrane. Shorter is already headed for tomorrow, spiralling through So What and Walkin’ with acrobatic modernism. But Coleman paved the way. This is his party. [Jan 2025, p.94]

They remain wholly beholden to Liam Fray’s songwriting, but they’re assisted by contemporaries: upwardly mobile Scottish soul singer Brooke Combe offers depth-giving harmonies on Sweet Surrender, as does Pixey on the unusually sweary First Name Terms. Solitude Of The Night Bus skirts too close to Arctic Monkeys, but Fray is developing apace. [Dec 2024, p.85]

The stylistic shifts and sheer quality of the songwriting make Fever Longing Still almost the perfect Paul Kelly album. [Dec 2024, p.93]

Dad is no longer the singer he was, which of course makes Cat Stevens’ title track all the more poignant. .... Junior does most of the heavy vocal lifting and it is he, you suspect, who suggested Ph.D.’s I Won’t Let You Down and Eurythmics’ Here Comes The Rain Again, both of which turn out to be highlights. [Jan 2025, p.82]

Stein steers these heavy songs with an admirably light touch. [Jan 2025, p.89]

Some of the best moments, though, are when you can get past their familiarity and hear the newness of the individual voices creating the harmonies – and also hear how much they seem to enjoy and inspire each other. [Dec 2024, p.103]

Each little element of Queen I’s flamboyant, sometimes preposterous excess now has its own place in the sonic firmament, youthful, incomparable Freddie Mercury close enough to touch. Rest assured, though, that the integrity of the original recordings remains. There are no new overdubs. [Dec 2024, p.96]

From a brilliantly tense 1977 cover of the Detroit Emeralds’ 1972 disco hit Feel The Need, to a Velvets-drone re-murking of Dylan’s She Belongs To Me and his recent doomy techno-goth NIN collaboration Star, these rough, raw and unfinished gems remind us that Ferry’s art was never just about surface perfection but always in what lies beneath. [Dec 2024, p.99]

Talking Heads: 77 still feels like a record that is always going to get past you, speeding ahead of the curve. [Jan 2025, p.96]

["Fünf"] A finale that thrillingly manifests the Can legend – equal parts ascetic and visceral, a wondrous zone where the corporeally propulsive co-exists effortlessly with the cerebral. The preceding Eins to Vier really aren’t bad either. [Jan 2025, p.98]

It’s the surprisingly light touch of the booming bass that gets you on 100% Samba; Rio De Janeiro A Janeiro, meanwhile, reminds you that Verocai grew up on the progressive rock that percolated through Brazil in the late 1960s. Long may they keep collaborating. [Jan 2025, p.87]

Those who like their Dave in lane will prefer the recently released, quintessentially post-rocking Aerial M Peel Session Andrew Perry from 1998. Fans of unpredictable Pajo should feast here. [Jan 2025, p.89]

The inevitable irony is that the first-class packaging and mono fidelity makes this serial potpourri feel new and thrilling again - while none of it accurately reflects the Beatles' creative intent and daily momentum. [Dec 2024, p.100]

They still sound remarkably fresh, and here their short (only three of the 14 songs last longer than three minutes), sharp shock still kicks hard. [Jan 2024, p.86]

It’s not all dreamy-headed stuff – Relief, for one, achieves rocky lift-off – but for the most part The Good Kind Tom Doyle sustains a compellingly airy atmosphere throughout. [Jan 2024, p.83]

Recorded in a single night, this light-touch meld of jazz, ambient, post-rock and hip-hop sensibilities find its players intertwined like tangled wires. [Jan 2025, p.82]

There are tender moments, too, such as Lianne La Havas’s guest-spot on sodium-lit ballad Body Shock, but this is largely a record of brash textures from a band relishing the margins. [Jan 2025, p.83]

Vital and vibrant. [Jan 2025, p.88]

Mostly Highway Prayers is a thrillingly modern bluegrass album for people who don’t even like bluegrass. [Jan 2025, p.88]

Another great, mind-bending, soul-baring, melodically rich album to his name: a singer tap dancing on the very edge. [Jan 2025, p.80]

’60s Mod club faves including thrilling takes on The First Cut Is The Deepest and Angel Of The Morning. [Dec 2024, p.94]

Live, the band’s urgency and spaciousness transform their fondness for cavernous arena rhythms and antiquated synths from clever re-appropriations into something that teases transcendence. [Dec 2024, p.85]

Nobody Loves You More is a singularly uplifting, life-affirming listen, where joy and despair, love and loss, are irrevocably entwined, and kept afloat by Deal’s unfailing lightness of touch. [Dec 2024, p.82]

But as personal as all of these songs sound, there’s a universality to Small Changes that, as with all Kiwanuka’s records, will emotionally connect with others. Everybody hurts, it seems to say, but this might help. [Dec 2024, p.86]

The easygoing Natural Information may be Callahan’s latter-day signature tune, and here daubed in Clarence Clemons-flavoured sax and quicksilver guitar, it sounds like the Eagles at a shamanic retreat. CPR for the soul. [Nov 2024, p.92]

Shaping billowing waves of electrostatic to articulate the sound of his hometown, Nairobi, at night. Worth resurrecting an old ’90s genre tag from The Bug’s past for Natur: illbience. [Nov 2024, p.87]

Expertly miked to capture Cannell’s own sharp recorder breaths and the church’s own otherworldly reverberations, the result is both a hallucinatory venture into sonic time travel, and a consciousness-expanding act of medieval meditation. [Nov 2024, p.88]

Mortality looms large as he recounts a car accident on The Last Ten Seconds Of Life, the bluegrass-flavoured Not A Lot Of Sand Left In The Glass and again for prairie trail eulogy I Want To Be The Man (My Dog Thinks I Am). [Nov 2024, p.84]

It’s their most expansive LP so far. [Nov 2024, p.92]

A triumph in thematic/aural juxtaposition, Come Ahead is up there with Primal Scream’s best. [Dec 2024, p.92]

With lyrics informed by loss and his current post-divorce relationship with a man, at the age of 64, Friday has clearly found himself and made a deeply heartfelt record, most of which is perhaps best heard at club-level volume. [Dec 2024, p.90]

His voice is a bit more raw in his 91st year, but that just adds yet more resonance. [Dec 2024, p.85]

It is gorgeous in the way a hotel painting is – very pleasant to look at once or twice but not to ponder for too long, an autumnal soundtrack whose glow fades like leaves. [Dec 2024, p.93]

There’s some very fine rock songs (Sally Was A Cop revisits the “Oh-oh-oh” singalong on Willie Mays Is Up At Bat from Temple Beautiful) and excellent ballads, from Americana closer It’s A Good Day To Be Alive to truly beautiful Red Sky Night. [Nov 2024, p.89]

Perrett might not have been having fun before, but even factoring in a song called Do Not Resuscitate, this finally sounds like the real thing. [Dec 2024, p.90]

Viva Lone Justice reminds us of all that made the original line-up special. [Dec 2024, p.92]

[These 14 jazz-pop miniatures offset whimsical structures and playful flaws with sharp hooks. [Dec 2024, p.94]

Thirty years on from Dubnobasswithmyheadman, the masters of post-rave audio narrative still know how to blow your tiny mind. [Dec 2024, p.90]

There’s a new level of sophistication here, befitting the fact that the one-time teenage home-recorder is now 27 and this is her fourth album. [Dec 2024, p.85]

Whatever ‘flow’ is, she has it, Koalas and Charlie Potato shimmering like hot tarmac mirages, and trippy closer Surround coming on like Parks and key collaborator Ruari Meehan’s nod to The Orb’s Little Fluffy Clouds. Repeat listens focus the kaleidoscope. [Dec 2024, p.87]

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]

REVELATOR is confrontational and sometimes uncomfortable (see CCTV’s shrill metallic screech), but always enthralling. [Dec 2024, p.91]

Here, he notes the dying of the light show with autumnal retreads of key songs from his annus mirabilis, including A Whiter Shade Of Pale, See Emily Play, A Day In The Life and – maybe toughest of all – Traffic’s No Face, No Name, No Number. [Oct 2024, p.82]

Their template of new music plus archival spoken word is revitalised here, with Earhart’s writing voiced anew by actor Kate Graham. Towards The Dream is guitar-twanging exhilaration. [Nov 2024, p.84]

Behind the moments that sound like megachurch guided meditation, however, are flashes of brilliant disturbance. .... Sophie stands as a monument to what might have been. [Dec 2024, p.92]

It’s late summer sunshine in music form. [Dec 2024, p.93]

No consolation, no platitudes: just stark commitment to picking up human signals through the storm. [Dec 2024, p.93]

Though the album opens with an isolated funky bass line, Butterss proves a democratic bandleader, often ceding the spotlight to saxophonist Josh Johnson and guitarist Gregory Uhlmann, Butterss’ companions in another fine group, SML. [Dec 2024, p.87]