McGuire's guitar and tape loop examination of his own psycho-dynamics. [Mar 2014, p.96]

An intriguing LP that balances inner existential turmoil with external grace. [Mar 2014, p.96]

An uber-melodious debut.[Mar 2014, p.96]

These evocative originals, inspired by road trips, inevitably reconnect ti her Memphis roots. [Mar 2014, p.96]

[The album boasts] more accomplished songwriting than some bands manage in a career. [Mar 2014, p.96]

Musically, Stewart's ambition to marry first-album Suicide with Einsturzende Neubauten and latter-day Scott Walker has been realised with aplomb. [Mar 2014, p.95]

An ADHD, electro-fuelled crazy quilt. [Mar 2014, p.95]

Evoking cinematic cliches is almost unavoidable on a mutant, spirited debut whose diversity is its greatest asset. [Mar 2014, p.95]

There's nothing indistinct about the more congenial, festival-friendly direction of War Room Stories. [Mar 2014, p.95]

At every turn there are moves unarguably adjacent to Revolver, The Zombies, early Byrds, and, in the title track strident harmonies, The Mamas & The Papas.... The tunes throughout, though, are original, and infectious. [Mar 2014, p.94]

An unadorned diamond in the rough, and his best record. [Mar 2014, p.94]

It's this continued need to feed her multi-platinum beast that stops the album from being the post-modern wheeze it could have been. [Mar 2014, p.94]

Haze's impetuosity may've harmed Dirty Gold's commercial prospects, but the purity of her intent speaks volumes. [Mar 2014, p.94]

This is a very organic, modern album. And it's brilliant. [Mar 2014, p.93]

An array of session superheroes fill the album with crackling electricity. [Mar 2014, p.93]

Kidjo is in scintillating form. [Mar 2014, p.93]

This is the sound of a band making a bold, if not entirely original, creative leap. [Mar 2014, p.92]

Tinariwen still speak to the world as outsiders, but now they are telling us more about ourselves than we knew before. [Mar 2014, p.92]

Blood and religion, sin and redemption are as key to Biram's music as country, punk, blues, spirituals and good-ol'-boy rock.... There's great examples here. [Mar 2014, p.91]

Swaying choruses and gutsy musicianship.... there's life after the circus has left town. [Mar 2014, p.93]

A melancholic late-night album, then, but one that really sounds beautiful. [Mar 2014, p.91]

The result is a dazzlingly crafted bunch of hazy, West Coast pop gems stuffed with Santanaesque six-string wizardry. [Mar 2014, p.91]

The quartet's attempt ti create something like The Chemical Brothers' patchwork futurism, it is influenced by frontman Jack Steadman's global travels, but ends up sounding like a bunch of Gap Yah students discovering foreign climes fir the first time and leaning too hard on the console's Arcade Fire 2007 button. [Mar 2014, p.90]

This potent return affirms Finn heeds his own advice. [Mar 2014, p.90]

Dead is visceral, propulsive and bursting with life. [Mar 2014, p.88]

The overhaul, surely, needed to be much more far-reaching. [Mar 2014, p.88]

The wait has been worth it. [Mar 2014, p.88]

Pleasant but risk adverse. [Mar 2014, p.88]

The debut's sinister clouds are replaced by spry digital funk and studio sheen. [Mar 2014, p.96]

Fantastic stuff. [Feb 2014, p.102]

Edmunds has always delivered, whatever the age and circumstances. And this batch of originals and covers, recorded in full do-it-himself mode, doesn't change that. [Feb 2014, p.91]

Africa Express score by proffering a raw immediacy and innovative spirit that instantly expels any whiff of imperialist musical tourism. [Feb 2014, p.88]

Hard, hearty and at home amid the grooves set out by the venerable likes of the Hodges brothers. [Feb 2014, p.96]

It's darker and starker, more 4am despair than midnight rendezvous. [Feb 2014, p.97]

It turns to a clutch of its founding fathers and allies for its 14th outing. [Feb 2014, p.97]

10 wistful, tender songs. [Feb 2014, p.98]

[The album,] at first, seems suffused in the same late-summer glow as The Beach Boys' low-key '68 LP Friends. But this brightness soon fades, the album becoming a beautifully solitary journey into night. [Feb 2014, p.95]

It's all expertly crafted stuff. [Feb 2014, p.94]

Overall Ghettoville feels unsettlingly cold; a stubborn statement of retirement in the form of a half-finished work. [Feb 2014, p.97]

Lanegan's own journey may be ongoing, but this is a vivid snapshot of where he's been. [Feb 2014, p.102]

The Worlocks remain a superior alloy of Velvets cool and narcotic Spaceman 3/MBV tropes. [Feb 2014, p.98]

The trio blow out the cobwebs with their relentless blasts of heavy metal sax/bass/drums power. [Feb 2014, p.98]

Well worth a late discovery. [Feb 2014, p.97]

Alternate/Endings is sprawling, cinematic and agenda setting. [Feb 2014, p.97]

Locating a broken, but still-beating heart within metallic machine music, East India Youth's debut is a triumph. [Feb 2014, p.97]

He's made a dramatic leap between first and second album as profound and unexpected as that of John Grant. [Feb 2014, p.96]

[Harcourt whets] our curiosity with this six-tracker which goes to the brink but never quite falls over the edge. [Feb 2014, p.96]

Realm's refusal to shut up after a radio-friendly 180 seconds, surely, make them all the more cherishable. [Feb 2014, p.96]

Like Sleater Kinney reimagined for synth-pop teens. [Feb 2014, p.98]

A record that twinkles with a smart electronic pop sheen. [Feb 2014, p.97]

Chiaroscuro is the contrast between light and dark in visual art, and I Break Horses' second album is similarly conflicted. [Feb 2014, p.97]

Moon ultimately suffers from a surfeit of wistful syrup. [Feb 2014, p.95]

An unusual 35 minutes, then, but Confection makes the perfect background for an evening of sophisticated seduction. [Feb 2014, p.95]

Rather than being derivative, this album is a perfect pop balance of cliche and rawness, with mythic ambition and songs that make you a three-minute hero. [Feb 2014, p.95]

The twilit fug of Warpaint is hypnotic, exotic, and rewards the close listening its hushed grooves and harmonies invite. [Feb 2014, p.94]

None The Wiser is as poppy a set as they have made to date. [Feb 2014, p.94]

The other peak performance is Longest Day Of The Year Blues, a deceptively languid doo wop ballad where the delicate tools that are Slade, Young and drummer Olly Joyce continue to punch well above their weight. [Feb 2014, p.94]

Remarkably, the performances by current artists from Ralph Stanley down the generations to Angel Snow are all superb. [Feb 2014, p.91]

Comparatively standard tunes such as To And Fro prevent Strong Feelings from being an unconditional classic, but that's tantamount to dismissing Toronto's CN Tower as a bit pointy. [Feb 2014, p.91]

Asgeir's voice is the first thing that grabs you. [Feb 2014, p.91]

This pan-generational Jones/Dap-Kings team have been injecting new vitality into a classic form since 2002, and the people will certainly want their strong new soul album. [Feb 2014, p.90]

Love's Crushing Diamond is restful, woven, baroque. [Feb 2014, p.89]

Filled with the restless tension of forever moving on from relationships, situations or cities, her rarefied empathy hits a haunting peak on For The Miner. [Feb 2014, p.89]

Those bummed that the proggy leanings of his Jicks have encouraged former Pavement stepper Malkmus to indulge his inner Saxondale will find much to love on their sixth album. [Feb 2014, p.88]

Rave Tapes does not find Mogwai colonising new territory, but that seems fair when their own stretch of land is still giving up such gold. [Feb 2014, p.89]

On this form, long may Damian Jurado stay lost. [Feb 2014, p.88]

This is a powerful collection of contemporary battle hymns that rings out lie a well-needed musical call to arms for the 99 per cent. [Feb 2014, p.88]

Wanderlust sees the singer execute an elegant slide into a more stately kind of pop. [Feb 2014, p.88]

The disillusionment makes for downbeat and decidedly adult pop. [Feb 2014, p.88]

Snoop is in surprisingly tender form. [Feb 2014, p.88]

Cymbals do serious but successfully swerve the perils of the po-faced by being fun. [Feb 2014, p.96]

Perhaps inevitably, given the material's scattered provenance High Hopes lacks the cohesion, both thematic and sonic that characterised Magic and Wrecking Ball. [Feb 2014, p.86]

He sounds shyer and less relaxed at the onset than on the 1968 archive At Canterbury House. [Jan 2014, p.112]

Highlights include the Earth, Wind & Fire-esque horns and harmonies of The Lewis Connection's Got To Be Something Here and tracks by Flyte Tyme, whose singer Cynthia Johnson left for Lipps Inc and Funkytown one-hit-wonderdom, but who on this evidence clearly deserved much better, [Jan 2014. p.108]

Fuses Velvetsy heartbeat minimalism with pastoral strings and acoustic guitar. [Jan 2014, p.104]

Their relentless attack is deadly serious. [Jan 2014, p.104]

16 lightly fried examples of his gift for surrealist pop/classic rock synthesis. [Jan 2014, p.104]

BSP's sifts from poignant viola and tranquil vocals to foaming turbulence are perfect. [Jan 2014, p.104]

Tricolore feels like an imaginary soundtrack. [Jan 2014, p.103]

While Desert Skies' fusion of '60s country-rock with '90s underground dynamics doesn't move ass deeply as 2001's sublime Once We Were Trees, its peaks prove Beachwood Sparks' early days are worth investigating. [Jan 2014, p.103]

A lesser work compared to, say, 2008's Nude With Boots, Tres Cabrones nevertheless stomps with enough sulphurous, slothful might to satisfy the faithful. [Jan 2014, p.102]

It's possible that it all makes rather more sense to the creators than it does to the listeners. [Jan 2014, p.102]

Fetch finds the band a newly slimline two-piece in pursuit of fresh territory. [Jan 2014, p.102]

One Day Away, with Urban, is country-lite, but everything else is heavy with the weight of Guy's skill and experience. [Jan 2014, p.101]

It feels like a big step forward. [Jan 2014, p.101]

Both slow-burning, early Zeppelin-style blues, its understandable they would front-load the album with its trump card, but both seem slightly at odds with the Dickinsons' mission statement. [Jan 2014, p.101]

Defiant, confused, heartbreaking: Hank3 is country music in a nutshell. [Jan 2014, p.101]

A remarkable, wonderful calling card. [Jan 2014, p.100]

A winner from top to bottom. [Jan 2014, p.100]

At once as snug as a velvet quilt in a log cabin, yet as challenging and testing as modern architecture, VII is a signpost to a whole new direction for Americana. [Jan 2014, p.100]

Its music delivered with an understated, glacial splendour. [Jan 2014, p.97]

Tomita-worthy retro electronica that justifies another stab at White Christmas, and rehabilitates lesser-known carols such as Midnight Clear and Sleep Quietly. [Jan 2014, p.97]

While reining in the triumphalism, Demonstration suffers from an overbearing sense of its own importance. [Jan 2014, p.97]

Cupid Deluxe is wildly eclectic and nostalgic. [Jan 2014, p.97]

By turns squally and bleepy, poppy and droney, the music here is too unfocused to really hit home. Again, just like old times. [Jan 2014, p.97]

The snotty attitude of MIA's incendiary globalist skipping rhymes has never been better balanced with first-rate pop hooks. [Jan 2014, p.96]

The stage is small, the set short, but as ever, The Bad Seeds contain multitudes. [Jan 2014, p.96]

Filled with tearful ballads and ragged-trousered country, the Avetts' playing may not be the most technically accomplished but the feel they bring to Never Been Alive and Another Is Waiting is alone worth wading through their previously misfiring albums. [Jan 2014, p.96]