It's a return to their best. [Oct 2012, p.83]

Scratchily downbeat, this is a true artist's vision in that Hood can remove himself from the pain without stinting on the honesty. [Oct 2012, p.82]

Those fans who jumped on with 1994's breakthrough album Dookie should rejoice: your favourite slacker-punks are, briefly, back. [Oct 2012, p.82]

If letting the world in has resulted in an album this beguiling, there's nothing to fear. [Oct 2012, p.80]

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

The smooth edges of Mature Themes doesn't mean this music is any easier to grasp. [Sep 2012, p.86]

This fierce debut [is] an essential purchase for anyone who has fallen for the jazzier end of the Ethiopiques spectrum. [Sep 2012, p.97]

Amid the psychedelic soft rock and esoteric twiddling, three tracks stand out. [Sep 2012, p.94]

This is the album to prove that great Afrobeat doesn't have to be a Kuti family affair. [Sep 2012, p.97]

Frenetic take on Radiohead's Street Spirit aside, the tightly arranged songs here are pleasingly Queen, AC/DC, Lizzy and Leppard-aware. [Sep 2012, p.86]

The best thing he's done since [Hard Road to Travel]. [Jul 2012, p.88]

DOOM is in the form of his life here. [Jun 2012, p.85]

This sounds like a calculated genre exercise. [Sep 2012, p.90]

While Anastasis is typified by lengthy songs and sometimes rather ponderous beats, Gerald is in her element on Kiko. [Sep 2012, p.95]

Ultimately Four is an album of two 9uneven) sides). [Sep 2012, p.89]

This is Swans at their most user-unfriendly and trouser soiling. [Sep 2012, p.94.]

The orb's Dr. Alex Paterson and Thomas Fehlmann conduct themselves as if overawed by their hero. They allow Perry to prattle away unchecked. [Sep 2012, p.88]

Rather than slicing the Fleet Foxes cucumber too thin, Poor Man adds a whole new flavour. [Sep 2012, p.86

II offers a litany of brief, mellifluous, vaguely jazzy mood sketches, fluidly mapping a terrain both playful and emotionally resonant like the missing link between Eric Satie's Gymnopedies and Everybody Digs Bill Evans. [Sep 2012, p.88]

There are moments when dear slips down pop alleys, but for those following, there's a creeping sense it could turn a bit Don't Look Now at any second. [Sep 2012, p.86]

While traces of Deacon's former giddiness punctuate America, there's an ambitiously hefty, almost John Doe Passos-like engagement with the ambiguities of the Land of the Free. [Sep 2012, p.88]

These 15 songs justify their status as outtakes. [Sep 2012, p.96]

They stick to their winning formula. [Sep 2012, p.88]

It's a scream, as we would expect from a musical humorist ranking only behind Randy Newman on the LOL-meter. And rivaled only by Tom Waits as a gloves-off DIY soundscapist in wood, steel, and string. [Sep 2012, p.87]

These radio sessions and TV appearances present an unique, accelerated Kinks history. [Sep 2012, p.103]

It's sex music for oddballs. [Sep 2012, p.89]

The more experimental efforts have a real impact. [Sep 2012, p.97]

Her tendency to over-infuse them with the weepies neuters what otherwise be gleaming moments. [Sep 2012, p.94]

It's a unified listen: it works as an album. [Sep 2012, p.102]

The sextet ply their angular chord changes and syncopated rhythms in first-rate tunes. [Sep 2012, p.97]

[A] rich and complex album. [Sep 2012, p.95]

The sense of isolation, longing and homesickness are palpable. But he's also wry and darkly funny, self-referential, and self-deprecating too. [Sep 2012, p.95]

The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends was the perfect Record Store Day artefact--dramatising the value and mystique of physical recordings. [Sep 2012, p.94]

It may prove hard for Matsson to get heard above the quiet din made by so many others who clutter his field, but he's one of the all-too-few worth listening to. [Sep 2012, p.94]

It lacks the crisp modernity of old but it's knee-deep in lush curvature and angular salvos, and new favourites keep emerging. [Sep 2012, p.94]

[The album includes] a stomping version of Elmore James's Rollin' And Tumblin' and a long and not wholly convincing reading of Stevie Wonder's Uptight. [Sep 2012, p.90]

Minimalist production values prevail and succeed in highlighting the beautiful--and often haunting melancholic--sonorities of Wilson's pipes. [Sep 2012, p.90]

I Was a Cat from a Book is as warm as an all-enveloping blanket by the hearth. [Sep 2012, p.89]

Thoughtful, tuneful, exquisitely melancholy, ever slightly off centre-- [Silencio] is, indeed, a welcome haven. [Sep 2012, p.86]

Gigantic of sound and vision, grandly poetic of pronouncement, the Millennium Stadium surely beckons. [Sep 2012, p.97]

The repetitive music loses a little power when you're sitting down listening to a hi-fi. [Aug 2012, p.87]

This epic finally reveals his personal vision in all its frenetic glory. [Aug 2012, p.94]

This debut captures their explosive energy and thunder; this is a band, that when it's found its own voice, will definitely go the distance. [Mar 2012, p.921]

An uneven yet entertaining debut. [Jun 2012, p.85]

Exquisitely sung, swept over with stormy emotions, Wild Dog's autumnal mysteries are alluring indeed. [Jul 2012, p.85]

His first LP of complete originals is a thing of profound beauty; deep, sad, wise songs, allied to perfectly crafted arrangements, from a man who's lived long enough in darkness to address the big, heavy questions with a lightness of touch. [Aug 2012, p.96]

This full of 303 squelches and flat, ever wonderful 808 thups-thups, sinister vocals and robot rumba rhythms. [Aug 2012, p.102]

Blur 21's extraordinary warts'n'all scope makes its subject's odyssey momentous and tangible. [Aug 2012, p.98]

These songs sound like old country classics. [Aug 2012, p.96]

There's country stoicism, sentimentality and sparkling sadness on the songs. [Aug 2012, p.96]

Ethereal snatches of long-lost voices from old 78s, stentorian tones of TS Eliot and--on Richardson Road--Robert Wyatt adds plenty to this warm-hearted electronica. [Aug 2012, p.87]

It's Thornton Wilder's Our Town divested of optimism, yet retaining that play's twilight feel. [Aug 2012, p.86]

This is Hogan's first solo album in 11 years and her best. [Aug 2012, p.96]

MOB sound as electrifying, as curious and as awake as they ever have. [Aug 2012, p.96]

It buries some strong writing, singing and potential. [Aug 2012, p.96]

For the most part his tribute to Duke Ellington works in the way that should keep purist onside. [Aug 2012, p.96]

This transatlantic convergence of innovative, virtuosic minds is a sublime advert for the possibilities of improves post classical composition. [Aug 2012, p.94]

It seems more about Africa's love affair with US urbana, and so less endearing. [Aug 2012, p.94]

Unity Band is now a scintillating platform for Metheny's fretboard wizardry. [Aug 2012, p/94]

La Havas sets herself apart from the coffee shop set with a rough-hewn edge. [Aug 2012, p.92]

Though no Pet Sound, this album, at its best so wistfully reliving out golden yesterdays, ranks up there with Today! [Aug 2012, p.92]

With the excellent Roots backing her, she recasts many of the dominant black music sounds of 30 or so years ago on a set of songs which address concerns that are clearly in the here-and-now. [Aug 2012, p.92]

It signals the charged completion of a circuit, the final bridging of a gap between conductors. [Aug 2012, p.91]

WIXIW's pop is still complex and affecting and of beguiling substance. [Aug 2012, p.91]

The former [true gems] are plenty, the latter [filler are] few. [Aug 2012, p.91]

Swing Lo works best at arm's length, admired like a diamond rather than held like a carbon-based life-form. [Aug 2012, p.91]

When it works, it's astonishing, but his hit rate is middling compared with erstwhile sparring partner El-P. [Aug 2012, p.90]

Danger et al stamp their authority on the genre, with a collision of claustrophobic lyrics, charm and playful innocence. [Aug 2012, p.90]

The album is at its rawest and most dynamic on such garage tracks as I Gotta Get Shorty Out Of Jail and One-Eyed Jack. [Aug 2012, p.90]

Fortunately, it manages to hang together in a way that suggest steamy nights out in the city with Massive Attack. [Aug 2012, p.90]

An extraordinary, multi-layered, attention-grabbing record. [Aug 2012, p.87]

He hops from one musical lilypad to the next--arguably a few too many for comfort. [Aug 2012, p.87]

Lewis hasn't topped 2010's masterful Forget, but he has proved it was no fluke. [Aug 2012, p.87]

The spring in their step has a dangerously sharp point to increase Never's allure. [Aug 2012, p.87]

The somnambulant nihilism of his one-trick flow and the risible machismo of choruses quickly wear out SpaceGhostPurrp's welcome. [Aug 2012, p.87]

Urban Turban is another irresistible Cornershop mash-up. [Aug 2012, p.86]

The stylistic shifts mean The Tarnished Gold doesn't hang together--it lacks the luster of real gold. [Aug 2012, p.85]

Yet for all Doseone's phantasmagoria and keening schizophrenia, there's a melodic richness that miraculously sculpts order out of the panicked disco chaos. [Aug 2012, p.85]

Theirs is a refreshing opaque, charmingly fumbling sound world. [Aug 2012, p.92]

Broken Brights is like a stroll along the beach at dusk; reflective, intimate, nostalgic and yet full of tomorrow's promise. [Aug 2012, p.92]

Pure class. [Jun 2012, p.92]

He has created a wooded lattice of crackling guitar and dusky electronica. [Jun 2012, p.87]

What started out as playful downtime in the studio soon blossomed into a set of poetic urban folk songs. [Jun 2012, p.86]

There is less of the soundscaping and eerie atmospherics that made last year's X EP so entertainingly varied. [Jun 2012, p.85]

Today it sounds quintessentially McCartney. [Jun 2012, p.100]

The languid voiced one has rarely sounded better. [Jun 2012, p.100]

The unreleased material sustains earlier standards. [Jun 2012, p.100]

There's still no room for the instrumental warm-up, so don't throw out that original bootleg. [Jun 2012, p.99]

It's hot, loose, raucous, and retro in an overlapping-era kind of way. [Jun 2012, p.93]

It's a beauty, intimate songs and poetic lyrics, overdubbed with the Seattle-based Texan's own harmonies. [Jun 2012, p.93]

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

He stomps or sways along in the nu Seattle folk/rockabilly grave-fun way displaying a sing-the-phonebook grace. [Jun 2012, p.93]

The songs are rarely more than threads of querulous melody and floaty notions. [Jun 2012, p.93]

Passage surges, subsides and enthralls like a Gothic Sigur Ros. [Jun 2012, p.93]

It is a lot like Teen dream, but novelty is hardly the point: if Beach House are your type, then Bloom is unlikely to see the attraction wither. [Jun 2012, p.93]

The group's fourth album confirms that their default setting is a bit four-square nuts-and-bolts punk pop. [Jun 2012, p.92]

A gloriously unviable alternative to dullard R&B/X Factorism. [Jun 2012, p.92]

Charmingly eccentric...but spiky too. [Jun 2012, p.92]