If the near Herculean task of sustaining enchantment through 12 instrumentals just occasionally tests Los Bitchos, it's easily forgivable. [Sep 2024, p.92]

Ritual is enchanting and transportive. [Sep 2024, p.84]

While ably constructed, particularly on the wistful The Old House, these songs feel slight - a starting point from which Konschuh's own individual voice may blossom. [Oct 2024, p.84]

There are still instances of thrilling freneticism; a Scandinavian Deerhoof. But this LP is often more cleanly directional – less angular and full of unexpected calm, as with the sweet vocal/ guitar chimes on Bell. [Sep 2024, p.89]

A deeply human record, the shepherd stepping away from his sermons to look for wonder and rapture. [Oct 2024, p.86]

You emerge rooting for Nicholson on every count. [Sep 2024, p.91]

Assembling musicians from the electronica, folk and jazz spheres to frame her disquisitions, she has fashioned a disquieting, gripping artefact. [Aug 2024, p.84]

Much of Ill Times Andrew Perry swings by like a more ’80s-fixated Black Keys (particularly yowler Fool For You), with Kenny-Smith unforeseeably excelling on the mike as a soul man, exorcising paternal bereavement (Dud) and the title track’s all-pervasive life agony. Old Transistor Radio busts out P-Funk proto-hip-hop, but there’s sufficient finesse here to make this team-up a keeper. [Sep 2024, p.93]

With her gravel’n’smoke voice, ability to be both cheeky and heartbreaking, and a dirt-kicking live band, her rise and rise is inevitable. [Sep 2024, p.91]

The album’s overriding mood is captured by the title track’s gospel choir sample: “daylight, sunshine, dance, embrace.” [Aug 2024, p.82]

[Grian] Chatten’s role feels ever more pivotal. His voice now has multiple personae, notably a Jeff Buckley doppelgänger on Romance’s upper register peals. His lyrical flow, meanwhile, makes pretty much every song an event. [Sep 2024, p.82]

A culturally rich and generally wonderful 72 minutes of little-heard revelry. [Oct 2024, p.94]

“Don’t mind me… I’m a lazy sod,” sings Ian Gillan. Other daft lyrics such as “Mother nature’s keeping her socks on” support his confession, but Deep Purple’s indomitable frontman remains in fine voice and, musically at least, they sound reborn here. [Aug 2024, p.81]

The huge exhilaration of Hawk's previous two albums has largely been replaced by more troubled moods - and more stylistic variety - but bravura lyrics remain. [Sep 2024, p.86]

Laus's writing is maturing, Real Man and tie My Shows surprisingly country-folk, while elsewhere there's bell-clear acoustic pop. Any occasional sameness is offset by existential stingers. [Oct 2024, p.90]

Boasting Dwyer's catchiest hooks yet. But Sorcs 80 is most alive when embracing its core weirdness. [Oct 2024, p.87]

A glorious convergence of talents. [Sep 2024, p.92]

Another Day, another faff-free, one-session-apiece exercise in succinctness, for a sixth long-player which presents Fucked Up as a more highly evolved version of their old selves – dense, intense and to-the-point. [Sep 2024, p.88]

Flight b741 feels like the doozy Primal Scream aspired to circa Give Out But Don’t Give Up. Turns out you don’t have to fly to Memphis to shine. [Sep 2024, p.88]

Like Baldwin, Ndegeocello isn’t one to look away, but both are generous enough and have the artistic skills to let you walk a mile in their shoes. [Sep 2024, p.87]

Aswad and Steel Pulse stand proud amid JA heavy-hitters Burning Spear and Black Uhur u, while PiL, The Slits and The Pop Group mingle with the un-dread Joe Jackson, SLF and Angelic Upstarts. With Misty In Roots glaringly absent due to ‘rights issues’, there’s ample scope for a sequel. [Sep 2024, p.101]

Ever unpredictable and inspired, >>>> is anything but run-of-the-mill. [Aug 2024, p.81]

Through it all, Metheny’s sole medium is a guitar built by luthier extraordinaire Linda Manzer. Thanks to his cloistered affair with the instrument, everybody wins. [Aug 2024, p.89]

The occasional slo-mo reverb-guitar twang, and on The Answers To The Questions a weary beatbox, cap off a supremely unsettling update on Lynchian pop weirdness. [Sep 2024, p.92]

It's impressive stuff, full of craft and invention, but there are moments when there could be more mellow - and a touch less pyrotechnic indie-rock Roman candle. [Sep 2024, p.91]

Smoke & Fiction is lean rock'n'roll that plays to the group's strengths. [Sep 2024, p.86]

This NYC ambient country trio continue to evolve on their fifth LP. [Sep 2024, p.94]

No Name is a much more nuanced record, more of a piece with White’s entire varied discography, than it might have first appeared.

Are Possible grasps the roots of folk tradition and propels them enthusiastically into new terrain. [Sep 2024, p.88]

What follows is a remarkably moving distillation of Blur’s 33 years as pop stars. [Sep 2024, p.84]

Here, the 36 unreleased tracks (albeit including alternate or instrumental versions of the LP cuts) highlight the outside influences that each brought to the table. [Sep 2024, p.96]

Lovely though these songs are, it’s hard not to feel they demand a similar attention, your mind fighting to impose structure on their swathes of classic rock signifiers, their lyrical opacity. Izenberg might be getting closer to his music, but he’s still oddly far away. [Sep 2024, p.84]

Forged from 60 hours of improvisation, the excellent follow-up to 2019’s Laughing Matter is tightly crafted without being too stable, the band throwing their melodic rope bridges over wide dark spaces on JJ’s woozy exotica lullaby or Lifeboat’s ominous electro-folk. [Sep 2024, p.84]

The Alabama five-piece, alongside producer David Cobb, totally cut loose, upping the octane to hard rockin’, guitar crunchin’ Southern gospel soul. [Sep 2024, p.86]

The Evidence and Hear The Children Sing are probably lodged in Talya Salsburg and Poppy Oldham’s subconsciouses for life now. Give this beautiful record of uncanny domesticity a few listens, and they may well take up residence in yours, too.

A succinct record about wisdom accrued through adversity, its layered arrangements packing subtle psych tropes and world-weary vocal-harmony. [Aug 2024, p.88]

There’s quite a variety of country musicians here. Most tend to play their selection pretty straight, though Rhiannon Giddens has an interesting take on Don’t Come Around Here No More. ... It’s the old school who provide this collection’s highlights. [Aug 2024, p.89]

Most of I Have Notes is a shop window for Gouldman’s songwriting craft. [Sep 2024, p.87]

Paint A Room’s hooks work in unassuming ways, carrying mid-’80s Creation vibes à la Weather Prophets or Westlake. [Sep 2024, p.86]

It’s a non-stop cavalcade of chá-chá-chá (including flute worthy of Orquesta Aragón) and mambo that should bring any dancer out of their shell. [Sep 2024, p.92]

It’s this ease and connection that gives When I’m Called its cumulative power. [Aug 2024, p.86]

Fielding love songs, existential ruminations and anthems of solidarity and resistance, The Auditorium Vol. 1 finds rap’s self-proclaimed James Baldwin sermonising in the key of life on its every glory and struggle, offering hope amid the darkness and remaining a voice of mature wisdom in a rudderless world. It’s one of his very best. [Sep 2024, p.90]

On record it’s more the spoken-word sections that grab the listener. [Jul 2024, p.93]

A quietly entrancing atmosphere is sustained throughout. [Jul 2024, p.84]

When Goddard himself provides vocals – notably on Follow You and On My Mind – it adds necessary cohesion. [Aug 2024, p.83]

Warning: the only rarity of note in this reissue, outside the remix narrative, is Lennon running down I’m The Greatest in a near-Beatles reunion with George Harrison and Ringo Starr – and that’s tucked away as a hidden bonus track. The Mind Games you get instead, in this lavish, rejuvenating treatment, is the several brighter, bolder albums it might have been, on the way to the one that fell flat in 1973. [Aug 2024, p.92]

Escape and new beginnings are constant themes in these eight mostly superb songs, but his old preoccupations keep yanking him back onto familiar turf. [Sep 2024, p.85]

It’s unlikely to set anything alight, but LA Times still leaves a warm glow. [Aug 2024, p.81]

There are gothy antecedents here – Baby Blue Movie sounds like the ’80s Cure over-medicated in the Hollywood Hills – and if it sustains a certain moodiness, X’s adheres to a tonally one-note atmosphere. [Aug 2024, p.82]

Kokoko! again deliver a banging, agitational rave-up that’s impossible to stay a wallflower to. [Aug 2024, p.87]

Jewel-sparkly and gently devastating. .... Devotees of Judee Sill, loved-up Bill Callahan and When Harry Met Sally will find it bright-eyed, glossy of coat and gentle of snout. Take it home. Feel less alone. [Aug 2024, p.85]

Unearthly. [Jul 2024, p.91]

Short it may be, but Happenings is full of ideas. [Aug 2024, p.83]

Ishibashi’s latest score is again subtle, delicate, but robust enough to blossom away from the film itself. It’s her balancing of disparate elements that’s so impressive. [Aug 2024, p.87]

Ultimately, by stylistically venturing back and forth in time, Aaron Frazer has struck gold with Into The Blue, a multifaceted soul album that blurs the past, the present and the possibilities of the future. [Aug 2024, p.82]

A haunting meditation on the state of America in the age of Trumpery (How I Wish) is the highlight, preceding the title track’s rousing gospel call to civil rights action. In contrast, she also documents the intimate and personal (Nothing Personal). [Aug 2024, p.89]

Pollard sounds more curious and engaged here than on some recent releases, and the result is the most compelling GBV of their third act. [Aug 2024, p.82]

Short but definitely sweet. [Aug 2024, p.94]

Their talent for maximalism is evident on the jagged, urgent Cinnamon Temple and a wonderfully trippy inversion of Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit. [Aug 2024, p.90]

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]

Walk Thru Me Andrew Perry feels less vibey and cutting-edge, with occasional polemical tunes reedily voiced by Davis, and Barlow brooding on grown-up issues like parenthood (My Little Lamb) and battling depression (Crepuscular) – not different enough from latterday Sebadoh, or indeed solo Barlow, surely, to reprise 1995’s commercial uplift. [Aug 2024, p.84]

Both energy and melodies hold strong throughout, and, suitably topped off with Ballad Of Mott-style self-chronicling finale Born Innocent, Redd Kross is these Angelenos’ defining epic. [Aug 2024, p.86]

How Will I Live… feels like a portal to some esoteric beyond, where minimal jazz, obtuse indie and folk-horror collide. Ominous, calmly-executed highlights I Swallowed A Stone, Unbraiding and How It Starts are marvels of world-building. [Aug 2024, p.84]

Deep, rewarding songs, rich in authorly detail, which, not for the first time, position Rateliff, still only 45, as a new Springsteen. [Aug 2024, p.81]

Ultimately, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that they’ve scaled greater heights with more time and pre-writing. [Aug 2024, p.91]

Further enriched by the palate of Fratti’s cello and Tosta’s brass, Sentir… is an extraordinarily possessed, uncanny world of its own. [Aug 2024, p.83]

Kamaru's softly spoken words amid Arkives' discomfiting drones drags listeners to unexpected depths, his voice a ghost in a machine of otherworldly chorale, siren-like synths and heaps of static. [Aug 2024, p.87]

In this filmic offering, all commentators observe our crumbling landscape. .... On the dark, drum-lead chant Baby Roe, DiFranco sounds like Billie Holiday as she upbraids the overturners of Roe v Wade (“We’re so wigged out/Yeah, we’re so devout”), before pleading for “the path of least suffering”. [Aug 2024, p.89]

McFarlane inhabits her songbook, eking out fresh meanings and truths. Unashamedly old-school backing from a core quartet of Giacomo Smith (sax), Joe Webb (piano), Ferg Ireland (bass) and Jas Kayser (drums) plays to her storytelling gifts. [Aug 2024, p.84]

Hex isn’t really about individual tracks, though: it’s about mood and feel. Overwhelmingly, the feel is good. [Aug 2024, p.86]

That on-the-road-again feeling is all over the album, with a well-honed band that plays like they still get a kick from it. [Jul 2024, p.91]

A rare (and improved) document of a more muscular Wings. [Aug 2024, p.99]

An urgent debut perfect for anyone grieving The Comet Is Coming's demise. [Aug 2024, p.90]

The intimate strings that lace the title track's elegiac sequence of pedal-effect guitar movements is a fresh high, the shadow-playing six-string storytellers surpassing the limitations of their intimate format. [Aug 2024, p.89]

A beautifully poised collection of deep, off-kilter, quasi techno and smudged ambient. [Aug 2024, p.87]

Placed in the modern setting and told in the universal language of folk music, her tales all ring true. [Aug 2024, p.83]

It is sentimental and raw, demented and ultimately reaffirming. [Aug 2024, p.81]

It's a fabulous record. A unique kind of Various Artists tribute album where its 11 songs - not a bad one among them. .... In All, delightful. [Aug 2024, p.80]

A 14-song whirlwind of dazzling approaches. [Aug 2024, p.88]

Stewart's mental health struggles delayed work, but the finished product distils personal pain into a powerful mix of Scott 3 and the Care Bears. [May 2024, p.84]

Easy to be cynical about Miracle Focus's natural-high alternative to Showalter's lysergic past, perhaps, but spacey, transcendent opener More You finds him in a wonderous, enviably alive place. [Jul 2024, p.91]

Not ideal for newcomers, perhaps, but a recumbent feast for fans. [Jul 2024, p.101]

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]

Morton & Russell rarely overplay their emotional hand, the music colour-changing to match the narrative of damage and resilience. .... Once it locks in, Daffodils & Dirt is hard to shake off. [Jul 2024, p.88]

Ultimately, the only benchmark springing to mind is the similarly-styledearly-'80sFranco-Belgians Antena. Feu De Garde is that good. [Jun 2024, p.88]

It's the confessional aspect that makes this compelling stuff, whether relating mid-life disappointment in Living The Dream or detailing a life reset in the delicately chiming Clean. [Jul 2024, p.84]

The wild times end on a poignant, giddy high with Parful - a house-y banger raving about everyday hedonism transcending sectarian violence - an irresistible distillation of Kneecap's peacetime party music. [Jul 2024, p.94]

Maisha builds on the old man's legacy by digging deeper into their background while allowing British producers Oli Barton-Wood and Tom Excell to add further layers in the mix. [Jul 2024, p.86]

While the nebulous quality of Mercy was very much feature-not-bug, a cloudiness indicating the limits of memory, here Cale seems to have sharpened the edges of his songs, any mist or drift purely down to old fashioned meandering. [Jul 2024, p.86]

With aid of latter-day Grace Jones producer Ivor Guest, his upbeat tendencies manifest in talk box-voiced electronic funk (think Roger Troutman/Zapp) that is more flattering, particularly when matched to the singer's biting wit on All That School and the MAGA-bashing Meek AF. [Jul 2024, p.86]

Their ninth record proves their distinctive spirit is still unbroken. The mood is knowingly mordant. [Jul 2024, p.84]

With childhood friend Sean Coleman aboard to coax Brian Wilson-ness from the 1980s'-penned And You Run, and tunes as charming as Breezy Sweet Smile, let's be grateful that Eels Time! rolls on. [Jul 2024, p.89]

Bonny Light Horseman probably could've said just as much over half the tracks, but the fact they had the courage to keep digging ever deeper into their emotional turbulence has bourne spectacular results. [Jul 2024, p.87]

This is Williams winningly flexing his more substantial songwriterly muscles. [Jul 2024, p.92]

It's a rare delight to hear a band so accomplished take what it does so seriously without taking itself that way. [Jul 2024, p.87]

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]

With percussionist Sam Clayton growling the vocals here,they bathe in the blues, immersed in classics by masters Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon and Little Walter. [Jul 2024, p.89]

In the best sense, she ticks boxes. With a slightly kooky voice, the bravery to unconventionally strip things down (the acoustic Dark is propelled by drums), a winning way with a hook (Missing Out swings) and a turn of phrase which veers from acerbic ("She says 'I might be a genius'/Well, she could be a model...") to lovelorn ("I want you to come over/So I can lay in your lap"). [Jul 2024, p.86]