A masterpiece. [May 2004, p.103]

Further expands ambient pedal steel's possibilities, adding strings and piano. [Mar 2021, p.91]

This never feels thrown-together, which is some achievement. Instead, the album feels like one to spend ample amounts of time with as you travel its far-flung corners as it reaches for the stars. [Feb 2021, p.84]

A sensual, hallucinatory delight. [Jan 2022, p.86]

Imarhan's 11 songs come wrapped in a soundscape; a surround-sound version would have the guitars and vocal central, but dust devils and translucent scorpions in the corners of your room, a sweet tea bubbling away and, after dark, the shuffling of a hyena behind the settee. the music expands to fill the space. [Mar 2022, p.82]

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

Might be one of the very best, and a neat entry point for new explorers. [Apr 2021, p.85]

Her jazziest yet, expressive alto-sax and hypnotic spoken words ladle emotional gravitas onto its fevered meditations and splintered storytelling. [Nov 2023, p.94]

This is an intimate portrait painted in bold strokes. [Dec 2023, p.90]

Across 10 intimate songs deftly ornamented by guitarists Matt Worley and Tony Kelsey and cellist Barney Morse-Brown, magic happens. [Nov 2025, p.88]

Toronto punk sextet's third LP is an epic soundtrack. [July 2011, p. 104]

Maybe if they'd dated this collection back to 1979 and the Christian albums, they'd have a more interesting storyline, but we definitely wouldn't have had a better collection of songs. [Nov 2008, p.122]

Admirers of Granduciel's previous forays along E Street won't be disappointed. [Apr 2014, p.91]

Beautiful and potent stuff. [Oct 2020, p.89]

Owusu is a charismatic anchor throughout this boundary-pushing debut. [Apr 2021, p.85]

Comic, sinister, suddenly moving, it feels like real-time psychological excavation, digging for truth. [May 2021, p.84]

A liberating 73-minute sprawl, constantly blurring the lines between euphony and cacophony. [Dec 2021, p.89]

Callahan's cast on Gold Record are notable for their kindness, and for the dignity of their discretion. [Oct 2020, p.85]

Taylor's beseeching voice and invigorating take on gospel is sincere and moving. [May 2013, p.96]

You couldn't wish for a more fitting musical soundtrack to the rest of your 2014. [Nov 2014, p.96]

Atmospheric chromatic harmonica, swirling strings, shadowy woodwind and Bargeld's rich voice add up to an album demonstrating that black has many shades. [Jun 2016, p.95]

Overall this is vivid testimony to art's elevating power. [Apr 2018, p.102]

Been Around has heart, soul, a voice and tunes to die for, an early highlight of 2020. [Feb 2020, p.90]

All guns are still blazing, but slightly differently. [Mar 2023, p.86]

This edge, this acknowledgment of the stakes at play behind her messages of faith, pushes these songs past any risk of empty sentimentalism, and makes Sun Without The Heat truly uplifting. [May 2024, p.87]

It's an entirely cohesive record, brimming with energy, invention, humour, lived experience, nifty playing and earwormy melodies: all things that make up a great debut album. [Jul 2024, p.88]

["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]

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]

Discreetly excellent comeback. [Apr 2025, p.87]

Anthology 4 offers another transporting parallel view into how The Beatles did what they did, from the pre-fame beginnings to the end and after. [Dec 2025, p.12]

Their latest band, captured on Live Forever in full electric flow. [Jun 2026, p.84]

[Francesco Turrisi's] accompaniments, often on old/unusual instruments, add a strange, delicate beauty to Giddens' solemn, powerful soprano. [Jun 2019, p.89]

Holmes is scrabbling throught he ashes of Vegas strip supper-club jazz to craft a decidedly 21st century soundtrack, mourning its passing while happily rifling its pockets. [Album of the Month, Feb 2002, p.90]

The result is laidback and chilled. [Apr 2003, p.104]

Nick Lowe has made the album of his career, a dozen stories of love and loss so beautifully simple that you'll never get to the bottom of them. [Nov 2001, p.12]

The short length and minimal production means Untitled Unmastered occasionally lacks the dynamics of Lamar’s previous work, but it remains an enthralling postscript to his masterpiece.

The urgency is tangible, as is the sense that while Simpson is smashing up genres as a rapid response to extreme times, he’s also landed on one of the best ideas of his increasingly remarkable career. Mutiny After Midnight doesn’t propose an escape from the now, it demands we confront it head-on, by being our most righteous and uninhibited selves. [Jun 2026, p.84]

There's nothing bland about this fervid, ideasy album. [Sep 2015, p.90]

A beguiling marriage of tradition and modernism. [May 2011, p.107]

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

While synth stomp Full Of Fire circles the (twisted) dancefloor, the bias is for brave, immersive, and high-risk music. [May 2013, p.88]

Side by side in this unfamiliar setting, well-known songs become unsettling. [Oct 2017, p.104]

With a voice that perfectly balances grit and sugar, Daniel and band tread their indie/rock tightrope with flair. [Mar 2022, p.85]

It represents the singer's best work since the aforesaid "Urban Hang Suite." [Sep 2009, p.93]

The Window Is The Dream initially seems opaque, but keep looking through and all becomes beautifully clear. [May 2023, p.92]

The magic of DJ Koze lies in the unique complex musical terroir he's built. [May 2018, p.93]

It's the insular intimacy of Korkejian's songs, like Zephyrs whispered in your ear, that make this debut such a triumph. [Aug 2017, p.95]

Do It Afraid doesn't sound quite as home-made and fingerprint-smudged as Bey's lo-fi previous recordings, there's still no-one who sounds like her, no-one chronicling the agony and ecstasy with her unguarded and resonant vision. [Aug 2025, p.81]

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

This is Joe Ely at his rugged best. [Nov 2015, p.94]

Acute while charming, she captures the sadness and silliness of the months when she hightailed it out of Ortonvile, Michigan, pop. 1,442. [Jun 2014, p.95]

The follow-up has richer, dreamier contours, but the mood is gaunter. [Sep 2018, p.94]

These are acutely playful and poignant dissections of his world. [May 2019, p.87]

This rolling membership opens the palette considerably. ... The songs that leave the biggest impression, however, are the raucous yet soulful bangers. [Mar 2020, p.89]

James Hunter may have a new band from New York but they swing like his old one, and it's mostly business as usual here, with Hunter's new batch of songs sounding just like the old songs he's influenced by. [Apr 2020, p.94]

This is as moving and real as Orton has ever been. [Oct 2022, p.86]

Her fiercest offering since 1996's landmark The Way I Should, and a long overdue follow-up to that album's righteous ire. [Apr 2023, p.83]

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

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]

Simon's new music sounds inventive, surprising and catchy to boot. [Jul 2016, p.94]

The 10 songs here complements mainman Creston Spiers' whisper-to-howl vocals with startling dynamic shifts. [Sep 2008, p.106]

Sounds miraculously unburdened by its conceptual weight.[Dec. 2011 p. 90]

Feels as old as a cracked-leather Bible that's lasted generations and witnessed many secrets. [Apr 2006, p.98]

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

An inspired makeover that only serves to complement Weaver's past achievements. [Aug 2019, p.93]

Despite these songs' sensuous abundance, deepened by McEntire's lush, chlorophyll-rich voice, there's a sharp modernity here. [Sep 2020, p.89]

Magic.... Its rhapsodies present a portait of an artist at an early height of his powers. [Feb 2005, p.102]

A lower case delight. [Nov 2020, p.88]

As candid as Steiner can be, this doesn't play like a primal scream: her naked vulnerability makes it a remarkably moving experience. [Apr 2026, p.91]

The songs on this second solo album are more substantive than those of 2017's Wintres Woma. [May 2020, p.90]

In line with the album title, Richard reins it in, as if she’s singing torch songs, but the emotion is palpable, her lyrics freighted with trauma. [Nov 2024, p.87]

Born from Locks' work with prison inmates, the likes of Distance are intricately funky collages, not a million miles away from recent tracks by Billy Woods. [Apr 2025, p.84]

It's the way these sessions are gracefully processed into digitalia that makes the whole thing so cohesive. [Dec 2021 p.87]

Third shows Portishead in the tradition of, say, Fairpoint Convention as much as Massive Attack, and though it might not convert sceptics it is convincing, and occasionally thrilling, demonstration that the wilderness can be a great place to cook up new ideas. [May 2008, p.103]

The results are mesmeric in their stately extrapolation of gloom. [May 2002, p.102]

A more focused excursion. [Oct 2017, p.98]

I Inside the Old Year Dying holds itself at the biting point between old and new, re-evaluation and revelation. What lies on the other side, only Polly Harvey knows, but this is a record she was born to make. [Aug 2023, p.76]

Cowards is all killer, both musically and thematically. [Mar 2025, p.84]

A fittingly weighty document of their emotional heft. [Nov 2015, p.105]

It's masterful stuff: a full conceptual realisation, filled with great melodies, deep grooves, colourful characterisations and sonic detail that reveals itself over repeated plays. ... A keeper for the decades to come. [Jun 2021, p.84]

An exhilarating record by a band not only thriving under pressure but already finding new ways to adapt to its force. [Feb 2022, p.80]

Impossible Truth is an unusually articulate trip. [May 2013, p.85]

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]

Stay Positive has consistently stronger material than its preecessors and, perhaps more importantly, is sequenced to maximum efficacy. [Aug 2008, p.100]

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]

Cooder has history in his brain, veins and fingertips as well as a gift for sound collage. [Nov 2014, p.109]

The Beloved Scouse songsmith's virtues are writ large: heart swelling hymns to the common man, irrepressible shanties, imaginatively deployed strings and brass, affectionate songs of booze-love, as unhinged a school-days memoir as you'll ever hear, and, at the closing Adios Amigo, the fondest of farewells. [Dec 2017, p.92]

Some bands arrive as a work in progress. Others, such as Divorce, are fully formed from Birth. .... They tick boxes aplenty. [Apr 2025, p.86]

An exquisite, arresting introduction. [Sep 2025, p.85]

A clearer-headed Goulden has given eight of those under-loved songs the garage verité treatment they needed all along for England Screaming. [Dec 2025, p.82]

Deliver[s] more surreal, neon-psych country rock, in sweet harmonies and super-crunchy six-string riffs. [Oct 2023, p.89]

Gigi's Recovery fully achieves TMC's transformative purpose, its lyrics of unflinching self-scrutiny leading to side two's exhilarating Only Good Things and the thrillingly airborne climactic title track. [Feb 2023, p.82]

Bleach sounds liked a valiant manifesto for something new that succeeded beyond anyone's wildest nightmare. [Dec 2009, p.112]

This new material finds them in [a] more experimental mode. [Oct 2017, p.90]

Occasionally ground down in the past with the sheer weight of sadness, here Songs:Ohia sound defiant, uplifting, and never better. [Apr 2003, p.102]

This is one explosive package no hip hop loving home should be without. [Aug 2004, p.92]

Coheres as well as anything else in their canon. [Jun 2003, p.90]

The Lost Tapes is such an impressive testament to Can's inspiration and questing spirit that without being greedy, one hopes that there may be more tapes sequestered away. [Jul 2012, p.96]