Most of these 12 songs... fall within the wistful to enchanting range. [Oct 2006, p.96]

As trad indie goes, The World Is Not Good Enough is concise, fluid beauty, just 229 minutes of plangent songwriting that explores Solomon's alarming lack of cope mechanisms. [Jun 2026, p.86]

Whatever you're doing, I guarantee you'll stop and listen to every word. [Jun 2010, p.102]

These loose, predominantly acoustic arrangements area fine fit for Malkmus's usual shtick; shaggy, ambulatory songs full of odd twists and rococo angles that seem designed to undermine pretension rather than amplify it. [Apr 2020, p.90]

District Line is Mould's strongest song collection since Sugar's alt-rock paradigm, "Copper Blue." [Mar 2008, p.102]

Real Emotional Trash conjures a virtuoso meld of folk rock, prog and cosmic blues tropes, all filtered through the ex-pavement frontman's tradmark arch surrealism. [Apr 2008, p. 101]

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

Its loose theme is authority: on Curfew and Battery, beats hit like police baton rounds, sirens wail and every chord feels significant. [May 2016, p.91]

A more sophisticated Harry Nilsson-like groove, but still keeping those Music City roots. [Jun 2017, p.95]

Six years on from his last, with a white beard grown, Browne delivers elegantly considered weight and truth. [Nov 2008, p.119]

Raw and skiffly as you'd expect. [Apr 2015, p.95]

Hopscotching from arrhythmic electronica to brutal DJ Shadow-style sonic assault and back again, it's a final demonstration that at last Stateless have arrived somewhere they can happily call home. [Mar 2011, p.98]

A gently breath-taking wonder. [Apr 2024, p.91]

Nine wordless, shape-shifting essays. [Oct 2021, p.93]

Beautifully elusive. [Apr 2024., p.85]

One seriously heavyweight record, even by Boris' far-reaching standards. [Sep 2017, p.92]

It all adds up to the heavy, heavy sound of extinction rebellion, King Gizz developing themes they first explored on 2017's Murder Of The Universe. [Sep 2019, p.94]

May prove to be one of the most beautiful, tangentially produced artefacts of our strange and uncertain times. [Dec 2021, p.82]

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]

Pang! doesn't just look forward to a blazing global meltdown. Beneath the modernist sheen, Rhys roots these songs in something older and wiser. [Oct 2019, p.83]

[Gentle Stream] is gorgeous sun-dappled psych, crossing the lighter side of paisley underground with Nick Drake's dreaminess. [Dec 2011, p.93]

Olsen never gives into indulgence, however, her songs keeping their shape, their direction and their impact to the end. [Sep 2016, p.90]

By finally abandoning the pursuit of making alt-rock sound as pristine as possible, Twin Atlantic have actually struck upon something much more significant here: their identity. [Oct 2016, p.96]

A series of richly textured, ambient instrumentals from pedal steel guitar. [Oct 2016, p.92]

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]

An intense journey from slow harmonic chants to minimal rave euphoria. [Nov 2018, p.91]

Mozzer [is] in excellent voice. [May 2005, p.96]

Confronted by performances like this, you just have to lay down your critical apparatus and surrender to the spell. [Oct 2013, p.100]

While it's the Oldham-penned title track... which will rightly grab all the headlines, Staton's mastery of more traditional material is no less imposing. [Apr 2006, p.88]

This is groundling rock at its finest. [Dec 2017, p.103]

You'll need to attune yourself to the unique musical argot that Lopatin has created on R Plus Seven, but once achieved an album of intrigue and beauty is revealed. [Nov 2013, p.89]

Centralia's seven lengthy essays proffer the duo's boldest, most immersive statements to date. [Mar 2013, p.88]

The melding of the Bristolian mixmasters' complementary styles is a low-end treat. [Apr 2015, p.95]

Her finest work yet. [Jul 2025, p.79]

Recorded in five days in 2008 with Frank Black in Salem, this album makes you realize where all the rage had gone from Back & Forth; it was here. [Mar 2011, p.99]

Rather than delivering a post-modern mishmash, they effortlessly synthesise these elements, making themselves a candidate for the quintessential 21st century pop group. [Aug 2009, p.102]

Whenever he lays down his licks atop the bed he's made, there's never any doubt that this is a Pat Metheny record. One of his better ones, too. [Mar 2010, p.101]

She has moved into a more hospitable climate, where multitracking of bass-strung guitar, lap and pedal steel, electric piano and percussion have resulted in a warmer palette, a golden late-sfternoon landscape of long desert shadows. [Aug 2016, p.97]

Ruiz's best mode is mocking fury, wielded against Trump, scene exclusivity and the consequences of silence. The leering tone makes an already fearless record genuinely fun. [Sep 2017, p.86]

Their finest since 2010's Destroyer Of The Void - sees them concentrating on what they do best: songs that sound like The Beatles at Big Pink; songs that sound like Dylan gone power-pop. [Oct 2020, p.93]

The results, like a digestible Oneohtrix Point Never, are gloriously sweet natured. [Sep 2016, p.93]

Frustratingly short of utter genius, but largely lovely too. [May 2003, p.102]

["This Is How We Make Our Dreams Come True" is] one misfire in a never-predictable and constantly shapeshifting and imaginative album. [Jan 2026, p.85]

Teamed, the trio's rich vocal-blend and sometimes sparkling, sometimes scruffed modern country is deeply impressive. [Jan 2025, p.84]

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

Its raw, emotional heartbeat is laid bare at the onset. [Dec 2017, p.94]

A poignant tribute. [Jan 2020, p.84]

It's a compulsive listen. [Feb 2021, p.85]

[A] perfect symbiosis of mournful brass and life-giving rock. [Dec 2015, p.92]

Befitting the audiophile sonic explorer that Vernon is - sound reliably excellent. [May 2026, p.86]

Supernatural Thing makes a strong case for keeping that odd flame alive. [Aug 2023, p.82]

Prim they may appear at times, but their offer of comfort in sound is impossible to refuse. [Nov 2012, p.90]

The sum total of this umpteenth solo long-player in 40 years is that the prodigious and progressive Landreth is his own man - a futuristic traditionalist. It's time that wider audiences took notice. [Apr 2020, p.88]

The best protest albums generally come bathed in their own brand of musical sunshine and Cornershop's joyous post-Brexit call to arms is no exception to the rule. [Apr 2020, p.86]

Andorra arrives in reverberant, sun-drenched spumes of falsetto vocals, crunching guitars, pulsating drums, jingling sleigh bells and fluttering flutes. [Sep 2007, p.109]

High-end reference points for a record that spectacularly reconciles micro-detailed improv with deep-listening ambience. [Nov 2023, p.90]

There's tear-in-the bear country, an angry field song, but the killer is Sorrow's shine. Classic Jim White. [Feb 2015, p.95]

A similar debt to motorik beats turn this debut album from a potential Baggy cul-de-sac into an electro-gliding beauty. [May 2019, p.93]

His voice is magnificent, the songs simple and moving. .... Wonderful. [May 2025, p.84]

Played loud, and listened to intently, it's the Bonnie Prince's most vital new release in more than a decade. [May 2016, p.88]

Ultimately, Chasing Yesterday is an assured second step on Noel Gallagher’s solo path--more sure-footed lyrically, while bearing a very becoming new-found musical spaciness.

Songwriter Darnielle expertly renders the acute emotions of adopting a new tribe and the resignation that life often forces. [Jun 2017, p.89]

Highly entertaining, though best consumed a few songs at a time, Quickies is more than a novelty record, though certainly novel. [Jun 2020, p.90]

As ever it's the small details they alight upon which resonate. [Jul 2025, p.79]

It is an enormously beautiful. [Sep 2025, p.86]

So joyful, so tender, so warmly anthemic, its vintage moves are timeless, and irresistible. [Jul 2018, p.89]

The sound quality is akin to a great bootleg – vocals suffer during I Ain’t Got Nobody, the only Sly original here – but the energy and impact of the group is brilliantly intact. [Sep 2025, p.94]

The likes of Strange Quiet, wit its pretty, pointillist synths and wobbly drones, the stately crystal guitar-flecked Capsule, or the tremulous, opalescent Under The Moon, serve to deepen the original album's strange, wonderstruct mood. [Aug 2019, p.108]

All told: a summer soul smash. [Sep 2017, p.93]

Its songs hurtle at Buzzcocks pace and fizz with nagging melodies. [Jun 2003, p.110]

It's music that's soothing as transportive. [Dec 2021, p.87]

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

Vivid flamenco guitar burnishes a confessional Scots brogue. A beauty. [Oct 2013, p.98]

Simultaneously soaring and depthless, soothing and unnerving, solemn and joyful, McPhee's excursions feel weird, unknowable, as if the path we're on is both bright and labyrinthine, a certain route to the unknown. [Feb 2018, p.94]

Their third LP proper was still their best, most filler-free creation. .... Reminds us how much The Lovin' Spoonful mattered, and why Neil Young fantasied about joining them. [Jun 2026, p.94]

There's a sense of going too far, of antic hilarity tipping into something more revealing. [Apr 2007, p.104]

Snaith is increasingly confident in his own voice. [Mar 2020, p.86]

An often beautiful, occasionally intimidating 48-minute environment piece. [Mar 2025, p.86]

The increasingly salty bite of Oberst's lyrics is only sharpened by the homely warmth of Salutations' arrangements. [Apr 2017, p.97]

Their most remarkable record in years. [Feb 2015, p.95]

It is Crosby's stubbornly enduring voice--the will to live and create in that gift after he came so close to throwing it away--that binds the wonder and mission on For Free. [Aug 2021, p.81]

It's Blitz! succeeds because YYYs have managed to mix the human and the electronic, the emotional and the artsy, the fashion-forward and the oddly retro. [May 2009, p.94]

Old and new, sweet and sharp, Welcome strangers holds you in an ambiguous, but utterly enchanting, embrace. [Jun 2018, p.90]

A great summer indie pop album. [Oct 2021, p.99]

Another masterfully blended cocktail of restless electronic beats, analogue daubings and digitally blasted vocals. [Nov 2002, p.110]

This is to Ghosted what Layla Part 2 is to Layla, the transcendent, ambient coda to the hit record and, to those in the know, the place where you go for calm, peace and release. [Jun 2024, p.91]

Streetcore is an amalgam of all that made Joe Strummer, the musician and the man, so great. [Nov 2003, p.131]

Any threesome with such a full house of boss songwriters shouldn't go splitting up again. [Aug 2013, p.86]

Diego Garcia has fallen hard for Interpol's diagonal guitar/bass chimes, but his band's debut also suggests The Cure's pop-conscious first album rather than Joy Division. [Jan 2005, p.102]

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]

Girl Band play ugly noise with a charisma and energy to drag them from the no wave ghetto, to somewhere bigger. [Nov 2015, p.89]

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

An astonishing landmark, and great record, wherein the Mod once again becomes The Modernist. [May 2010, p.94]

These self-penned songs feel so timelessly authentic they might have been dredged from the deep well of traditional British Isles song from which Roberts regularly sips. [Feb 2015, p.95]

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

The album's blend of '70s Euro-flick iciness, shag-pile funk and dark lyricism make for an intriguing and sophisticated treat. [May 2016, p.86]

Part polemic, part paean and featuring contributions from amongst others, Paul McCartney, Imogen Heap and Tina Grace, it makes for an arresting colection that's as valid musically as it is for any mesage it is sending. [Nov 2008, p.12]