The Great Bailout is a grand, artistic and political statement in an age when such vision is too rarely attempted. [Apr 2024, p.87]

The songwriting's uniformly exceptional, the messaging on-the-nose and inspiring - and boy, can he still play guitar. [Apr 2024, p.82]

Despite one-time Rudimental leader Amir Amor's rather flat production and the dearth of all-out tub-thumpers beyond the wry The Lads, they've transformed themselves inti a differently beguiling proposition. [Mar 2024, p.88]

It really shouldn't work, but like much of It Leads To This, it does. [Mar 2024, p.91]

Throughout, Power's vocals retain their lovable keen and Youth's production is uncluttered and crisp. [Apr 2024, p.88]

The veteran 4AD band bring a depth and worldliness to these songs that sets them apart. [Apr 1024, p.92]

Glasgow Eyes' liberal use of electronics is a renewing force, and a kind of homecoming too. .... Glasgow Eyes is a positive twist in the sage of these negaholics synonymous. [Apr 2024, p.86]

The Candy House's garbled distress flare or the My Bloody Neubauten of I Don't Miss My Mond confirm she is still picking up signals nobody else can, [Apr 2024, p.88]

Don't be deceived: these songs have the substance to become - unlike those eBay purchases - an obsession that sticks. [Apr 2024, p.83]

Pissed Jeans' fist-pumping tunes, thrilling noise and acidic wit ensure their permanent bummer is always a good time. [Apr 2024, p.87]

A confident and substantial evolution of their sound. [Apr 2024, p.89]

This is too much fun to be a one-off. [Apr 2024, p.82]

In just any universe, Playing Favorites would dominate the world's FM stations for two years straight. [Apr 2024, p.84]

This cool and stylish record should make the jazz best-of-year lists. [Apr 2024, p.90]

Classic songwriting creatively re-imagined in pulsating, droning, rackety new environs. [Apr 2024, p.89]

An alleviating statement from an artist whose curiosity and striving fir development have remained a driving force. [Apr 2024, p.85]

The melancholy feels more goth than hippy and, ultimately, both the sounds and lyrics feel unresolved. [Apr 2024, p.90]

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

Walls is an essential slice of art-punk history. It's also a blistering good time. [Apr 2024, p.97]

An elegant, thought-provoking record. [Mar 2024, p.86]

Brilliantly executed with Shirley Bassey-like surety in an arresting, always distinctive, lyrical voice. [Mar 2024, p.89]

Daniel conveys an expert melancholy. its ups always just on the brink of an elegant down. [Mar 2024, p.88]

Heavy though it is, the songwriting remains remarkably light and agile. [Mar 2024, p.88]

A mesmerising return. [Mar 2024, p.90]

For all its filigree detail, Spring Eternal is a big philosophically questing record, a velvet glove hiding a death-like grip. [Mar 2024, p.90]

For all the heartache, Blu Wav is surprisingly uplifting, transcendent, even.[Feb 2024, p.85]

There are 808s and sensory synths galore, but it's the powerful message and those voices - tough soulful leads and contrastingly sweet gospel harmonies - that hold sway here. [Mar 2024, p.87]

Allied to keening, reedy vocals and sophisticated hooks, these songs deliver a truly impressive debut. [Mar 2024, p.88]

It's over in a flash, an exhilarating fairground ride you won't want to disembark. [Mar 2024, p.88]

Its aim is true, uplifting and yes, mighty persuasive. [Mar 2024, p.80]

The works-in-progress disc of this handsome reissue package gives an even starker impression of a man rummaging joyfully through the studio toy box, now slapping down an instinctively lively drum beat, now jumping on a synth he’s only just plugged in, and rolling with it.

Her ability to dominate a room with minimal musical movement is astonishing; this record lowers the temperature, heightens the sense, slows down life, frame by frame. [Mar 2024, p.85]

She's still drawn to the edges like a death's-head moth to an inferno, but once you are in Wolfe's distinctive headspace, it's easy to believe they are her comfort zone, and maybe even yours. [Mar 2025, p.85]

Rendered with a delicate, impressionistic touch, Phasor's dreamlike entreaties cut far deeper than predecessor Far In's lockdown ruminations. [Mar 2024, p.90]

What Now is no less discursive, plundering so many styles that it might instead be called What Next. But working with co-producer Shawn Everett in a series of top-tier Nashville hubs, Howard makes it cohere not only through the prayer bowls that clang and drone between tracks but also through the way she captures the wild vacillations of falling in and out of something that’s possibly good and potentially terrible. [Mar 2024, p.84]

But, for all the technical proficiency, there's a sense of nobody ushing themselves too hard. [Mar 2024, p.91]

Tapir!'s considerable world-building skills impress, even if seven-minute closer Mountain Song seems a little directionless. [Feb 2024, p.88]

[Producer Daniel Boyle] strikes a crisp specious groove somewhere between dubstep and '90s digi-dub, for Perry to voice croakily alongside co-vocalists. [Mar 2024, p.82]

There's a full band, a string section Swarmatron and brass. Reassuringly, the songs are strong enough to carry the new load. [Mar 2024, p.85]

It's an LP of insight and empathy. [Mar 2024, p.82]

It may make for a rollercoaster musical ride, but it's utterly thrilling. [Mar 2024, p.88]

After the initial shock, the pair's songwriting smarts cuts through persuasively, alongside strong messaging about acknowledging your needs and vulnerabilities. [Feb 2024, p.88]

This double LP has sonic coherence across 65 minutes of taut, sinewy but ever-unpredictable compositions, with a subtly altered sound palette. [Feb 2024, p.86]

Rhys’s melodies stay with you, and his wordplay is as pleasingly idiosyncratic as ever. [Feb 2024, p.89]

The resulting sound is high-contrast, with graceful melodic resolutions, slippery pitch-bends and experiments with form. Curios that hit at once, but can also withstand lengthy unravelling. [Mar 2024, p.91]

Lurching guitar, chiming piano and stabs of overdubbed choral harmony are combined with vocals that swing from sweetly intimate to dry and flippant. [Mar 2024, p.89]

There's no doubt Mackenzie Scott never stops moving here, switching between gothic sway, grungy stomp and electro-pop gyration, but it can make it hard to catch her eye in a meaningful way. [Mar 2024, p.86]

Green Day are admirably assured, honest, and funny on Saviors. [Mar 2024, p.82]

Beneath the Day-Glo surface, Chemtrails rage away. [Jan 2024, p.89]

New ground is not broken, but happily, neither are they. [Jan 2024, p.86]

All in all, less immediate and traditionally melodic than A Light…, Wall Of Eyes is one for the heads, revealing its many charms and details only upon repeated listens. [Mar 2024, p.83]

Little Rope carves space for the well-worn mind, offering sharp perspective on moments when everything seems blunted. [Feb 2024, p.84]

The LP is a treat, like listening to an oracle from the depths of a digital cave. [Feb 2024, p.86]

The former Bedales pupil's steely vocals and ear for a big melody amidst the intricacy offer a unifying and satisfying undertow. [Feb 2024, p.88]

Iechyd Da documents a period of intense anguish with careful understatement and smart musical references. [Feb 2024, p.87]

From Ireland's proliferating alt-guitar pack, these intense runners could go the distance. [Feb 2024, p.89]

Nau isn't especially original, but he is especially beguiling. These are songs to luxuriate in. [Feb 2024, p.89]

The "low tide" hinted at on side one submerges the second half, but delivers some of Brown's deepest, most affecting work. [Feb 2024, p.88]

Nelson's trademark rough vocal edges suit the rustic vibes of this Southern folk music and yet the ensemble also ventures into more experimental newgrass turf. [Feb 2024, p.88]

It's an impressively elegant and expressive one. [Feb 2024, p.87]

Gazelle Twin masterfully keeps us in suspense, incorporating strongly evocative sonic components. Around track eight the tension subsides, yet this doesn't affect the overall consistency. [Feb 2024, p.86]

Zietsch's music upholds the sparse, haunted tone set by Lana Del Ray, the minimalism so acute that each chord change often lasts for just one stroke of the strings or ivories. [Jan 2024, p.88]

Where the stage show had the intimacy of Young's between-song chats, the intimacy here comes from the sensation that you're listening in on his thoughts as one song drifts, like memories do, from one tome to another. [Jan 2024, p.90]

From top to bottom, what a joy it is. [Jan 2024, p.88]

What did we get for our 20-year wait? Something substantive, something deeply considered. [Jan 2024, p.87]

Progressive conceptual art, underpinned with profound personal resonances. [Jan 2024, p.87[

A brave, stand-alone release that lays her talent bare, it's a beautiful unreal entrancement you'll find hard to stop listening to again and again. [Dec 2023, p.91]

Into his eighth decade of unblinkered creativity, Hayward continues to thrill. [Dec 2023, p.93]

The necessary and sustaining art-yin to their live knees-ups’ yang, with Theatre Of The Absurd… Madness have made an album that is among their absolute best. [Jan 2024, p.90]

The heavy-breathing White Rabbit and Scarper comes with a prickle of John Carpenter Menance, while Last Transmission or Imminent are hyper-vigilant Tangerine Dream. There are times when a less obviously doctored emotion bleeds through, though. [Jan 2024, p.94]

This edition adds a 1999 concert. .... It's R.E.M. at their sweetest. [Jan 2023, p.99]

The Complete Budokan 1978 is a richer picture of this restless nerve at work. [Jan 2024, p.101]

Grace For Saints And Ramblers, from 2013's Ghost On host, is delivered with nonchalant Lou Reed rhythm; 2017's About A Bruise displays a freewheeling agility, while The Trapeze Swingers plus right into Beam's storytelling mode. [Jan 2024, p.91]

When his sturdy tunes do hit the jackpot, one wonders why Kirsty MacColl's hit with A New England is such a rare cover. .... Like all political songsmiths, Bragg seeks to transcend the didactic and stir the blood, and largely succeeds. [Dec 2023, p.101]

Unlikely to soundtrack your next dinner party, but it's hard not to marvel at Matmos's cut-and-paste mastery. [Jan 2023, p.93]

Ultimately, Innerstanding finds Harrison marking out his own territory, sustaining a brooding musical atmosphere and filling it with sterling melodies. [Jan 2024, p.88]

Pro-synth voluntaries like Znaniya (Falkor) can jar, but the highlights foreground Atwood-Ferguson as a widescreen visionary in the David Axelrod and Charles Stepney tradition, with a Rolodex of jazz hitters to call on. [Dec 2023, p.89]

While the collection's title acknowledges the scary presence of three Misfits songs. As for "Mistakes", however, there really are none. [Dec 2023, p.105]

Hatfield eschews radical reinventions, but her peeling away of the more finessed layers surrounding Lynne's indestructible melodies/chord sequences works a treat on Can't Get It out Of My head, Strange Magic and Telephone Line. [Nov 2023, p.92]

Even if there are moments when Rockstar seems under-amped, you have to admire her chutzpah. [Jan 2024, p.89]

"It's not too late to find where you are," he sings on The Tern; Hadsel seems to tremble on the brink of that revelation. [Dec 2023, p.88]

If the crackle of original Dylan electrifies Marshall's voice, she finds her own phrasing, both robust and reverent, as she ringmasters Ballad Of A Thin Man's mystic forces, or brings a limpid empathy to Like A Rolling Stone. [Dec 2023, p.92]

Reminiscent of early Nathaniel Rateliff and John Moreland, and prime John Prine, there's no reason here to doubt Martin might one day eclipse them all. [Dec 2023, p.88]

If life's what you make it, here Anderson makes it sound very beautiful indeed. [Dec 2023, p.92]

The quieter moments work best, like the moody, organ-led reworking of Shakin' All Over, which lesser bands have thrashed into the ground over the years but really shines here. [Dec 2023, p.86]

Though Anderson buries his voice and words in the maelstrom, his declared (if not immediately) apparent) theme of a constantly thwarted search for "true love" seems right at home in shoegazing's characteristic marriage of bliss and anxiety. [Dec 2023, p.93]

Los Angeles already feels like a destination record, Lee, Tolhurst and Budgie putting their decades of world-building expertise to excellent use. If the world they have built is on the brink of collapse, it only adds to the thrill. [Dec 2023, p.85]

A queasy heat seeps into the Sonic Youth hiss and clang of My Little Tony, Jelsy's Bad Seeds metallic thrum and Shoo's slow, high plains drift. [Dec 2023, p.94]

They are spare but complete, as rich as old letters or photographs. [Dec 2023, p.86]

This new box set offers a ton of unreleased tracks (47 in total). Ranging from the ropey – Schoolyard sees him at the age of 32 singing about losing his virginity at 16 to, erk, a 14-year-old girl; Horny Pony features a toe-curling rap – to the bafflingly binned, they nonetheless provide real insight into Prince’s creative mind. Highlights include ghetto chronicle The Voice, jazz instrumental tribute Letter 4 Miles (recorded two days after his friend Davis’s death) and, best of all, the gently trippy Alice Through The Looking Glass. [Dec 2023, p.105]

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

Bauhaus Staircase shows OMD thriving as much as surviving. [Dec 2023, p.91]

The production ideas and songs, however smart, won't change the world; they will, however, prompt large swathes to sing along. [Dec 2024, p.84]

Even when further adrift from the lost funk sampledelia that made his name, Shadow's production brilliance shines through. [Dec 2023, p.90]

No new ground is broken, but everyone emerges unscathed. [Dec 2023, p.86]

The emphasis on experiment and process means there are fewer newly-excavated compositions - Like Veils Said Lorraine, a For The Roses orphan; the modal guitar reveries Sunshine Raga and Bonderia, the former with tabla and free-form trilling - but no less in the way of surprises. [Dec 2023, p.96]

The story arc LeBlanc has stitched into the songs never get in the way of sheer enjoyment of the tunes he's created. Grand concepts are a tricky move for any artist, but LaBlanc pulls it off with plomb. [Dec 2023, p.91]

Ultimately, the thrills on The Silver Cord are intermittent, but you have to admire Gizzard's relentless pursuit of the next high. [Dec 2023, p.87]