Spencer build this world of thrift-store influences and acid wit, and he sounds happy there. [Dec 2018, p.88]

These are exquisitely sad songs of spare belongings and reduced circumstance, about men who fail, and the women who stay with them. [Dec 2018, p.91]

Yawn is a sublime show of songwriting strength. [Dec 2018, p.86]

No Tourists may be an open-topped bus ride around a familiar sonic landscape, but it's also a lot of fun. [Dec 2018, p.84]

Solemn, aesthetically rigorous environment this music occupies. [Dec 2018, p.93]

Where the comic thesp rabbitholes back to 1980s telly music, with sincere, library-esque 'ommages. [Dec 2018, p.94]

Warrants deep exploration. [Nov 2018, p.95]

If you need reminding, it demonstrates what a good singer she is. [Dec 2018, p.90]

Filmic instrumentals ranging in mood from Badalamenti oddness to bright piano etudes and reflective gloom. [Nov 2018, p.96]

While there's a surprisingly low glam quotient, Fudge Sandwich finds odd harmonies between funk and anarcho-punk, plus more predictable psych. [Dec 2018, p.84]

It's an album that is, by turns, melancholy and unsettling, tragic and nightmarish, unfolding with a creeping narrative dread. [Dec 2018, p.93]

The Londoner's high soul voice shines through on astral-themed second album. . [Dec 2018, p.94]

It's all so sad, and surrounded by 80-plus minutes of restless, questing uncertainty. [Nov 2018, p.90]

Here If You Listen is never less than gorgeously meditative, and in its cloudy, impressionistic swell bobs flotsam of unusual beauty. [Dec 2018, p.88]

Amid the jams and Vietnamese trim, neat ideas coalesce. [Dec 2018, p.94]

R.E.M. At The BBC is not definitive history, but as a corrective to the idea that the post-Monster years were just R.E.M.'s long sweep into elder statesmanhood, it presents a fine alternative one. [Dec 2018, p.101]

Allways showcase a band reconfigured as a kind of hippy Meters. It's an unlikely transformation, but an appealing one. [Dec 2018, p.93]

There's undoubted musicianship on display but killer tunes are rarer. [Dec 2018, p.87]

Raw and revealing though still rather opaque. [Dec 2018, p.94]

A reverberant, high-octane treatise on the transcendent power of love and loud music. [Dec 2018, p.94]

Konoyo is subtly emotive, its soundscapes cool and tranquil then swallowed up by blossoms of cryptic drama. [Dec 2018, p.93]

Production-wise it's the compressed, tidy sound du jour that flattens out dynamics; it would be interesting to hear them recorded on some funky old analogue gear, to add a bit more grit. [Dec 2018, p.92]

Her laconic, absurdist humour gently inflects each track, even when she is singing about intense paranoia and loss. [Dec 2018, p.90]

Rodgers' fealty to rhythm is still unquestionable from opener Till The World Falls through the emphatic beats that drive Boogie All Night and single Sober, which are clearly less subtle than "old" Chic. [Dec 2018, p.90]

The Hex expands brilliantly in a musical vision that had lain mostly dormant. [Dec 2018, p.90]

This second album builds on [2017's Feed The Rats'] sure foundation, the tracks now numbering six and dialling down the long-form indulgence in favour of more tightly focused song structures that sacrifice nothing in intensity. [Dec 2018, p.88]

It's rather an unsuccessful mish-mash, especially given the aggressive diversity of the guest stars. ... But the weakest link is Morello's hyperactive and ultimately distracting tic towards Skrillex-esque techno bursts, bleeps and squelches, which ensure The Atlas Underground will age worse than MAGA hats. [Dec 2018, p.84]

A Wonderful Beast occasionally revisits that street-walkin' vibe (When The Weekend Comes Around), but otherwise rises above genre to present this foghorn-voiced alt icon as quality songsmith, amid unprecedentedly high-spec playing and arrangements. [Nov 2018, p.94]