Its 17 yearning, numinous essays, with lyrics that are part road trip, part inward odyssey, inhabiting a liminal, sepia-tinted sound world. [Apr 2016, p.88]

Colour Theory showcases a more lavish, studio-based approach. [Apr 2016, p.87]

Girl At The End Of The World lacks the hooky brilliance to be James' best, but it's a Top 3 contender. [Apr 2016, p.90]

Heavier, weirder and bleaker than anything they've released, Distance Inbetween is weighty but never hard work. [Apr 2016, p.84]

Lynn still sounds full of the life-force; more engaged and effervescent than many stars half her age. [Apr 2016, p.88]

There's a pleasing, ad hoc nature to these loose-limbed grooves. [Mar 2016, p.97]

The overriding feeling, though, is that you want to give them a good shake, maybe get them a it drunk, try to liven them up. [Apr 2016, p.91]

Sturdy, rousing, crank-it-up Rock'n'roll that's sometimes more punk, sometimes more country. [Feb 2016, p.93]

Multi-artist tributes are typically patchy by nature, but George Fest really works. [Apr 2016, p.86]

Throughout the album's crisp 10-track sequence, this reconfigured band are clearly once again enjoying the fruits of the unfathomable confluence of life and art. [Apr 2016, p.87]

Painkillers suggests their frontman really was holding his best songs back. [Apr 2016, p.88]

By shedding some of their rock'n'roll excess, though, it feels as if Primal Scream finally have some idea of what they want to be when they grow up. [Apr 2016, p.90]

All told, less might have been more. [Apr 2016, p.96]

Closer listening finds thin-voiced New Yorker Andrew Wyatt undercutting the Swedish Britney Spears producers' sleek earworms with sing-along melancholy. [Apr 2016, p.96]

Ward opens More Rain with the sound of a deluge outside before going on to ponder the vast gulf between the American Dream and its less glamorous reality, but the final glitterbeat stomp of I'm Going Higher he finishes with the sun on his face. [Apr 2016, p.94]

He has an honesty, knows how to caress a good song, and phrases knowingly. [Apr 2016, p.89]

Bar the grating closer, it's their most beautiful yet. [Apr 2016, p.89]

Ambitious but muddled, throughout they veer from awful to the gently compelling. [Apr 2016, p.86]

There's no manifesto here, only an exploration of identity, just as Letissier searches for her place in this decade's pantheon of fabulous poly-musical femmes. [Apr 2016, p.92]

With Telegram's Krautrock, psychedelic Pink Floyd and glam rock influences, it packs a remarkable punch. [Apr 2016, p.91]

[The Ridge] finds the Montrealer's signature esoteric bow-work allied to song structures that err, at least vaguely, toward the orthodox. [Apr 2016, p.93]

It's confusing, with flaky endings and mood swings, and an utterly compelling mix of not caring at all and desperately caring. [Apr 2016, p.87]

Wintry, ethereal and strangely bewitching, it feels both ancient and modern, rooted in the raw Appalachian landscape of Leigh's childhood and the contemporary language of confessional memoir. [Apr 2016, p.91]

Imbued with harmonies, melody and some hard-edged dynamics that draw on Led Zeppelin, this is what the pastoral Pink Floyd of 1971 might have done next. [Apr 2016, p.91]

Ne So is a thing of delicacy, it's a silky, immersive grooves and intertwined guitars weaving a subtly seductive canvas against which Traore's smoky vocals, often couched in close harmonies, waft. [Apr 2016, p.92]

Anthrax's energised take, though hardly original, remains forceful and persuasive with each member still delivering with the strength of 10 men. [Apr 2016, p.94]

London's Yuck offer scrubbed-up take on the FX-drenched guitar pop of Pavement or MBV. [Apr 2016, p.96]

There's a dark, delicious humour and true heartbreak in the NY trio's frank yet delicate confessionals. [Apr 2016, p.96]