Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You is both an album of admirable ambition and a mantra worth repeating until its mysteries are revealed. [Mar 2022, p.81]

A proper fire-starter. [Mar 2022, p.88]

The 7th Hand embodies contemporary jazz at its most thrilling. [Feb 2022, p.91]

It's not all strum und drang though. The beatless despair of Källans Återuppståndelse shows the harmonic subtleties at play within Von Hausswolff's bewitching repertoire of dissonance and drama. [Feb 2022, p.87]

The tunes are still naggingly memorable, but often less convivial, more melancholy. [Feb 2022, p.86]

The edges of 2019's Candy Colored Doom have sharpened: her voice and guitar sheer off into abrasion on Metal Bird. [Feb 2022, p.85]

This is as perfect as any album can be. [Mar 2022, p.98]

The corners of these songs might not snag quite as dangerously as before, but there's no blunting of the fascination Le Bon's songwriting so expertly exerts. [Mar 2022, p.80]

Ants... represents a substantial step forward for them. [Mar 2022, p.84]

Her balance of mesmerising, confessional intensity with sculpted pop instincts remains an unfailing pleasure throughout. [Mar 2022, p.85]

The sisters soar even higher here. [Feb 2022, p.91]

Shimmering debut. [Mar 2022, p.90]

A succession of haunting story songs. ... Closing track After The Rain, meanwhile, is a hymnal balm. Less happily, he's made a part return to his original calling as a spoken word poet. [Feb 2022, p.89]

1991's indie strivers and success stories, over three nugget-selected discs. [Mar 2022, p.98]

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]

There's not much here to rival very top Tull but then nothing that sullies the venerable brand either. [Feb 2022, p.83]

Her songs sound simultaneously safe and familiar, yet strange and unknowable. [Feb 2022, p.89]

Apart from the upbeat soul of Never Want To Be Kissed, featuring Stax veteran William bell on vocals, Set Sail stumbles and squints through its nine other tracks, although on Bumpin' they at least rouse themselves long enough to sound like Tony Joe White imitating Sly Stone. [Mar 2022, p.86]

The musical density doesn't quite complement the elegiac lyrical flow, and a change of pace might have meant another way forward, but there's tenderness to spare. [Feb 2022, p.90]

Hall explores his anger and depression through mostly downbeat but frequently beautiful ballads. [Feb 2022, p.87]

If the forward-looking, ever exploratory production just occasionally outguns the songwriting, Daft Punk-ish floor-filler The Last Dance is unimpeachable, a defiant shimmy toward the apocalypse. [Mar 2022, p.82]

Deceptively simple, the result is a lovely thing. [Feb 2022, p.86]

This hour-long excerpt inevitably loses that multimedia narrative heft, yet its marriage of dronescape synths and Chinese libretto - voices alternatively soaring, skittering and sorrowful - still casts an otherworldly spell. [Feb 2022, p.84]

There's a new directness, a more linear approach to melody, and, most unexpectedly, the overt presence of synthesizers. [Mar 2022, p.86]

While Time Skiffs sounds deeply, existentially scattered, every atom is in its rightful place. [Mar 2022, p.87]

Tackling eight traditional songs, he plays Just A Close Walk With Thee and Old Rugged Cross relatively straight, but turns the likes of We Shall Rise and Are You Washed In Blood? into glorious Southern boogie, replete with screaming guitar solos. [Mar 2022, p.82]

Part happy break-up LP, part honest look in the mirror, Extreme Witchcraft works magic. [Feb 2022, p.82]

This is a record of delicately sculped nuages, all wispily sung by guitarist/keyboard-player Wata. [Mar 2022, p.80]