2015's Tape Hiss, Rats On Rafts were as unrelenting. Now they've added impenetrability to the armoury. [Mar 2021, p.86]

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

Dissonant yet heavenly, Gas Lit is an album that seethes, soothes, liberates and bewitches in equal measures. [Mar 2021, p.83]

Baroque pop at its most exhilarating. [Mar 2021, p.89]

Songs build from hypnotic bass grooves and spindly guitar lines, Lottie Pendlebury's nonchalant vocals intertwined with circular countermelodies that pull you into their undertow. Lyrically deft and witty. [Mar 2021, p.82]

Thunderstorm Warnings doesn't put a foot wrong, delivering the big music with heart instead of bluster. [Mar 2021, p.90]

Medicine At Midnight is strangely impersonal, with little to declare beyond its maker skill at the form. The lyrics, meanwhile, are often undercooked. [Mar 2021, p.82]

Comes with the smart lightness of touch that's the Vampire Weekend birthright. [Mar 2021, p.89]

The Future Bites is a great grown-up pop record - knowing and self-aware, but never too much for its own good. [Feb 2021, p.83]

Yorkston is one of our finest talents, still stretching out. [Feb 2021, p.82]

Home is as challenging as it is comforting. [Mar 2021, p.85]

Murray's voice is a beautiful, dreamy magnet for Hughes's backdrops, which without losing their twang take all sorts of tangents. [Feb 2021, p.85]

Cooler Returns proves Kiwi Jr have the skills to match their smarts. [Feb 2021, p.86]

They were recorded in different session over 16 years, though feel right at home with each other. [Feb 2021, p.85]

There's not a bad song here but, more to the point, Fogerty Sr's voice and guitar sound as potent and commanding as ever. [Jan 2021, p.88]

Welfare Jazz finds them dropping through the gears and settling on a sound that often resembles the frazzled nocturnal grooves magicked up during Josh Homme's Desert Sessions. [Mar 2021, p.90]

Packs ear-worms and dulcet vocal harmonies galore. [Mar 2021, p.86]

A truly fine album. [Mar 2021, p.84]

Defiantly mainstream. Still, it's certainly not weedy, relying on big Nashville arrangements filled with swelling strings and modulated Hammond organ. [Mar 2021, p.82]

This is music for smarter dancefloors. [Mar 2021, p.89]

It mostly works but can be breathless. [Dec 2020, p.82]

WYTMWY is Knox in typically epic form, a suspenseful fusion of country-folk ballads and Twin Peaks cabaret. Bu there's a fresh clarity here too. [Feb 2021, p.88]

While Khruangbin's own cover of Kool & The Gang's Summer Madness is a technical knock-out, the two-punch combination of Maxwell Udoh's inaptly titled Nigerian disco landmark I Like It (Don't Stop) and David Marez's florid Ensename is distinctly below the belt. [Jan 2021, p.100]

A useful and thoroughly entertaining precis of one of the great 21st century rock projects. [Jan 2021, p.101]

Slow, stark tracks like Kick-Around Johnny sound like a spun-out, confessional Lou Reed, and there's epiphany too: I Came To Tell You In Plain English (I'm Leaving You) is casually devastating. [Jan 2021, p.90]

A suite of songs involving a character returning from a near-death experience, it works just as well without the plot. Still, there are twists and turns aplenty. [Jan 2021, p.91]

After the past 12 months, you might feel you want and need more escapism than Spare Ribs really offers. Yet if everyone's been made to gaze into the abyss this year, it's a relief, a comfort--maybe even a pleasure--to find Sleaford Mods in there, gazing right back at you. [Feb 2021, p.80]

Drunk Tank Pink is the sound of a band pushing themselves to discover new sonic and emotional terrain. [Feb 2021, p.82]