The moving Electric Shock incorporates joyous synths and Headcase is berserk thrash-pop brilliance. Dizzying closer, Mortals, meanwhile, might have been a Top 10 hit in the early '80s. [Oct 2019, p.86]

This album engages out minds while it explores, but as it raises questions, it still comforts. [Sep 2019, p.92]

Any agitation on Katherine Paul's second LP is gently expressed. [Oct 2019, p.92]

Tucker has created an album that should endear her to those who still raise the outlaw flag while also appealing to hard-edged pop-tinged rock believers. [Oct 2019, p.83]

There's social critique and black humour in spades, though the blanket-warm harmonies often smother The Rails' tougher messages. But if you want comfort in trying times, wrap up here. [Sep 2019, p.90]

Once again Tucker demonstrates his knack of creating simple, incantatory, almost folky vocal lines, which pivot around a few telling chord changes and lodge in the memory long after the music stops. [Sep 2019, p.91]

Twelve Nudes' unbridled howl, mania and joy is on the nose. [Sep 2019, p.95]

How To Live is more of a creative evolution than a total break from Cooper's previous music. [Sep 2019, p.88]

Their needling attack punctures fevered egos on There's No One Like You, and cooks up some pleasingly wonky acid-rock, but best of the bunch is the closing flourish When Do I Get To Sing "My Way." [Sep 2019, p.88]

There is sweetness--Shuffling Stoned's hyperfocused vignette; the title track's mystical George Harrison drone--but August feels like the product of a wandering mind deliberately slipping through the cracks. [Sep 2019, p.89]

This is a different sounding Billy Childish. Not Radically different, but enough to notice that something's going on. At the root is personal tragedy: he had a nervous breakdown last year, and lyrics, written more like prose than punk missive, deal with mortality and the passing of time. [Sep 2019, p.88]

This is a sweet entry point. [Oct 2019, p.92]

The bluesiest tracks are best (Beat The Drum; Witness). [Oct 2019, p.92]

i,i never sounds less than excellent, with wide-open acoustic/electric audio structures allowing pizzicato strings to waft through and rising clouds of horns to blow in unexpectedly. It really is bleeding edge stuff. [Oct 2019, p.90]

Her first album since 1968's Kufunta on Immediate. The former Ikette's voice is little changed since those days and still rooted in powerful gospel. [Aug 2019, p.88]

Spontaneity suits him; weaving jangly groove-grit with melody and just the odd overly-earnest lyric. [Sep 2019, p.96]

It all adds up to the heavy, heavy sound of extinction rebellion, King Gizz developing themes they first explored on 2017's Murder Of The Universe. [Sep 2019, p.94]

A questing, festering record, Face Stabber isn't for the faint-hearted, but its lows are outnumbered by exhilarating highs. [Sep 2019, p.95]

A first strike of the match before they burn their own path forward. [Sep 2019, p.94]

The Center Won't Hold sounds like a band urgently resetting their course, putting their fury and fear ona war footing. At times., it's on a industrial scale. ... There are gorgeous pop songs here, too. [Sep 2019, p.84]

Respite is infrequent with Blanck Mass, but when it arrives, its effects are heightened. [Sep 2019, p.91]

Succinct and entirely self-preformed, Regan's typically poetic sixth album conjures a singular, almost meditative mood via fingerpicked guitars, backwards-recorded instruments and subtle textures. [Sep 2019, p.95]

His rare talent for corralling emphatic musicians into his rhythmically intense, entrancing vision adds a whole new spin to the Indo-jazz continuum. [Aug 2019, p.91]

The whole soundtrack comes downbeat, mum-like fusion of standard instruments and glitchy electronics run throughout all the atmospheric instrumentals. [Sep 20129, p.89]

A chequered beast swiveling between ill-fitting newe adventures in growling rock electronica and hazy, '80s-throwback dram pop. It's somewhere between that Safe Place seem happiest, Eternal Recurrence, Jump Jet and End Game revisiting hazy, propulsive Ride territory of old--complete with the odd crap lyric--but the laidback, Syd Barrett-like Dial Up and arrhythmic, big-sounding In This Room show they still have genuine class. [Sep 2019, p.86]

To most ears, this late-night, whipcrack-sharp chooglathon, finally unveiled, sounds astounding. What were they like on a good night? [Sep 2019, p.107]

While six of these 19 tracks are intricately wrought miniatures, it's the supreme confidence of four-minute relative marathons Peel Free and horn-pricked parental paean Bloom Wither Bloom that shine. [Sep 2019, p.91]

Her eerie, seductive first solo outing takes your brain to a new plane. [Sep 2019, p.93]