A creepy yet danceable debut. [Nov 2016, p.96]

Rarely can the lute have sounded quite as threatening as it does here. [Nov 2016, p.93]

Rooted in dubby pop and embellished with punchy horns, it captures the Birmingham group's maiden rebel sound. [Oct 2016, p.98]

An album that stalks the perpetual gloaming so wholeheartedly, you do rather wish for a ray of sunlight here and there. [Oct 2016, p.98]

Some of the purest, restorative, most unburdened music imaginable. [Oct 2016, p.98]

Gibb's voice might be audibly timeworn in parts and the production is a bit vanilla, but there's no denying the poignancy here. [Nov 2016, p.86]

The Last Hero captures them approaching the peak of their powers. [Nov 2016, p.94]

Highlights: I Know's breathless vocals and pummeled drums; Invisible Man's irradiated energy, railing against Alzheimer's. [Nov 2016, p.96]

The result is a most ambitious, rewarding and soulful debut. [Nov 2016, p.86]

[Day Breaks] is arguably her masterpiece to date. [Nov 2016, p.90]

It features the Bright Eyes/Desaparecidos frontman alone with piano, harmonica and guitar, putting down songs never quite intended as an album. This sparseness means that the focus on Oberst is tight--maybe too tight. [Nov 2016, p.90]

A worthy addition to the genre. [Nov 2016, p.92]

Her characters will wander through your imagination for days after the record's stopped spinning. [Nov 2016, p.86]

Sirens proffers another string to his bow, its nine skittering essays overlaying richly textured, genre-melding electronic sound worlds with liminal song "structures." [Nov 2016, p.81]

It's one of the most thrilling rocksteady albums to have been made since the genre emerged in the late '60s. [Nov 2016, p.89]

[For Bteer, Or Worse] maintains the same innate love of his subject and feeling of bonhomie. [Nov 2016, p.94]

Peaks early with the opening title track. [Nov 2016, p.96]

This feels like Hiss Golden Messenger's overdue breakthrough album. [Nov 2016, p.89]

Gong carry on with positive absurdist elevation via psychedelic jazz rock. [Oct 2016, p.100]

For every shallow, Banks stirs up a hidden depth. [Nov 2016, p.90]

It benefits from producer Jim Sclavunos's emphasis on a place-you-in-the-room live approach, bringing the dark to labelmates Temples' light, as Heavenly's neo-psych vanguard marches onwards. [Nov 2016, p.94]

Reflective but brimming with aching melody. [Nov 2016, p.88]

Cohen joined by bass, pedal steel, brushed drums, recorder, flute and violin. This, if anything, has made her songs stranger still, breathing life into the ghostly riddles of cold watchmen and voices from the forest and releasing them out into the corporal world. [Nov 2016, p.91]

It's easily their best work. [Nov 2016, p.94]

Hard blues, soul and R&B take a back seat to pop tunes with a elegant turn. [Oct 2016, p.92]

Armstrong continues to lean on lyrical phases that sound clever but don't say much. Still, the album includes several strong character sketches. [Nov 2016, p.88]

On Requiem, they invert proportions, taking a variety of folk and world sounds as base ingredients and embellishing those with rock noise. Whether that's a more intriguing approach depends on if you prefer relentless musical phrases delivered on pan flute or distorted guitar. [Nov 2016, p.91]

If not every experiment works, Brown's twinkling hook-up with Kendrick Lamar, Ab-Soul and Earl Sweatshirt on Really Doe totally surpasses its billing. [Nov 2016, p.89]