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]

Albanese's piano plus synths and cello soundtrack near-darkness in pensive, drifting instrumentals. [Apr 2016, p.96]

Emmy's most effective tool is a sense of place, and her journey from experience to the finished work, saturated in detail, is often a lot darker than her measured delivery suggests. [Mar 2016, p.94]

A succession of sprawling mini-epics--throbbing with energy, insidious basslines and pulsing chords--prevail. [Mar 2016, p.95]

For a rapper who has excelled in redefining the artform, The Life Of Pablo is a sprawling, uneven and curiously unfinished sounding affair with a dearth of recognisable bangers. Much less than the sum of its parts when stacked against the grandiloquent orchestral sweep of 2010’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy or pared-back abrasive aural sculpture of predecessor Yeezus, it suggests West is merely human after all.