His phrasing the rare product of a lifetime spent refining how to sing plain and true yet always with the hint of a raggle-taggle tune pulsing beneath the surface. [Jan 2025, p.84]

It's easily Body Count's finest hour. [Jan 2025, p.82]

Songs of experience, beautifully realised. [Jan 2025, p.86]

Studio-recorded in a single sitting, the Arkestra honour their mentor’s methods by keeping everything moving, seemingly to infinity. [Feb 2025, p.89]

Matt Berninger walks a distinguished line between control and catharsis, with only occasional collapses (Graceless, for example), but when the music falls away during Bloodbuzz Ohio, you hear a band carried on by both the roar of the crowd and the structural might of their songwriting. [Jan 2025, p.83]

With piano and dulcimer adding unforeseen acoustic texture, Trees Speak’s soundworld is ever-changing, often terrifying, but rarely short of awe-inspiring. [Jan 2025, p.90]

The waves that roll through Mosaic are chiller, more austere, but no less beautiful. [Feb 2025, p.89]

Ambient noise draws the threads of these songs together – distant chatter, the sound of rain – but it’s the night buses and pubs of Wonderlight that best catch The Night’s Victoria Segal muted glimmer. [Feb 2025, p.82]

Tuneful ’60s folk-rockers Lucky #8 and Mary Miracle raise the tempo while closer Fractal Canyon is a joyful epiphany of redemption. [Feb 2025, p.84]

Straddles the line between the jackhammer clattering pop of Girls Aloud (Sorry, Etc is almost a facsimile), the elusiveness of Fiona Apple and Chvrches’ own electro backdrop. [Feb 2025, p.88]

Though it’s not the recluse’s reverie that was 2020’s fine single-hander Monovision, Long Way Home also feels somewhat introverted. [Sep 2024, p.86]

Tropicália, Third to Six Soft Machine, Santana, Dungen, Alice Coltrane and Kamasi Washington seem to be in there. The Nick van Bakel-led, Melbourne-based art-popsters subsume all of this and more into the whole; a seamless coagulation. [Jan 2025, p.85]

As with predecessors Omega and The 7th Hand, Blues Blood brims with fresh harmonic ideas, but also an emotional potency that resonates long afterwards. [Nov 2024, p.90]

Add in lyrics that could make Brian Wilson weep and here is an album equally suitable for long winter nights and bright summer parties. [Jan 2025, p.89]

It’s a truly gorgeous record, capturing the grand contrarian at his happiest, living in the present and reworking the past. [Nov 2024, p.89]

Its essence remains constant, as post-punk, soul and Southern rock collide in an ever-delectable succession of hyper-melodic bangers – sunny online-trolling satire Flash Bare Ass, and faith-keeping marital romancer Light On surely count amongst JP’s career-best. [Jan 2025, p.82]

As fine as anything they’ve done, making a virtue of their shoestring gear and lo-fi recording tech to create minimal space-rock morsels focused on interior melancholy. Their melodies are sluggish, warm and desolate, their arrangements spare but affecting. [Jan 2025, p.90]

Tuttle locates the beauty, complexity, joy and decay within Chapman’s demos and opens them out into a new kind of collage-kosmische, finding the European psychedelic resonances in Chapman’s multilayered blues patterns and reworking them for some kind of grand, universal eternity. [Oct 2024, p.87]

Coleman is the revelation, a muscular, soulful conscience in the modal frenzy, raw and swinging like a barroom Coltrane. Shorter is already headed for tomorrow, spiralling through So What and Walkin’ with acrobatic modernism. But Coleman paved the way. This is his party. [Jan 2025, p.94]

They remain wholly beholden to Liam Fray’s songwriting, but they’re assisted by contemporaries: upwardly mobile Scottish soul singer Brooke Combe offers depth-giving harmonies on Sweet Surrender, as does Pixey on the unusually sweary First Name Terms. Solitude Of The Night Bus skirts too close to Arctic Monkeys, but Fray is developing apace. [Dec 2024, p.85]

The stylistic shifts and sheer quality of the songwriting make Fever Longing Still almost the perfect Paul Kelly album. [Dec 2024, p.93]

Dad is no longer the singer he was, which of course makes Cat Stevens’ title track all the more poignant. .... Junior does most of the heavy vocal lifting and it is he, you suspect, who suggested Ph.D.’s I Won’t Let You Down and Eurythmics’ Here Comes The Rain Again, both of which turn out to be highlights. [Jan 2025, p.82]

Stein steers these heavy songs with an admirably light touch. [Jan 2025, p.89]

Some of the best moments, though, are when you can get past their familiarity and hear the newness of the individual voices creating the harmonies – and also hear how much they seem to enjoy and inspire each other. [Dec 2024, p.103]

Each little element of Queen I’s flamboyant, sometimes preposterous excess now has its own place in the sonic firmament, youthful, incomparable Freddie Mercury close enough to touch. Rest assured, though, that the integrity of the original recordings remains. There are no new overdubs. [Dec 2024, p.96]

From a brilliantly tense 1977 cover of the Detroit Emeralds’ 1972 disco hit Feel The Need, to a Velvets-drone re-murking of Dylan’s She Belongs To Me and his recent doomy techno-goth NIN collaboration Star, these rough, raw and unfinished gems remind us that Ferry’s art was never just about surface perfection but always in what lies beneath. [Dec 2024, p.99]

Talking Heads: 77 still feels like a record that is always going to get past you, speeding ahead of the curve. [Jan 2025, p.96]

["Fünf"] A finale that thrillingly manifests the Can legend – equal parts ascetic and visceral, a wondrous zone where the corporeally propulsive co-exists effortlessly with the cerebral. The preceding Eins to Vier really aren’t bad either. [Jan 2025, p.98]