If inherent heaviness is the ultimate aim for any metal band, then Mastodon only partly succeed. Fortunately, they hit the right combination between brutal, epic, progressive and endless wild soloing. [Aug 2014, p.92]

Her band is spare and empathetic, and she's a smart enough writer to avoid mawkishness and dramatics. Which just makes it grab you harder. [Aug 2014, p.93]

Jaded & Faded offers a series of fleetingly thrilling, anti-everything songs that pulse with the kinetic energy of New York street life. [Aug 2014, p.92]

The latest outing from the Icelandic quartet may not possess quite such drama [as John Grant's Pale Green Ghosts], but there's plenty to admire here. [Aug 2014, p.91]

If these last two [fire and freshness] are tough to keep up 15 years on, it doesn't show. [Aug 2014, p.93]

OOIOO create a continually changing mandala of sounds somewhere between Boredom's sky-high orchestrations, Can's idiosyncratic ethno-experiements and the world-jazz fusions of Don Cherry. [Aug 2014, p.88]

More robust moments provide the necessary shift but, with all its delicate finesse, Forgetting The Present largely prefers to take its oblivion lying down. [Aug 2014, p.86]

On the surface, Beware The Fetish is like My Bloody Valentine or Metal Machine Music, as unbowed or compromised by trying to give the people what they want. Yet at its heart is a burning desire to make fantastic pop music. [Aug 2014, p.88]

[A] diverse new set. [May 2014, p.96]

The material is uneven. [Jun 2014, p.95]

Recorded using vintage hardware, the guitar sound is as rich as tiramisu. [Jun 2014, p.95]

Fluttering, arpeggiated melodies, ice-crisp percussion and muscular beats mean tracks like Ya Po kick hard and linger long on the palette. [May 2014, p.93]

Acute while charming, she captures the sadness and silliness of the months when she hightailed it out of Ortonvile, Michigan, pop. 1,442. [Jun 2014, p.95]

Bitter-pill catharsis. [Jun 2014, p.89]

This 1981 release was the middle and probably the greatest of Grace Jones's Compass Point trio. [Jun 2014, p.106]

Though true sub-notes of contemplation are hard to find in Noel’s initial tranche of songs, there’s vulnerability in his solo version of Half The World Away recorded live in a Tokyo hotel room on September 16, 1994, as Oasis madness spiralled in earnest. It’s this expanded edition’s one true unreleased gem. [Jun 2014, p.102]

There's alot of her here, and the connections are all her own. [Jun 2014, p.89]

For much of the album's remainder, Carthy sticks with the melting pot approach that he and Greater Mancunian peers like Rae & Christian helped codify over a decade ago. [Jun 2014, p.93]

[Leithauser] revels in letting his talent run free, outwith trad rock arrangements. [Jun 2014, p.92]

With songs about Slits frontierswoman Ari Up and their inspired use of carnivalesque steel pans and soaring Bollywood-styled strings, it also marches to its own beat. [Jun 2014, p.92]

The tune count is mainly healthy, with the super-exuberance of Is This A Breakdown, Grapes Upon The Vine's echoes of 1983's Porcupine, and a second-half pursuit of the epic culminating in the soaring, redemptive New Horizons. [Jun 2014, p.88]

[The album] is most notable for two typically saturnine contributions from unlikely electro diva John Grant. [Jun 2014, p.98]

At times you'd think she's finally stepped around her natural sophistication and freed her true nature. But then her rooted unwillingness to share, via comprehensible diction, the lyrics she's carefully crafted does step between the different intimacies of sound and sense. [Jun 2014, p.88]

Wrangler's is a twitching, throbbing, mildly dystopian sound-world of vivid analogue synthesizer tones, overlaid with heavily processed vocals. [Jun 2014, p.96]

Tiersen lays out nine densely dripping songs, full of lavish orchestration, indeterminate clanking and on the choral Midsummer Evening, a kind of Wicca-pop maelstrom. [Jun 2014, p.96]

Gentle, Andrew Bird-style ballads bump alongside histrionic prog pop and four-to-the-floor beats on Ritalin-phased second LP. [Jun 2014, p.98]

A sweet yet spiky soundtrack for our march into oblivion. [Jun 2014, p.89]

Eerily pretty if a little ponderous. [Jun 2014, p.98]