The inevitable irony is that the first-class packaging and mono fidelity makes this serial potpourri feel new and thrilling again - while none of it accurately reflects the Beatles' creative intent and daily momentum. [Dec 2024, p.100]

They still sound remarkably fresh, and here their short (only three of the 14 songs last longer than three minutes), sharp shock still kicks hard. [Jan 2024, p.86]

It’s not all dreamy-headed stuff – Relief, for one, achieves rocky lift-off – but for the most part The Good Kind Tom Doyle sustains a compellingly airy atmosphere throughout. [Jan 2024, p.83]

Recorded in a single night, this light-touch meld of jazz, ambient, post-rock and hip-hop sensibilities find its players intertwined like tangled wires. [Jan 2025, p.82]

There are tender moments, too, such as Lianne La Havas’s guest-spot on sodium-lit ballad Body Shock, but this is largely a record of brash textures from a band relishing the margins. [Jan 2025, p.83]

Vital and vibrant. [Jan 2025, p.88]

Mostly Highway Prayers is a thrillingly modern bluegrass album for people who don’t even like bluegrass. [Jan 2025, p.88]

Another great, mind-bending, soul-baring, melodically rich album to his name: a singer tap dancing on the very edge. [Jan 2025, p.80]

’60s Mod club faves including thrilling takes on The First Cut Is The Deepest and Angel Of The Morning. [Dec 2024, p.94]

Live, the band’s urgency and spaciousness transform their fondness for cavernous arena rhythms and antiquated synths from clever re-appropriations into something that teases transcendence. [Dec 2024, p.85]

Nobody Loves You More is a singularly uplifting, life-affirming listen, where joy and despair, love and loss, are irrevocably entwined, and kept afloat by Deal’s unfailing lightness of touch. [Dec 2024, p.82]

But as personal as all of these songs sound, there’s a universality to Small Changes that, as with all Kiwanuka’s records, will emotionally connect with others. Everybody hurts, it seems to say, but this might help. [Dec 2024, p.86]

The easygoing Natural Information may be Callahan’s latter-day signature tune, and here daubed in Clarence Clemons-flavoured sax and quicksilver guitar, it sounds like the Eagles at a shamanic retreat. CPR for the soul. [Nov 2024, p.92]

Shaping billowing waves of electrostatic to articulate the sound of his hometown, Nairobi, at night. Worth resurrecting an old ’90s genre tag from The Bug’s past for Natur: illbience. [Nov 2024, p.87]

Expertly miked to capture Cannell’s own sharp recorder breaths and the church’s own otherworldly reverberations, the result is both a hallucinatory venture into sonic time travel, and a consciousness-expanding act of medieval meditation. [Nov 2024, p.88]

Mortality looms large as he recounts a car accident on The Last Ten Seconds Of Life, the bluegrass-flavoured Not A Lot Of Sand Left In The Glass and again for prairie trail eulogy I Want To Be The Man (My Dog Thinks I Am). [Nov 2024, p.84]

It’s their most expansive LP so far. [Nov 2024, p.92]

A triumph in thematic/aural juxtaposition, Come Ahead is up there with Primal Scream’s best. [Dec 2024, p.92]

With lyrics informed by loss and his current post-divorce relationship with a man, at the age of 64, Friday has clearly found himself and made a deeply heartfelt record, most of which is perhaps best heard at club-level volume. [Dec 2024, p.90]

His voice is a bit more raw in his 91st year, but that just adds yet more resonance. [Dec 2024, p.85]

It is gorgeous in the way a hotel painting is – very pleasant to look at once or twice but not to ponder for too long, an autumnal soundtrack whose glow fades like leaves. [Dec 2024, p.93]

There’s some very fine rock songs (Sally Was A Cop revisits the “Oh-oh-oh” singalong on Willie Mays Is Up At Bat from Temple Beautiful) and excellent ballads, from Americana closer It’s A Good Day To Be Alive to truly beautiful Red Sky Night. [Nov 2024, p.89]

Perrett might not have been having fun before, but even factoring in a song called Do Not Resuscitate, this finally sounds like the real thing. [Dec 2024, p.90]

Viva Lone Justice reminds us of all that made the original line-up special. [Dec 2024, p.92]

[These 14 jazz-pop miniatures offset whimsical structures and playful flaws with sharp hooks. [Dec 2024, p.94]

Thirty years on from Dubnobasswithmyheadman, the masters of post-rave audio narrative still know how to blow your tiny mind. [Dec 2024, p.90]

There’s a new level of sophistication here, befitting the fact that the one-time teenage home-recorder is now 27 and this is her fourth album. [Dec 2024, p.85]

Whatever ‘flow’ is, she has it, Koalas and Charlie Potato shimmering like hot tarmac mirages, and trippy closer Surround coming on like Parks and key collaborator Ruari Meehan’s nod to The Orb’s Little Fluffy Clouds. Repeat listens focus the kaleidoscope. [Dec 2024, p.87]