II offers a litany of brief, mellifluous, vaguely jazzy mood sketches, fluidly mapping a terrain both playful and emotionally resonant like the missing link between Eric Satie's Gymnopedies and Everybody Digs Bill Evans. [Sep 2012, p.88]

There are moments when dear slips down pop alleys, but for those following, there's a creeping sense it could turn a bit Don't Look Now at any second. [Sep 2012, p.86]

While traces of Deacon's former giddiness punctuate America, there's an ambitiously hefty, almost John Doe Passos-like engagement with the ambiguities of the Land of the Free. [Sep 2012, p.88]

These 15 songs justify their status as outtakes. [Sep 2012, p.96]

They stick to their winning formula. [Sep 2012, p.88]

It's a scream, as we would expect from a musical humorist ranking only behind Randy Newman on the LOL-meter. And rivaled only by Tom Waits as a gloves-off DIY soundscapist in wood, steel, and string. [Sep 2012, p.87]

These radio sessions and TV appearances present an unique, accelerated Kinks history. [Sep 2012, p.103]

It's sex music for oddballs. [Sep 2012, p.89]

The more experimental efforts have a real impact. [Sep 2012, p.97]

Her tendency to over-infuse them with the weepies neuters what otherwise be gleaming moments. [Sep 2012, p.94]

It's a unified listen: it works as an album. [Sep 2012, p.102]

The sextet ply their angular chord changes and syncopated rhythms in first-rate tunes. [Sep 2012, p.97]

[A] rich and complex album. [Sep 2012, p.95]

The sense of isolation, longing and homesickness are palpable. But he's also wry and darkly funny, self-referential, and self-deprecating too. [Sep 2012, p.95]

The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends was the perfect Record Store Day artefact--dramatising the value and mystique of physical recordings. [Sep 2012, p.94]

It may prove hard for Matsson to get heard above the quiet din made by so many others who clutter his field, but he's one of the all-too-few worth listening to. [Sep 2012, p.94]

It lacks the crisp modernity of old but it's knee-deep in lush curvature and angular salvos, and new favourites keep emerging. [Sep 2012, p.94]

[The album includes] a stomping version of Elmore James's Rollin' And Tumblin' and a long and not wholly convincing reading of Stevie Wonder's Uptight. [Sep 2012, p.90]

Minimalist production values prevail and succeed in highlighting the beautiful--and often haunting melancholic--sonorities of Wilson's pipes. [Sep 2012, p.90]

I Was a Cat from a Book is as warm as an all-enveloping blanket by the hearth. [Sep 2012, p.89]

Thoughtful, tuneful, exquisitely melancholy, ever slightly off centre-- [Silencio] is, indeed, a welcome haven. [Sep 2012, p.86]

Gigantic of sound and vision, grandly poetic of pronouncement, the Millennium Stadium surely beckons. [Sep 2012, p.97]

The repetitive music loses a little power when you're sitting down listening to a hi-fi. [Aug 2012, p.87]

This epic finally reveals his personal vision in all its frenetic glory. [Aug 2012, p.94]

This debut captures their explosive energy and thunder; this is a band, that when it's found its own voice, will definitely go the distance. [Mar 2012, p.921]

An uneven yet entertaining debut. [Jun 2012, p.85]

Exquisitely sung, swept over with stormy emotions, Wild Dog's autumnal mysteries are alluring indeed. [Jul 2012, p.85]

His first LP of complete originals is a thing of profound beauty; deep, sad, wise songs, allied to perfectly crafted arrangements, from a man who's lived long enough in darkness to address the big, heavy questions with a lightness of touch. [Aug 2012, p.96]