Aswad and Steel Pulse stand proud amid JA heavy-hitters Burning Spear and Black Uhur u, while PiL, The Slits and The Pop Group mingle with the un-dread Joe Jackson, SLF and Angelic Upstarts. With Misty In Roots glaringly absent due to ‘rights issues’, there’s ample scope for a sequel. [Sep 2024, p.101]

Ever unpredictable and inspired, >>>> is anything but run-of-the-mill. [Aug 2024, p.81]

Through it all, Metheny’s sole medium is a guitar built by luthier extraordinaire Linda Manzer. Thanks to his cloistered affair with the instrument, everybody wins. [Aug 2024, p.89]

The occasional slo-mo reverb-guitar twang, and on The Answers To The Questions a weary beatbox, cap off a supremely unsettling update on Lynchian pop weirdness. [Sep 2024, p.92]

It's impressive stuff, full of craft and invention, but there are moments when there could be more mellow - and a touch less pyrotechnic indie-rock Roman candle. [Sep 2024, p.91]

Smoke & Fiction is lean rock'n'roll that plays to the group's strengths. [Sep 2024, p.86]

This NYC ambient country trio continue to evolve on their fifth LP. [Sep 2024, p.94]

No Name is a much more nuanced record, more of a piece with White’s entire varied discography, than it might have first appeared.

Are Possible grasps the roots of folk tradition and propels them enthusiastically into new terrain. [Sep 2024, p.88]

What follows is a remarkably moving distillation of Blur’s 33 years as pop stars. [Sep 2024, p.84]

Here, the 36 unreleased tracks (albeit including alternate or instrumental versions of the LP cuts) highlight the outside influences that each brought to the table. [Sep 2024, p.96]

Lovely though these songs are, it’s hard not to feel they demand a similar attention, your mind fighting to impose structure on their swathes of classic rock signifiers, their lyrical opacity. Izenberg might be getting closer to his music, but he’s still oddly far away. [Sep 2024, p.84]

Forged from 60 hours of improvisation, the excellent follow-up to 2019’s Laughing Matter is tightly crafted without being too stable, the band throwing their melodic rope bridges over wide dark spaces on JJ’s woozy exotica lullaby or Lifeboat’s ominous electro-folk. [Sep 2024, p.84]

The Alabama five-piece, alongside producer David Cobb, totally cut loose, upping the octane to hard rockin’, guitar crunchin’ Southern gospel soul. [Sep 2024, p.86]

The Evidence and Hear The Children Sing are probably lodged in Talya Salsburg and Poppy Oldham’s subconsciouses for life now. Give this beautiful record of uncanny domesticity a few listens, and they may well take up residence in yours, too.

A succinct record about wisdom accrued through adversity, its layered arrangements packing subtle psych tropes and world-weary vocal-harmony. [Aug 2024, p.88]

There’s quite a variety of country musicians here. Most tend to play their selection pretty straight, though Rhiannon Giddens has an interesting take on Don’t Come Around Here No More. ... It’s the old school who provide this collection’s highlights. [Aug 2024, p.89]

Most of I Have Notes is a shop window for Gouldman’s songwriting craft. [Sep 2024, p.87]

Paint A Room’s hooks work in unassuming ways, carrying mid-’80s Creation vibes à la Weather Prophets or Westlake. [Sep 2024, p.86]

It’s a non-stop cavalcade of chá-chá-chá (including flute worthy of Orquesta Aragón) and mambo that should bring any dancer out of their shell. [Sep 2024, p.92]

It’s this ease and connection that gives When I’m Called its cumulative power. [Aug 2024, p.86]

Fielding love songs, existential ruminations and anthems of solidarity and resistance, The Auditorium Vol. 1 finds rap’s self-proclaimed James Baldwin sermonising in the key of life on its every glory and struggle, offering hope amid the darkness and remaining a voice of mature wisdom in a rudderless world. It’s one of his very best. [Sep 2024, p.90]

On record it’s more the spoken-word sections that grab the listener. [Jul 2024, p.93]

A quietly entrancing atmosphere is sustained throughout. [Jul 2024, p.84]

When Goddard himself provides vocals – notably on Follow You and On My Mind – it adds necessary cohesion. [Aug 2024, p.83]

Warning: the only rarity of note in this reissue, outside the remix narrative, is Lennon running down I’m The Greatest in a near-Beatles reunion with George Harrison and Ringo Starr – and that’s tucked away as a hidden bonus track. The Mind Games you get instead, in this lavish, rejuvenating treatment, is the several brighter, bolder albums it might have been, on the way to the one that fell flat in 1973. [Aug 2024, p.92]

Escape and new beginnings are constant themes in these eight mostly superb songs, but his old preoccupations keep yanking him back onto familiar turf. [Sep 2024, p.85]

It’s unlikely to set anything alight, but LA Times still leaves a warm glow. [Aug 2024, p.81]