As usual, it mixes vintage country, soul and R&B. Be cool, however, listen on, and it comes together. [Oct 2011, p.106]

It's no great leap forward, but it's a decent return on the band's early promise. [Oct 2011, p.105]

Whitmore's sparse new songs brilliantly realised. [Oct 2011, p.105]

We're on such familiar territory here that Wildfire is as much homage as innovation. [Oct 2011, p.105]

This is possibly the most remarkable album Finn has been involved with in a decade. [Oct 2011, p.99]

Gravity the Seducer aims to be the great leap forward but still falls a little short. [Oct 2011, p.98]

Luke Pritchard and co attack each of their songs with crisp, clean confidence, brisk guitar lines and open vowels. [Oct 2011, p.97]

Kasabian have always talked a great album, but Velociraptor! sees them deliver with verve and imagination. [Oct 2011, p.94]

Buckingham's pop ear is still highly attuned. [Oct 2011, p.106]

Portamento does not convince. [Oct 2011, p.105]

Can be hard for mere mortals to swallow. [Oct 2011, p.104]

Strange Mercy is the shimmering, expansive sound of an artist defiantly coming into her own. [Oct 2011, p.104]

While Wu's trademark kung-fu film samples can't help but sound dated some 18 years after their breathtaking debut similar charges crumble to dust against the renewed evangelism of Ghostface Killah. [Oct 2011, p.104]

It's cleaner, but still killer. [Oct 2011, p.101]

It's a technical leap forward...but she wears this transformation easily. [Oct 2011, p.101]

Dolly steps up as America's cheerleader, to help fight the recession blues. [Oct 2011, p.100]

Nearly a decade later, their new album attempts to recapture the moment of dancefloor serendipity and only occasionally do they succeed. [Oct 2011, p.99]

The album is most notable for the man's glorious undiminished tones. [Oct 2011, p.98]

The frat-boy humour is wearing a tad thin. [Oct 2011, p.97]

[Bridges] convincingly inhabits a batch of mostly self-penned story songs that radiate a weary gravitas and wry existentialism. [Oct 2011, p.96]

From the title's Depression-era jokes onwards, Cooder protests like it's 1939. [Oct 2011, p.96]

Studded with occasional gems...it's also weighed down by a handful of jokey throwaways and partially realised pop numbers among its 24 tracks. [Oct 2011, p.94]

Where her self-titled debut was intense and socially conscious, things are groovier now. [May 2011, p.107]

As the Crow Flies feels like a more personal work. Both a soundtrack to dreamlike childhood summers and an imagined government guide to the cycles of the seasons, complete with liner notes by historian and folklorist Ronald Hutton. [Sep 2011, p.101]

This is resilient, tough, exultant music that just didn't push thorough a t the time. [Sep 2011, p.113]

Nothing unfamiliar, yet distinguished by granite totem-pole vocals and mesmerically ominous axe. [Sep 2011, p.97]

Stars offers deep dreamlike comfort, undercut by the melancholy violin of founding member Noel Sayre, who tragically died during the album's recording. [Sep 2011, p.96]

The cosy and intimate songs, sung in the disarming, high-pitched tenor so admired by Sufjan Stevens, are pleasant enough, but it isn't until the Cajun-tinged shuffle of Ophelia and late-night bar lament You Belong To Heaven that it gels. [Sep 2011, p.95]