Their trad arrangements of others' songs are bewitching, but it's a pity they don't pen more original songs. [Nov 2009, p.112]

Maraqopa sounds like the place he's been searching for all along. [Mar 2012, p.105]

Haunting debut from post-dubstep pioneer. [March 2011, p. 113]

Grandaddy sound like a lo-fi ELO and, in frontman Jason Lytle, possess an admirably unusual songwriter. Sophtware Slump is more coherent than their 1997 debut Under The Western Freeway, Lytle having settled on a theme: knackered electronics.... Cheap, cheerful and utterly charming.

There's only 22 minutes of material here, including skits--but his edge has never been sharper. [Jan 2019, p.113]

It's complex music but with enough of a melodic charm to hook you in, easy to appreciate but hard to fully grasp. [May 2016, p.104]

While it might not feature too many songs the faithful will be hollering for at gigs, it's crammed full of ear candy. [Jun 2015, p.98]

If World Eater has an ear for the end-times rave-up, it's also not going anywhere gently. [Apr 2017, p.111]

Shadows, their eighth album, piles the instrumental layers back on without sacrificing any of the Scots' traditional strengths. [July 2010, p. 140]

Draws you in and then pulls you under. [Apr 2020, p.108]

A meditation on modern urban life that lets the city shine with mystery, menace and grace. [Jan 2004, p.118]

These are skewed, disturbing, beautiful songs...

Hypnotic stuff. [Summer 2020, p.100]

Over a strident indie-rock soundtrack, singer Kate Jackson comes across like a female Morrissey. [Dec 2006, p.138]

They're back to their trouser-soiling best here, genre-hopping like mad and avidly playing the "long game." [Jan 2016, p.113]

A pleasure, of course. [Dec 2018, p.104]

Rarely has a band justified the attention put upon them so beautifully. [Jun 2019, p.112]

In time, Devils & Dust will be regarded as an inspired stopgap. [Jun 2005, p.105]

There is a slight foal-legged wobbliness to some of her allusions, some of the ardour, a roughness that prevents When Winter's Over or Come To Terms from being a too-mature blend of Cat power and KT Tunstall. [Dec 2013, p.115]

It's a strange and beautiful album, one that's hard to turn away from. [Nov 2014, p.102]

An atmospheric masterclass. [May 2018, p.104]

Charming without being cloying, Paradise is the work of a band beginning to stretch their wings.

The relentless macho intensity would be oppressive were Hill and Morin not having so much fun pillaging everything from punk to crunk. [Jun 2012, p.100]

With Williamson delivering street-ranter streams of consciousness over Andrew Fearn's frigid post-punk/jip-hop productions, it's possibly not for the casual listener out for a few laughs but there's much to invigorate in its unaffected, defiant slagging of hated jobs, metropolitan hipsters, Twitter and more. [Jun 2014, p.120]

Massiveness should be assured. [Summer 2018, p.114]

A dozen familiar tracks, minus their overdubs. [Oct 2013, p.116]

An album of some considerable beauty. [Sep 2005, p.118]

Folk and indie-pop influences are as prevalent as prog's darker hue, making Allas Sak far less challenging than it might have been in less thoughtful hands. [Nov 2015, p.109]

She's still very much the real deal. [Aug 2020, p.111]

The arrangements here are written specifically with a touring quartet in mind, adding ever greater layers of haunting melancholy and soaring grace. [Sep 2006, p.109]

These broiling drum-led riffs offer curdled cries, much volume and even humour. [Aug 2006, p.113]

Her observations possess a nuance that blasts away old cliches, but are also related with a pleasing simplicity. [Aug 2020, p.107]

The sisters harmonise like sisters should, the tunes soar as both country and Bright Eyes should and First Aid Kit is contending like contenders should. [Feb 2012, p. 104]

Jamie Treays has come back fighting and fighting brilliantly. [Nov 2014, p.117]

This, though, is accessible without compromise. [July 2008, p.106]

Packed with mesmerising detail yet powerful enough to dance to, the result is electronic music that radiates intelligence and emotion. [Dec 2019, p.109]

Ultimately, floating voters will lament the lack of a flat-out glam and/or electro-disco belter to rival their hits. [Oct 2017, p.111]

By turns eerie and enthralling, it's the kind of experiment [John] Cage would surely applaud. [Dec 2018, p.111]

She's just as full of herself, but she now has a voice brimming with womanly promise. [Nov 2006, p.149]

Why Make Sense? is a meaty electro-grooving celebration of love, hope, dancing. [Jun 2015, p.101]

His earthy but frequently beautiful Americana has maintained a consistent heaviness of vibe, and album five continues down the same byway. [Nov 2016, p.107]

It's a stimulating and animated listen, his resigned confidences frequently sharpened by dyspeptic wit. [Jun 2017, p.105]

Without a single piece of filler here, this is the musical equivalent of meeting a stranger you feel you've known all your life. [Nov 2001, p.128]

Be More Kind strikes a balance between the personal and the political. [Jun 2018, p.116]

There is a wonderful tension on Mangy Love between the pleasure of the music--lush, soulful, spinning out from Elliot Smith or Lambchop--and the often ugly, complex breaks and disturbances in the lyrics. [Sep 2016, p.103]

A sublime tonic. [Jul 2020, p.113]

Broadcast are detached and austere, but mesmerised by their discoveries in the radiophonic workshop. Current single Echo's Answer and the unusually upbeat Come On Let's Go are the best places to start, but this is a classic case of an album working as a whole. Hard work, but compelling.

This album - musically more extravagant, lyrically just as searching - takes its place at the shoulder of 1994's Stones In The Road as her best yet.

It's terrifically exciting stuff. [Apr 2003, p.101]

Cox's great virtue is that he wears his experimentation lightly; though meticulously orchestrated and teeming with digital feints, these songs feel wonderfully spacious and derive an easy-going charm from his hazy vocals and their one-take recording. [Jan 2010, p. 117]

There are moments of exquisite melancholy to treasure. [Dec. 2011 p. 136]

It's hard not to be drawn into their occult world. [Jun 2013, p.99]

It is disorientating, but clocking in at just 26 minutes, this is also a tight, brilliantly breathless dispatch of noise. [Apr 2018, p.116]

The result is a success as both an artistic statement and a mea culpa. [Nov 2019, p.108]

It never tries to blow the house down. Rather, the soloists take turns to dance around each other, creating a supple and mellifluous air. [Sep 2019, p.115]

Ode To Joy shivers on this ledge between defiance and dissolution. Despite Tweedy's fears, it turns out more Wilco music is exactly what's needed. [Nov 2019, p.117]

An exquisitely warm, olde-worlde soup in which to bathe one's auditory senses. [#361, p.116]

Their cut-ups... work best when at their most odd. [Jun 2006, p.117]

Fans of his early output will continue to wonder why he's forsaken immaculate prog house so completely: those up for the trip, conversely, will just be keen to know where he's headed next. [Dec 2017, p.108]

Barbara Barbara is an ideal way for them to restate their currency. Having lain dormant, the creature is alive once more, electrifyingly so.[Apr 2016, p.103]

Like so much of his troubled catalogue, it disarms you with its beauty. [Dec 2010, p.124]

It may well be his strongest ever collection. [Feb 2006, p.98]

As intense as music can be, this record may be quiet but it isn't for the faint-hearted. [Mar 2018, p.111]

Morby's songs move from the grandiose to hushed confessionals and by the time it ends with Dylan-like O Behold the entire journey feels like a revelation. [Jun 2019, p.115]

It won't bring down the establishment, but it does light a bonfire under their arses. [Oct 2019, p.113]

The way Blumberg expands and contracts the title track four times over the record, or filters a warped background shriek into Silence Breaker, underlines his experimental drives, his desire to push through sound barriers. [Sep 2020, p.107]

Occasionally it drifts a little too aimlessly, as if recorded under the dulling influence of Prozac, but when she gets it right, she can be entirely, weirdly riveting. [Jun 2009, p.131]

Everything here sounds how Jehnny Beth is meant to sound, making To Love Is To Live a record as masterful as its creator is complicated. [Summer 2020, p.99]

It all serve to confirm Cutler as one of contemporary electronica's most gifted and distinctive sonic manipulators. [Aug 2014, p.110]

Exhilarating debut album. Its 11 breathless tracks bottle the barely-controlled explosion of energy that masquerades as their live show, then sprays it all out again like cheap lager. [Jul 2019, p.111]

A beautifully moving, soul-stirring, bravely genre-blurring album. [Oct 2014, p.111]

Innovation isn't on the agenda, but thanks to some stomping tunes and Auerbach's oak-smoked vocals, it's another rock-solid enterprise. [Sep 2004, p.119]

Jigga may have the edge right now, but on this evidence Nas looks the better bet in the long run. [Mar 2003, p.112]

A familiarly kaleidoscopic whirl of retro-futuristic sounds. [May 2005, p.111]

While Sing The Delta isn't DeMent's best work, it's full of understated, sharply observed songs. [Jan 2013, p.102]

A third-eye dilator to be sure, but surprisingly easy to groove to. [Jul 2009, p.131]

The most powerful moments are frequently the most stripped-down, underlying the fact that Feist is surely one of the best singers working today. [Nov. 2011, p. 126]

The settings are spacious, the rhythms stately and Stuart Staples croons woozily about how it's all gone horribly wrong.

Truely, there's no one like them. [Dec 2009, p.127]

A strange, spooked and deeply involving record. [Jul 2012, p.105]

Musically, it's more straightforward, psychedelic metal in which the sound leaps from minimal guitars to maximal sludge noise. [Oct 2012, p.98]

Offering a clear connection with his melodically sophisticated, emotive songwriting of yore, it combines light an d shade while touching on such universal notions as the ineffable mystery of existence, how love is eternal and the waning of earthly powers. [Nov 2013, p.114]

With gospel tinges and road-dusted melodies, this is high-end Americana and piano balladry, his brothers' loss is everyone else's gain. [May 2014, p.110]

Life lived close to home, outside any metropolitan notions of centre, is continually apparent in these intimate melodic reveries, which mull romantic vicissitudes via folk-influenced acoustic and sometimes molten electric rock. [Dec 2015, p.113]

Eve is, ultimately, one of those moody, chain-smoking nights in on your Jack Jones, where only the intimate anguish of a deft alt-noisenik-turned-twisted balladeer will do. [Sep 2016, p.114]

GLA's songs are snappy, its drums gigantic, its guitar riffs thrilling and McTrusty sings I Am Alive with the conviction of a man truly reborn. [Oct 2016, p.113]

Lean and modest throughout, Don't Let The Kids Win reverberates with a sense of truth that only the truly exceptional can convey. [Nov 2016, p.110]

Cory Hanson's solo debut holds itself very upright, eyes straight ahead, creating the sense that its elegant parlour-folk could topple into mania at any moment. [Jan 2017, p.107]

Ribbons feels almost like a homecoming. [Jul 2019, p.106]

The shock of the new is gone, but they've rediscovered the art of surprise. [Aug 2019, p.111]

Like a lot of world music, it probably has niche appeal, although Soroor's voice is beautifully expressive. [Nov 2019, p.112]

Akchote can still serve up a dancefloor banger when required. ... Although its on the album's closing track that he discovers the perect balance between artistry and energy, silken-voiced R&B singer Gallant turning Run For Me into a heady EDM ballad that elevates his signature beats to new heights. [Dec 2019, p.115]

Against all odds, this is a brilliant second act. [Jun 2020, p.97]

Mature, classy and a hard-earnedtriumph. [Jul 2020, p.105]

For a record that strives to sound disembodied, it has a powerful grip. [Jul 2012, p.105]

Historic recreation pop, yes, but it presents beautifully. [June 2019, p.111]

It's a stunningly assured, deeply romantic and already one of the year's best. [Dec 2018, p.113]

That [metal] grind is almost gone from Mutt in favor of a more mellowed mainstream sound, but his storytelling style has become razor sharp. [Aug 2012, p.95]