Although the music is minimal, propulsive and built for clubs, Avery's formative years spent listening too rock and proto-electro lend the album a dynamic that suits headphone immersion. [Nov 2013, p.102]

Knight is now coming up on the rails. [Feb 2016, p.112]

Victory Shorts makes art-pop by contrasting Michaelson's mordant lyrics and juanty, sophisticated melodies. [Oct 2008, p.139]

Not all of it convinces; Buttery's vocals can stray into a chill-out. But this is still an absorbing record that deserves to break hearts beyond the confines of the dubstep scene. [Dec. 2010, p. 108]

An arresting record for challenging times. [Mar 2012, p.113]

Fizzing with energy and wearing its Pixies hat with pride, Touchdown is a blast of brain-scrambled indie rock that reaches its apogee, of sorts, on the irresisitibly dumb 'Hey, Hey.' [May 2009, p.119]

A tightly constructed record, its hushed instrumentation and Southern Gothic lyrics give it a melancholic mood, one that Bondy handles beautifully. [Dec 2009, p. 117]

Bad Contestant may sound studiously restrained, but Maltese never lets things stagnate, buoying the album along with his amusing lyricism. [Jul 2018, p.115]

This second collection of mostly covers after 2013's Memphis embraces some of the best music of his career. [Jun 2015, p.111]

All in all, as resonant and dignified a covers album as you'll ever hear.

Led by the strident vocals of the younger Klara, it is, however, the strength and surprising maturity of the pair's songwriting that makes The Big Black And The Blue such an impressive first effort, not least on the gorgeous Ghost Town. [Feb 2010, p. 105]

The resultant chaos is addictive, energizing and catchy as hell. [Feb 2010, p. 108]

The whole album flows like a rainbow-hued river animated by the spirit of generosity and wonder. [Aug 2016, p.116]

Their best yet. [Sep 2001, p.120]

Someone still plays the Devil's music. [Jun 2004, p.98]

Q's energetic, exuberant delivery is frames by some impressive and varied production throughout. [Jun 2012, p.108]

Stockholm contains 11 good-to-excellent songs, hooks and pleasure aplenty, but still, alas, short of a masterpiece. [Jul 2014, p.101]

It feels like a coherent vision, even if it occasionally spills into narco-whimsy. [Oct 2016, p.107]

A fascinating new direction. [Nov 2019, p.115]

Keeping up with his often logic-defying wordplay can be a challenge. But the payoff is a startling insight into how the world looks from the inside one of hip-hop's most original and consistently inventive minds. [Nov 2019, p.110]

These songs snap at the outer edges of country, blues and folk, their emotional turmoil leavened by moments of bone-dry humour. [Nov 2000, p.107]

It can meander--Mind To Be Had never quite knows what to do with its initially exciting Neu! vibrations, Defeatist Anthem doesn't shift beyond pretty--but they texture Barragan with a delicacy and precision that makes you want to keep picking away at these songs. [Oct 2014, p.114]

Petra's songs have an autumnal quality, wistful yet mellow, with his voice providing the earthy centre. [Dec 2019, p.106]

Posthumous albums tend to sound cobbled together, compromised, missing that vital spark, but this loving father-son dialogue has produced a worthy epilogue to one of music's greatest songbooks. [Jan 2020, p.115]

Like Coldplay rummaging through a charity shop, it's a patchwork of moods and styles all stitched together by Dangerfield's heart-on-sleeve exhortations. [Aug 2006, p.113]

It's a well-deserved victory lap for the trio and ample proof that growing up doesn't have to mean losing your edge--or your anger. [Mar 2017, p.115]

Listeners so far unhipped to the contemporary avant-classical may find themselves pleasantly intrigued. [Feb 2018, p.117]

It tails off slightly with too much frosted minor chord melancholy and some monochrome male vocalists, but there's nothing to suggest creative exhaustion. [Jan 2015, p.129]

New Blood again finds him working with a full orchestra, this time on selections from his own back catalogue. [Dec. 2011 p. 136]

As warmly irresistible as the Feeling, the impossibly catchy 'Best Of Me' nods to Elton John's 'Your Song' and it's the finest moment here. [Oct 2008, p.150]

It's a challenging, ambitious combination of words and music that becomes increasingly absorbing over time. [Jun 2015, p.103]

[Randy Newman returns] to what he does best: write and sing songs that veer from wild sentimentality to ambiguity to deep cynicism. [Sep 2017, p.113]

Illuminate is a powerful, sometimes overwhelming debut that pushes all the right buttons. [Jul 2014, p.103]

Jamie is a thrilling first step into her future. [Oct 2019, p.106]

Wild World is the right album at the right moment. [Oct 2016, p.112]

She's created an album that discovers an uncanny balance all of its own. [Feb 2018, p.109]

This 20th album is his most overt and conscious attempt to wrestle with specific demons that [diagnosis of being in the autism spectrum] raises up. [Nov 2013, p.113]

Oracular Spectacular is a triumph of conceptual ambition, a series of fantastic voyages that avoids any of the navel-gazing such notions normally provoke. [May 2008, p.138]

Given an open mind and time to unfurl, Working Out is a wholly absorbing record. [Mar 2014, p.107]

Allen keeps it reliably real. [Mar 2009, p.92]

It's been a long time coming, but Brit-rap's first genuinely huge album is here. [Oct 2009, p.104]

Suffused in African melody and harmony, the touches of house and hip-hop more decorative than foundational, it reads like Esau's love letter to his homeland. [Jun 2015, p.113]

Not an experience to be rushed, but it makes for quite a trip. [Summer 2019, p.112]

Sam Owen's milky vocals give these songs a bloodless, etiolated quality that's as sinister as it is pretty. [Summer 2018, p.114]

Like Willy Wonka, Jack White is a strange, dramatic and otherworldly figure. Lazaretto amplifies all these character traits to electrifying effect. [Jul 2014, p.106]

She's still in her element luxuriating in that crisis point where comfort is soured by paranoia. ... Relative stability suits her just fine. [Nov 2019, p.112]

The hit rate is impressive. [Oct 2015, p.109]

The two troubadours don't miss a trick bringing sepia-tinged majesty and tragedy back to life. [Nov 2016, p.102]

Z proves they have not lost the magical intimacy that touched 2001's At Dawn and '03's It Still Moves. [Nov 2005, p.127]

A swinging selection ranging from Lonnie Johnson to The Milk Carton Kids, from folk, country and blues to rollicking R&B, stripped down, hot and sweaty. [Dec 2015, p.108]

This all-original 20-tracker works even better as an intimate, end-to-end, night-drive companion than a snack tray despite Williams's often grueling vocal intensity. [Nov 2014, p.119]

You'll fall for Peter Broderick's humour and ingenuity in the end. [Nov 2012, p.90]

While lyrically Kings Of Leon remain underdeveloped, how they've grown musically. [May 2007, p.119]

On every possible level, this album is a total blast. [Jan 2015, p.128]

These songs sound as if they could have echoed around soot-stained ports and roadside taverns for generations and can still cast 21st-century listeners under their spell. [Mar 2018, p.117]

This all Peters's show as she shines a light under some very dark roots. [Mar 2015, p.114]

Wu-Tang devotees won't be disappointed. [Apr 2013, p.94]

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]

The sound is raw, yet dense and intense, each track a microdrama of shifting textures and competing motifs. [May 2015, p.113]

Despite a late lapse into mediocrity, the good here far outshines the bland. [Feb 2003, p.96]

A harrowing, clearly autobiographical dissection of a decaying relationship. [Sep 2001, p.109]

It's a record delivered with real verve and attack. [Sep 2016, p.111]

This is Parker's finest achievement yet, with the lavish soundscapes and dense atmospherics often anchored with undeniably catchy hooks. [Aug 2015, p.102]

Even if the arrangements can stray toward the vintage, the sisters' sublime voices ensure their songs always shine with startling clarity. [Jul 2014, p.107]

Less immediate than her band work, it's a record that is rewarding and quietly revelatory. [Nov 2019, p.112]

It's gloriously dark and downbeat stuff. [Nov 2001, p.130]

Insane, extraordinary. [Mar 2005, p.95]

If not Elliott's most inventive album, The Cookbook is certainly her most colourful and entertaining. [Aug 2005, p.124]

It's not always easy, but it is frequently brilliant. [Dec 2018, p.108]

It's as an articulation of grief that this record speaks most powerfully. [Jan 2019, p.106]

The best record of the three record of the three recorded with his new and far younger band Promise Of The real, it veers between raw fury an tender melodies. [Feb 2018, p.110]

[The songs] slow drift proves compelling, in a faintly Virgina Astley way. [Jan 2015, p.131]

If some of these drifting, piano-rich tunes aren't reworked into dream-state Ibiza sunset bangers by next summer then, frankly, the world is dancing to the wrong beat. [Mar 2013, p.98]

The familiarity of Ivy Tripp breeds disquiet, rather than contempt, its surface cracking like thin ice, revealing its depths. [May 2015, p.115]

Auerbach and Carney don't tear up their blueprint, but tripping out their sound suits them. [Jun 2014, p.102]

Rest And Be Thankful is as welcome as the first true summer's day in Argyll. [Aug 2015, p.109]

Glass Animals have mapped out a vivid, intoxicating soundworld of their own. [Jul 2014, p.107]

Splits evenly into out-and-out rockers and downhome folk. [Nov 2003, p.123]

Plastics is a deeply impressive debut. [Aug 2014, p.105]

Cause & Effect plays to their strengths. [Nov 2019, p.112]

L.A.-based quintet unleash positively euphoric debut. [Oct 2011, p.120]

Tindersticks once again turn the spaces and losses into songs of substance. [Jan 2020, p.114]

Strikes a winning formula of DIY integrity and big bucks sheen. [Mar 2006, p.110]

It sounds as you would expect: a desolate dreamscape punctuated by nervous drum machines. In other words, it's a bit Kid A. [Aug 2006, p.110]

It's an album that weaves in and out of domestic life and musical ambition, and somewhere in the knot of them lies something rather special. [Mar 2017, p.108]

One of the chiefs pleasure to be had from The Slow Rush is the sheer depth of sonic treats packed into each song. [Apr 2020, p.102]

[An] immediately fascinating, a cluttered, three-records-playing-at-once orchestral fantasia that--icing on the art-pop cake--is inspired by Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. [Jan 2015, p.131]

The music is fabulous, a sublime pulse of Hammond organ, trombone and piano. [Nov 2012, p.100]

Shine A Light balances the hamminess with proper rock 'n' roll. [May 2008, p.132]

It may sound less dense, but The Hungry Saw is as dark, mysterious and seductive as ever. [May 2008, p.141]

Business-as-usual for Jones, cranked up to 11. [Jul 2017, p.108]

Waterfall finds them back doing what they do best. [Jun 2015, p.108]

It's quite sublime. [Summer 2018, p.116]

A hip hop album of raw and unusual playfulness. [Jan 2010, p. 118]

For their sixth album, the quintet have finally made theor cranky Americana into fully fledged classic rock. [May 2010, p.118]

The vibe remians woebegone but with the combination of lush arrangements and gallows wit add layers of transcendence previously only hinted at. [Jun 2010, p.131]

With its soft lilts and cracked delivery, his rusty voice presses the same emotional buttons as Shane MacGowan and Arab Strap's Aidan Moffat. [May 2004, p.98]

Devendra Banhart's singular world remains as intoxicating as ever on the earthy, analogue-sounding Ma. [Oct 2019, p.106]