Little Simz’s latest--and greatest--album is divided between three emotional states: bravado, doubt and love. [Apr 2019, p.58]

He has a fascinating rhythmic sense, phrasing almost like a man who is writing down his words as he sings them, which gives the record a strong sense of immediacy and almost improvised spontaneity. And yet the accompaniments are more elegantly constructed than that implies, a beguiling mixture of harmonic squidge and tight metrical control. [Apr 2019, p.57]

She delivers an almost unrelentingly banging techno set whose cuts, while perhaps underground, could never be referred to as deconstructed. [Apr 2019, p.57]

The results are gorgeous. [Apr 2019, p.54]

Don’t let inevitable mainstream acclaim obscure the beauty and ingenuity of this album; it’s big enough for everyone. [Apr 2019, p.52]

State Of Ruin is a typically pristine offering from Planet Mu’s UK roster of trap and grime inspired producers, at once displaying high definition composition of dynamic bass pressure without really producing anything hugely exciting. [Apr 2019, p.50]

The production has remained faithfully jagged and abrasive, where a trebly and bass-starved sonic narrative enforces a fresh take on what continues to be intense and difficult listening. [Apr 2019, p.50]

It’s just possible that, nearly three decades into her recording career, It’s Real is Ex Hex frontwoman Mary Timony’s strongest release to date. [Mar 2019, p.62]

By the time you’re through to the end of the album, Negro’s precise refusal to have bullied you with his ideas means you’re happy to return to the beginning and let that sunlight in again. Central heating for kids. Lovely. [Mar 2019, p.57]

The project ultimately feels a little vague and indulgent. Though the sounds of plastic on offer are eclectic and the compositions joyous, Matmos seem to acknowledge climate change as a throwaway aside in favour of an avant garde remaking of physical theatre. [Mar 2019, p.55]

There’s no subject harder to broach in polite society than loneliness. Martin and Robinson know this and should be commended for taking an extended gaze into this particular abyss. [Mar 2019, p.54]

Three years ago Eyes On The Lines marked the emergence of an important songwriting talent, a rebirth midwifed by a dozen years on the road. The Unseen In Between delivers the same impact, but deeper and more lasting. If you wanted to pinch a Chapman reference, you might say it acknowledges that those growing pains never actually stop. [Mar 2019, p.48]

These aren’t stoical songs; nor are they blandly defiant. They speak a deep truth about ageing, and one that spikes several more humdrum cliches: age isn’t just how you feel, but an ineluctable fact; it isn’t just a matter of numbers, but very much a felt experience, and Chapman has delivered a beautiful continuum of musical experience since he emerged in 1969 with Rainmaker and Fully Qualified Survivor. [Mar 2019, p.48]

Lee Gamble’s In A Paraventral Scale makes another step towards a scene that for some has been and gone. [Mar 2019, p.51]

“Carapace” is one worth returning to, an agitated Pixies-style rocker that pogos up and down for three energetic minutes. Equally enjoyable is the kosmische inspired interplay wired into “Lurk Of The Worm”, together with the bolts of grunge that light up “Where Have You Been All My Life?”. Elsewhere some of Pollard’s songs can be compared to those of Peters Gabriel and Hammill, two distinct guiding voices who can occasionally be heard whispering in the hull of this inflated blimp of a record. [Mar 2019, p.52]

Eton Alive is but another visceral and impetuous take on a grim political reality. [Mar 2019, p.58]

Encore is Hall’s first record under the moniker since the 1981 single “Ghost Town”, and with guitarist Lynval Golding and bassist Horace Panter in the fold, it feels more like The Specials than anything has in a long time. [Mar 2019, p.59]

Merging a sophisticated rhythm dynamism, often with an almost gamelan aspect (“Two Flames Burn”) with a Laibachian apocalyptic proclamatory element and 90s crossover rave-electronic-industrial urgency, Disturbance may not be entirely different from what Test Dept were doing a long time ago, but, then again, nor is the political context in which they’re doing it. [Mar 2019, p.60]

Her most powerful album to date, both vivid and serene in its uncanny way of slowing the pace of time. [Mar 2019, p.61]

Tutti is a journey to the centre of the soul, but it is a kindly one, and Cosey is a most excellent guide. [Mar 2019, p.61]

Weird is more insular, almost cabin feverish in Hatfield’s tendency to celebrate her own company (“All Right, Yeah” and the impossibly wholesome “Do It To Music”) or conversely magnify her own physical flaws (“Broken Doll”). If you hold some nostalgia for Hatfield’s early years but tuned out some time ago, you might get more from this than you expect. [Mar 2019, p.62]

At times flush with the meditative air of Alice Coltrane, elsewhere like some whispered about 80s new age obscurity, this album both requires and justifies extensive attention. [Mar 2019, p.62]

Bob Mould is not pulling up stylistic roots on Sunshine Rock, but it’s still breezier than his average, thanks in part to the use of an 18-piece string section on much of the album. [Mar 2019, p.62]

A modest effort of just over half an hour. [Mar 2019, p.62]

The blithe ease with which it slips from unruly quasi-techno to Tony Conrad-like violin drone (“Pumpkin Attack On Mommy And Daddy”; “The Wrong Thing”) keeps this consistently diverting. [Mar 2019, p.62]

This is darkly delicious pop--with no smiling. [Mar 2019, p.64]

Cross’s ability to get the job done with his stripped down trio is the real achievement here. [Mar 2019, p.65]

It’s something like Noname if she had a backstory closer to The Game. And just when it almost veers too close into Soulquarian-lite territory, Boogie drops “Self Destruction”, a vocally agile self-examination that reminds you why his contract was picked up by Eminem. [Mar 2019, p.65]

Tobacco’s beats sound like a mescaline trip through a haunted theme park from Scooby Doo, while the Def Jux legend in a different lifetime raps about an eagle snacking on a cat like a churro. Pretty standard stuff really. [Mar 2019, p.65]

This is rain-choked pain music, inspirational negativity, hypnotic blood moon melodies over crack-slanging boasts. [Mar 2019, p.65]

Their world is one where the scrambling of senses serves a true psychedelic purpose--to open doors, to facilitate fresh ways of perceiving and, most gloriously, to wonder. It’s great to have (all of) them back. [Mar 2019, p.49]

What on the record might be the magnified pop of dust and surface scratch, here could represent imperfections on a cosmic scale--the debris of space and time, swallowed and digested. Where Basinski succeeds is the tone he adopts; rather than the heavy dread of inevitable supermassive doom, these sections are somehow wide-eyed and full of slowly drifting wonder. [Mar 2019, p.49]

If you listen to White Stuff and hear good time rock ’n’ roll then perhaps it’s time to check into the rock ’n’ roll nursing home. On the other hand if you hear avant garde brinksmanship, check your ears. It’s both, it’s neither. Does it matter? Does anything? Yes and no.

Thankfully here, in spite of the occasional song in Latin or mention of the Peninsular War, Batoh succeeds in stripping things all the way back to a jewel-like clarity. ... Even when things do take on a heavier and more expansive turn, technique, structure and lyrical meaning are powerfully combined. [Feb 2019, p.44]

It’s not uncommon for DIY punk, hardcore and noise artists to veer towards the more contemplative, electronic ends of musical experimentation. ... Croatian Amor’s exercise in post-apocalyptic world building is another effective example of this transition. [Feb 2019, p.53]

Drift Code may not be as bold an artistic statement as Spirit Of Eden, nor as interesting a sideline as .O.Rang, nor in all likelihood be as celebrated 17 years hence as Out Of Season. But Webb proves himself just as skilled as his former collaborator Gibbons in his ability to build worlds whose orbits brush against the heart while always staying at arm’s length. [Feb 2019, p.49]

The sixth album by this Norwegian power trio is, like each of its predecessors, a fierce demonstration of their strengths as individuals and as a collective. [Feb 2019, p.54]

Musically, Ace Of Cups remains more or less faithful to the instrumentation and stylistic idioms of the place and time in which the band formed. ... Other songs on this sprawling debut tend toward the folksy, bluesy and disarmingly earnest. [Feb 2019, p.55]

He has the knack of E-40, of Slick Rick, of George Clinton, for whipping up ugly shit with infantile rhyme to make it taste like candyfloss. On “Outside!”, he turns “Who want to die” into a sprightly singalong. The cheer proves to be a cover for both an experimental edge more disruptive than that of Some Rap Songs and a hefty impact when Vince does finally start to crumble. [Feb 2019, p.56]

It’s hard to get with the tiresome self-deprecation of that album title, the way he hides his pain behind a smile and hides his smile behind a dope aesthetic on that artfully blurred cover. When Earl does choose to project beyond his navel he has a powerful, booming voice and an ear for novelty. Where his gaze shifts to the outside world he can be inspirational. [Feb 2019, p.56]

A tight action trio who have screwed their collective anger and frustration into a balled musical fist and let fly. [Feb 2019, p.58]

There’s a brace of humble attempts to get his head round his situation, tracks like “Trauma” and “Oodles O’ Noodles Babies”, brilliantly nuanced performances where Meek wavers on the edge between uncommon restraint and a violent simmer. Jay-Z showing up on “What’s Free” to boast about tax avoidance brings everything back into perspective.

Once the starpower dazzle fades, it’s not always obvious who he is, but the lack of easy answers makes him interesting enough for now.

Though the compilation is vast and the songs hardly bleed into one another--we’re often jumping genres, pivoting off cascading basslines and quickly changing pace without missing beats--there is a level of thematic cohesion here. [Feb 2019, p.66]

The music for the horror/revenge fantasy developed from Cosmatos and Jóhannsson’s mutual appreciation of heavy metal and psychotronic cinema, and it shows. [Nov 2018, p.56]

When it works, it’s pretty thrilling--as on their version of Joe Henderson’s “Earth”. Whether bassist Domenico Angarano will ever forgive himself for fluffing the galaxy-unlocking riff at the start of Alice Coltrane’s “Journey In Satchidananda”, however, is between him and the Creator. [Dec 2018, p.63]

There’s no denying that braggadocio has always been a key component of the genre but after a while it does become wearing when little more is on offer to elevate the tunes. What rescues the whole affair is Daniel Boyle’s dedication to the task at hand and his skills in bringing the rhythms and end mixes together, though with session input from the great but unsung UK reggae sessioneer Hughie Izachaar on guitar and bass plus old Upsetter Robbie Lyn on keyboards it’s enough to infuse any session with confidence. [Nov 2018, p.62]

Melnyk’s playing has a rare capacity to energise and exhilarate, and in that respect Fallen Trees does not disappoint. [Jan 2019, p.82]

Pieces Of A Man is coherent, marrying the raw energy of trap with jazz-funk inspired beats. Black Milk’s instrumentals “Stress Fracture” and “Gwendolynn’s Apprehension” are remarkably complex both melodically and rhythmically. [Jan 2019, p.80]

Siblings is a powerful collection of choral singing, poetry, spoken word, field recordings and samples that draws from a vast and interconnected range of friends and collaborators, and times and locations, bringing this idea of activism through communality to its exuberant climax. [Jan 2019, p.73]

Where Lopatin’s earlier work often evoked the sense of a simultaneous need and impossibility of love--most notably in his Chris de Burgh sampling “Nobody Here”--the music here seems to strive for immediacy. [Jan 2019, p.70]

The delicacy and lightness of the album is underpinned by mesmerising, rich textures, constantly buzzing and clunking away beneath the surface. [Jan 2019, p.70]

“Exactlyfourminutesofimprovisedmusic” is one of the highlights on Blow, not least because it toys so wittily with ideas of genre and song versus freedom. [Jan 2019, p.70]

The unreachable past collides with a dark, unpredictable future, leaving the listener with a pit in the stomach and endless respect for the way that Ishibashi has upped her game. [Jan 2019, p.67]

A record that awakens mysteries and meaning from sparse elements; a masterful ritual. [Jan 2019, p.67]

The songwriting and lyricism are strong, but her storied voice elevates the album and invests it with a depth and serenity that few can match. [Jan 2019, p.64]

There Is A Place flirts with pastiche, but it’s hard not to be swept along by its uplifting grooves. [Dec 2018, p.52]

Lyrically, Foster possesses both esoteric wisdom and an ascetic purity yet never wanders out of reach; she has the musical instinct of her troubadour sisterhood (Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Judee Sill et al) and in the spoken word moments, the cosmic gravitas of Eden Ahbez. [Dec 2018, p.48]

“Sky Burial” gives us a melodic refrain of “I’ve been looking for you” bouncing over phantasmal electronic, squelching synths and a bass that almost clangs with detuning; “Dyma Fy Robot” revels in Metal Mickey vocals and a tumble of discombobulated percussion and trilling birdsong; “Tiny Witch Hunter” tangles helium-fuelled vocals with wailing sax and African rhythms. [Dec 2018, p.59]

This record has its moments, for instance the squarewave basslines and breakbeats of “Edelweiss” and the outro to “Climb Ev’ry Mountain”. However, as is often the case with Laibach, the pervasive air of calculated irony prevents the album from passing from the ridiculous to the sublime, even when it all gets so silly that on paper it sounds like it should. [Dec 2018, p.52]

Admirable in its candour, if at times hard to swallow. [Dec 2018, p.56]

The hi-hats and furiously brushed cymbals of Badalamenti’s pseudo-jazz cues outline these tracks, along with heavy but oddly affectless arco bass. He performs Lynch’s lines, describing scenes of unearthly violence, banality and menace, as if growling the menu of a New York Brooklyn trattoria. What guides the album away from this rather dated aesthetic, apart from the glaring crispness and pitch-black texture of the mixing, is the quality of the noise. [Dec 2018, p.69]

This collection, and its atmosphere of sharing a bench with the 20th century’s Mozart as he explores still nascent songs, is an appropriately seductive tease to what will doubtless be a decades-long unearthing of the vault’s untold treasures. The songs themselves, as they’re presented here, really are secondary to this feeling, something like finding a just unearthed message from a departed loved one. [Dec 2018, p.69]

The diversity of the record, it’s ability to flow from gnarly jazz to doomy funk of to peachily perfect quiet storm pop like “Conmigo”, never feels forced; and there’s a new wisdom and wonder to Muldrow’s voice that leaves things suggestive more than doctrinaire, open rather than sealed, playful rather than penetrative. Superb. [Dec 2018, p.63]

Tender without being overly sentimental, this is music with real feeling. [Dec 2018, p.59]

The music still nods to Broadcast in its gothic otherness, and the basic format of analogue synth driving the bass, drums and vocals is unchanged. But the sound is more structured, more--gasp!--song-like. Unfortunately the production is imbalanced, rough and thin. [Dec 2018, p.59]

The conceptual core of Vessel’s third album is rather ambiguous. Queen Of Golden Dogs follows a loose narrative of self-discovery and transformation and a couple of queer literary and surreal visual art references. ... Musically, Queen Of Golden Dogs is similarly vague and amorphous. [Dec 2018, p.58]

His music, which radiates humour, tenderness, frustration and audacity, remains seductively mysterious. [Dec 2018, p.54]

For music built around the shrouding and decay of its composer’s bodily presence, Thresholder feels curiously non-corporeal. In large part that’s attributable to the purity of Craig’s voice. ... But elsewhere--when melting between the tremulous organ tones of “And Therefore The Moonlight” or forming grainy cirrus wisps in “Sfumato”--Craig sounds as though he’s already shed his physical shell and ascended into the cosmos. [Dec 2018, p.46]

Cocoon Crush is, partly, the album that you’d imagine Future Sound Of London’s Lifeforms might have become if they’d had a million times the processing power at their disposal. Poised and composed. [Dec 2018, p.45]

While Lattimore is willing to put her instrument through some effects, she never subdues its essential character. Its inherent lightness gives records that bear her name a yielding quality that contrasts with the stark clarity of Baird’s solo work, let alone the body blows delivered by her combo Heron Oblivion. [Dec 2018, p.44]

Explicit references to surrealism and Japanese ambient, alongside DJ Screw and Jodorowsky, read as clumsy and uncritical homages to tired tropes and cliches, which ultimately serve a tactless and indulgent end. [Nov 2018, p.63]

Choirboys sing the poems of Nils Christian Moe-Repstad over Eivind Aarset’s guitar, but as with the more expansive orchestral passages, it can come across as earnestly ecclesiastical. The most affecting pieces are those where Henriksen and Bang strip it down, such as on “The Swans Bend Their Necks Backward To See God”, where pitched down trumpet lows like foghorns over the Humber valley. [Nov 2018, p.68]

Hoffmeier’s fourth solo album The Drought sees her graduating from the Copenhagen based label Posh Isolation to PAN to deliver her strongest statement yet. [Nov 2018, p.62]

Shorn of its images, Carpenter’s score for David Gordon Green’s reboot of the Halloween franchise is oddly aimless. There’s the instant jolt of recognition: that simple piano phrase is resurrected, and given a steroidal boost, its famous 5/4 rhythm now underpinned with a sturdy kickdrum. But after that the music hardly seems to build in intensity, or riff off each other; there are certainly no new hooks or textures that sear the listening ear like the first. [Nov 2018, p.53]

A record that is often overwhelming, at times breathtaking. [Nov 2018, p.55]

Berry consequently embellishes and embroiders these reassuring moments of collective memory, bringing out in each of his cover versions some surprising hidden detail. [Nov 2018, p.50]

Universal Beings is heady and refined. [Nov 2018, p.58]

A roaring return to a full band sound featuring twin drums, electric bass and keyboards. The secret ingredient that makes it such a blast, though, is an unabashed injection of prog pomposity. [Nov 2018, p.62]

The initial impression given by Death Valley Girls’ third album is of a hypertypical Los Angeles band: kinda punky, kinda raucous, but wholly beholden to the rock canon, in the style of past-decade LA outfits like The Icarus Line and The Warlocks. Multiple spins of Darkness Rains don’t refute this, but do reveal an undeniable spirit and likeable energy. [Nov 2018, p.65]

Who Do You Love? may be a tacit admission by Norway’s Årabrot that they can push that sound no further. There’s an unlikely, boisterously garage rock vibe to much of this record, albeit larded with gothic drama by Kjetil Nernes’s vocal approach. [Nov 2018, p.65]

The biggest problem with Noname’s Room 25 is that the opening two tracks, adding up to barely four minutes of music, are just too damn good. ... The rest is merely exceptional. Essential. [Nov 2018, p.68]

The tracklisting is divided between acknowledged classics and ephemera. There are extended remixes, demos and live tracks, but only a couple of genuinely illuminating items, and more often in theory than practice. [Nov 2018, p.72]

Musically it’s a joyous triumph: vocally Estelle is utterly assured but naturally ebullient, the sound of someone totally at ease. [Nov 2018, p.68]

The album deftly balances expansive environments with a singular vocal intimacy. [Nov 2018, p.51]

It's a well-worn concept, but one which Gorgun works through with curiosity and clarity of purpose. [Oct 2018, p.61]

If there’s fun in her music, it’s somewhere between the anaesthetising effect of especially her more electric noises and the ecstatic release in her vocal, both too honest to be anything else but awkward. Fundamentally sociopathic. [Nov 2018, p.55]

Their newest struts and froths like the wild-eyed offspring of Deerhoof and Thundercat, raised in the swamps on little but No New York and toadstools. At turns, it’s impossibly upbeat--something like a Martian single parent’s go-to motivational album--and spasmodically funky, in the best tradition of Bernie Worrell-era Talking Heads, flipped on 45. [Nov 2018, p.54]

It's not so much a return to first principals as a 3D reboot of the homicidal stoner aesthetic established between 1991-1995 with Cypress Hill, Black Sunday and Temples Of Boom. [Nov 2018, p.52]

This is actually a joyful, bouncing album. [Oct 2018, p.68]

A strong late career release. [Oct 2018, p.63]

Another Life captures the ecstacy and catharsis of bodies exchanging sweat and petrol, crushing each other in unison. [Oct 2018, p.48]

Having already worked with the likes of William Basinski and Herndon, remixing for Björk and Max Richter, Jlin is taking the innovative spirit of a regional Chicago born style to the institutional stage of the creative establishment. Applying that to a project with a choreographer like McGregor is an experiment in combining the best of both worlds. [Oct 2018, p.55]

Not a satisfying record, nor a fully rounded one, but one that suggests so much future exploration. [Oct 2018, p.56]

Love In Shadow, Sumac’s fourth studio album in three years, features four songs occupying a side of vinyl each and brushes territory you’d hardly associate with its members’ other projects. [Oct 2018, p.62]

Her craft comes through more strongly on For My Crimes. It therefore takes a little longer to appreciate that the song structures are just as acutely developed as on her previous two albums. Despite its lyrical themes of romantic suffocation and nostalgia, and its allusions to domestic violence, For My Crimes is steady and unwavering. [Oct 2018, p.59]

Digital Garbage is an honest and oddly selfless document of the time, impressively free from bravado. [Oct 2018, p.59]

It might take you a few cuts to pick up on the gagaku thing. [Oct 2018, p.54]