Such durational piece, composed from several instruments, recall Phill Niblock, but Malone’s album is softer, more atmospheric, even melancholic. Does Spring Hide Its Joy is material for deep listening, and its considerable length alone is a radical statement in times of fragmented attention. [Feb 2023, p.52]

Far from being derivative, Demolished Thoughts remains uniquely Moore's own. [Jun 2011, p.51]

It's an almost-pitch-perfect progression of eight tracks across 39 minutes. [Oct 2014, p.54]

The result is streamlined and raw, but still with their customary flourishes of melodic invention woven in. [Dec 2014, p.48]

Kaani is a tireless surging wave of uplifting music. [Sep 2013, p.65]

Prekop's approach to synth composition is refreshingly free from pomposity and self-regard, his ego dissolving amid cascades of fizzing electronic sounds and beatific melody.[Mar 2015, p.56]

If anything, she has rediscovered the energy that defined her work with Uzi, Live Skull and Come, pouring imposing defiance into ten rocking cuts. [Oct 2021, p.58]

The cleaner production of Half Free ups the anxiety. [Oct 2015, p.58]

This is the most elaborately arranged thing Gunn has ever done, jammed full of understated yet excellent guitar. [Oct 2014, p.54]

If Richter was attempting to instill some of the haunted bleakness of Winterreise into his own music, he has certainly succeeded. [Jul 2010, p.60]

It’s a joyful noise, for sure. [Oct 2023, p.50]

While the tracks appear softer edged, they share "Strawberry Jam's" tangy, bitterweet flavours. [May 2008, p.49]

The tempo is seldom above a crawl, and Toure's guitar weaves a crackling bed of thorns that even the typically crystalline over-production can't completely smooth out. [Mar 2015, p.59]

The tunes recorded on 6 March bear no relation to that relaxed and delicate session [with Johnny Hartman]. Instead, they’re much closer to the kind of high-octane material the quartet were pursuing in live performance at the time, albeit with considerably less intensity than could be witnessed on the bandstand. [Aug 2018, p.74]

DJ Seinfeld’s new album is clean, crisp and emotional but irresistibly danceable. Parts of it recall Jessy Lanza, other parts Throwing Snow and Dark Sky. He became known via the lo-fi trend a few years back but Mirrors is more indicative of a welcome garage revival. [Oct 2021, p.59]

Pole aka Stefan Betke is actually making the best music of his life right now. ... Tempus is mesmeric and that leaves space for Betke’s amazing painterly hand to weave magic. [Feb 2023, p.54]

This decidedly literate songcraft has a range of ancestors, including Talking Heads, Sparks and David Grubbs, but three albums along, The Books are nailing down a distinctive soundworld of their own. [#254, p.54]

What drives each track home is the tight focus of the playing, riffs and ideas, each one the clockwork fuse on a ticking time bomb. [Oct 2015, p.60]

Syro feels like a perfected memory of 80s music. [Oct 2014, p.54]

It's a startlingly consistent album--dazzling, baffling and sprawling in the same way that Russell and his work was. [Dec 2014, p.50]

In small doses this perpetual explosion is often magnificent. [Sep 2013, p.66]

Spalding has always been a prodigious talent, but it's by adopting the uninhibited persona of Emily that the 31 year old singer and bassist has found a truly distinctive voice. [Jun 2016, p.56]

It’s a bold, defining album from the UK techno producer that will undoubtedly fulfill her wish to flip people’s perceptions. [Jul 2017, p.52]

It’s invigorating and a ton of fun. [Sep 2018, p.63]

Perlas is debonair, contemporary and redolent of that old seductive charge. [Mya 2012, p.58]

The way these surprises are smuggled in via skilful sonic illusions attests to Holden’s wide listening habits, and his judgement for bringing different sounds together like an old school studio producer. [Apr 2023, p.54]

[A] glorious record. [Feb 2017, p.44]

Hold It In finds these crusty veterans meeting the threat of middle-age ennui with ingenuity and enthusiasm. [Oct 2014, p.57]

It's not just Hertz's technical nous that makes Flatland so compelling, but his commitment to forging something lucid, plastic and expressive, music that blurs the line between hyper reality and the topsy-turvy world of imagination. [Dec 2014, p.51]

These processes are slow, sometimes painful and on multiple scales, but with each track and each album, the producer is changing our understanding of sound, data, memory and our own bodies in musical space. [Jun 2016, p.56]

With his best record in years, Gibbs gets a bump stock boost from Kenny Beats (03 Greedo, Key!), a former EDM DJ turned grimiest white boy rap producer since Alchemist. This is Gibbs being Gibbs. [Sep 2018, p.66]

The second set might not be as powerful as its predecessor, but the milieu it conjures is still engrossingly evocative. [May 2012, p.61]

It's clear that, for Shipp, The Tradition clearly goes way beyond jazz. [Jun 2011, p.54]

Plunges deeper into Saami’s isolate sonic wisdom. [Oct 2020]

This is the sound of two mature rap gentlemen throwing it up for one of hiphop's most enduring, if not always endearing, charms: utter immaturity. [Dec 2014, p.54]

Run The Jewels is a document of true friends finding the fun in being very angry. [Sep 2013, p.66]

For all its kinkiness Green Twins is indubitably an R&B record (tracks like “Cuffed” and “JP” really can’t be described as anything else) and an exceptional one at that. [Jul 2017, p.52]

There’s a heavy Eddie Henderson vibe here, propulsive, warm and engaging, and by the time the album closes on the jagged street vignette of its title track, it’s evident that BBNG have gone back to find a new future, a new lease of life. [Nov 2021, p.48]

The Earth Is Blue has a glorious, spacey innocence that inspires affection. [#253, p.57]

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]

Altogether, there is a fluid, amniotic quality to the record. Listeners may find themselves spacing out, looking out the window or staring at something, sinking into the riffs and the ASMR-like words that emerge - "We are walking in circles", "She dreams in the future", "Impossible drawing" - amid the hypnotic rise and fall of the synths. [May 2026, p.46]

While the Bowie tribute will probably garner most attention--hey, at least it saves Basinski having to explain the story behind Disintegration Loops again--for me, “A Shadow In Time” is the more absorbing work. [Feb 2017, p.44]

Parades succeeds in avoiding the most perilous pitfalls of simulated whimsy and fey affected vocals to achieve something gloriously endearing. [Nov 2007, p.53]

The music develops through collective improvisation, but it’s supremely focused and tight. These formal qualities are combined with a keen political edge. [Jul 2021, p.58]

Dust floats along meditatively, and is Halo’s warmest and most familial record to date. [Jul 2017, p.52]

With the stylistic anchor lifted, the 12 cuts sound progressively more deranged as they blossom into alien dance floor mutants from bubbles of heady synths, deliriously processed voices, absurd squiggles and reversed beats. ... It’s difficult to imagine a better debut for ex-DFA head Jonathan Galkin’s new imprint FourFour. [Nov 2021, p.48]

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

Borders is Emptyset’s Fury Road--both heavier and cleverer than the trilogy it follows. [Feb 2017, p.47]

The tracks here, presented with the intention that other will use them as a creative starting pint, nevertheless feel fully realised, evoking a succession of fleeting states and ambiguous atmospheres. [Dec 2014, p.57]

Another nuance of Virgins is the pacing. With the exception of a few slightly predictable orchestral driftscapes, Hecker's editing instincts have rarely sounded this restless and razor-sharp. [Oct 2013, p.45]

It seems an easy listen at first, but the scale is daunting. [Feb 2014, p.53]

A good bit stranger-sounding and more interesting in their excavation of the past. [Jul 2017, p.53]

On Bioprodukt, his fourth album for Planet Mu, Edwards’s prolific nature again benefits from the honed ear of label boss Mike Paradinas, who curates a neat ten track journey through recent material. [Jul 2017, p.50]

New York Noise is exemplary: the right mix of 'hits' and obscurities. [#233, p.71]

"K9 Reliance" indulges in faux harpsichord to conjure a convincing giallo theme, devilishly nervous and hush-hush, with brass swells that underscore the cinematic funk. There are a few odds and ends in the mix, too. "K12 Uplands" is a gorgeous pastoral led by woodwinds, tailor made for some adventure game's soundtrack. On "K13 Vigilant", strings and piano chase each other frantically. "K14 Welbeck" closes the album with a glorious organ dirge, reminiscent of Jenkinson's collaborations with James McVinnie. [May 2026, p.56]

The prevalent mood is restless and defiant, with the vulnerability found on earlier albums swept along by a sense that this time they're both lovers and fighters. [Dec 2014, p.57]

It's Ferraro's best since Far Side Virtual. [Oct 2013, p.46]

Like most blockbusters, TM103 lacks some subtlety and depth, but is nevertheless preposterously entertaining, almost unerring anthemic stuff. [Feb 2012, p.71]

Satisfying proof that pop remain pop however thoroughly digested. [Feb 2014, p.54]

Written on a piano and organ instead of guitar and featuring a 24-piece ensemble of strings, winds and brass, -io is the purest realisation of Fohr’s pop sensibilities. [Nov 2021, p.50]

The music on Ism is intimate. Pieces end with a jolt. Brief interludes take a questioning tone, as if the fragments are enough in themselves, no need for resolution. The album’s warmth – a quality shared by McCraven’s output – owes much to the International Anthem engineering approach. [Jan 2019, p.66]

Oczy Mlody fluently balances three decades of untamed experimentation with the poppier sensibilities they've gained along the way. [Feb 2017, p.51]

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]

Prepare to be enchanted. [Oct 2014, p.61]

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]

The duo have created a world of two halves; a land of tension and mystery that collides with a place of release and transcendent sorrow. [Feb 2017, p.55]

The 11 songs here are energised, chest beating anthems that are positively soul elevating. [Oct 2014, p.61]

A World Lit Only By Fire finds Godflesh on pleasingly resolute form. [Dec 2014, p.57]

The ten tracks on Is It Going To Get Any Deeper Than This? provide – with occasional turns towards kosmische or lounge music – some of the most pop oriented music Daniel has ever released. [Nov 2022, p.66]

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]

Several tracks differ little from versions on their 1987 Flying Nun debut Brave Worlds, but the instrumental rarity "Moonlight On Flesh" brings a welcome expansiveness redolent of a more modest Echo And The Bunnyman. [Dec 2014, p.57]

Gorgeous string arrangements, sax and synths give Birthmarks a palpable sense of encroaching mist. [Apr 2020]

A feast of buried treasure, a flickerframe parade which continually offers up magical fragments of sound, revelatory and transitory in equal measure. [#230, p.46]

Mystical, alluring and straight from the heart, We Are Together Again cements Oldham's reputation as a major force in the singer-songwriter tradition. [May 2026, p.60]

A resplendent albeit slightly cloying selection of meticulously arranged songs, bloated with instrumental detail and performed in a way that makes the sound like a revived soundtrack for some old, forgotten art house movie. [Oct 2014, p.61]

[The] precisely arranged layers of keyboards and guitars have as many behind-the-door delights as an advent calendar. [Oct 2013, p.46]

Cinematic, otherworldy landscapes and expert playing aside, there's something else to the album. Anderson flips expectations of where refrains or rhythms might go. [Jul 2016, p.46]

The Footwork moves might be hard to master, nut there's every chance your brain will o a jig to this. [May 2012, p.66]

It’s darkly, powerfully feminine, exquisitely produced and haunted as fuck; maybe the best record she’s ever made. [Nov 2021, p.50]

Accompanied by the group that toured with him for his 2022 YTIJA38 album, together with contributions from a select group of musicians. Their combined improvisational skills give Callahan the room he needs to expand upon how he throws his words out in songs - at times he comes across like a resurrected Lou Reed or a Van Morrison in full Astral Weeks flow. [May 2026, p.60]

The intense volume and solemn pace of the music is given extra weight and dimension by Scheidt's extraordinary vocal. [Oct 2014, p.61]

This is dance music, but not as we know it, and a delight to experience. [Oct 2013, p.47]

Swoops and swirls of tape chaff and manipulated sound effects alternate with the kind of beguilingly wistful, haunted folk we've come to expect from Tucker, brilliantly complementing the album's moments of abstraction. [Mar 2012, p.65]

Whether with Supersilent or on his own, Arve Henriksen has demarcated his own world of sound, communicating in ways that are sometimes inscrutable but always deeply felt. [Jul 2017, p.53]

Littered with fragments of found voice recordings and beefed up with pumping guitar riffs, Attempted Martyr takes no prisoners and, in the spirit of the group's origin state, efficiently kicks out the jams. [May 2026, p.61]

The music is a fluid mix of acoustic instruments and studio slickness, all recorded under lockdown conditions but mixed seamlessly, and while the lyrics are earnest, the songs are joyous, not sombre. [Jul 2021, p.60]

One has to look back to the golden age of the West African guitar bands to find this level of complexity executed with such brazen confidence and ability. [May 2015, p.59]

It may lack subtlety but it sounds incredibly vital. [#229, p.68]

At over 22 minutes, it’s ["The Offender"] one of two side-long pieces and could just as easily have gone on for an hour, or all night. ... The short pieces are just as good as the long ones. [Nov 2021, p.52]

The disc's closing one-two punch of "white Electric" and "Sundome," render Glass Drop a triumph, and a major evolutionary leap. [July 2011, p.44]

Orchestra Hits is the truest iteration of Rice and Schrader’s aesthetic to date. By polishing these songs, buffing them to relative shininess and adding serrated electronics, their emotive impact and melodic drama are greatly magnified. [Oct 2024, p.60]

A lifetime’s pain and a decade juggling mixtape fame with his trap life erupting in one magnificently choreographed molten flow of poetry. Not that it’s all full blast, Potter comes with the widescreen vision of Scarface or Ghetts, stepping back as necessary, philosophically patient. [Jul 2023, p.65]

“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]

More than just a treat for both bands' fans, this is a genuinely surprising and brilliant collaboration. [Apr 2026, p.51]

At times 50 swerves near to MOR Americana, but Chapman’s guitar playing, the bedding of every track, bristling with thorns, won’t let it. [Jan 2017, p.61]

Although the hard-hearted and selfconsciously cool may dismiss them as the avant folk scene's answer to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, that's no reason to deny one's self the joyous singalong harmonies of 'Don't Be Afraid, You're Already Dead." [Oct 2007, p.71]

It's simply clean, so the outstanding performances come over strongly. [Oct 2013, p.49]

Nomad is well-name--but what's most striking is not its diversity, but its coherence. [Dec 2008, p.73]