Snow Bound adheres to the template he has been carefully fine tuning over the years, a series of thoughtful, occasionally joyful, barbed pop rockers with masked sociopolitical references attached, all artfully designed to hook themselves into your memory and hold fast. [Oct 2018, p.64]

Sometimes the sensuousness of Serpent Music is missed, but Tumor’s drive to take this radically new music to audiences as big as Blake’s, Ocean’s or even Radiohead’s is exhilarating. [Oct 2018, p.63]

If the album feels a little like it’s beginning to run out of ideas by the end of its 45 minutes, the audacity of its central aesthetic propels it to some dizzying heights along the way. [Oct 2018, p.62]

Pig Destroyer explore transgression on their sixth album by creating a new narrative that begs for more careful introspection about who we are and the world we live in. [Oct 2018, p.60]

Body is a sound sculpture that cares less for internal time than for the cerebral pleasures of long duration. [Oct 2018, p.60]

Sifting through these hermetic songs is like coming across a cobwebby box of photographs in an empty home. Tiny fragments of narrative emerge, only to be drowned by ambiguity and absence. [Oct 2018, p.58]

Double Negative stands alongside Yo La Tengo’s There’s A Riot Going On as a painfully honest expression of what it’s like to live in a post-truth country and have to call it your own. [Oct 2018, p.58]

Beauty, tradition, experiment: American primitive guitar is in safe hands. [Oct 2018, p.55]

These are elements that need time to present themselves, on an album that requires a retreat inward. It’s the kind of mindquietening escape. [Oct 2018, p.55]

Pastoral serves to expose the casual but forceful villainy of Robinson and his ilk while emphasising one of folk horror’s core themes: that people are the scariest monsters of all. [Oct 2018, p.53]

The pursuit of risky and rigorous music-making continues to feel wiser and nobler for his prodigious, elevating presence. [Oct 2018, p.52]

Halfway through its flow, Gave In Rest reveals itself as her first sustained attempt--a successful one--at stranding listeners in a mellow darkness before taking them back outside. [Oct 2018, p.51]

The pairing of contemporary classical with electronic music is a concept that could easily--and often does--go wrong. At times Shelley’s On Zenn-La feels like it’s about to do just that, but this very awareness of historical context makes it a worthy tribute to its hallowed predecessors. [Oct 2018, p.51]

It's [Neil Fallon's} witty, intelligent, lusty lyrics that elevate Book Of Bad Decisions from good to great. [Oct 2018, p.50]

Like most Aphex Twin releases Collapse contains moments of queasy brilliance. [Oct 2018, p.48]

Throughout the album, multiple vocal lines with different rhythms and lyrics are frequently layered atop each other, lending to a dense, teeming maximalism. This tendency makes the moments of relative spaciousness, like the synth-laden and futuristic “Coming Back (From The Distance Between The Spaces Of Time)”, feel all the more boundless. [Oct 2018, p.49]

For the majority of the tracks featured here, Hawkwind and Batt have jumped the shark with enough velocity to achieve geostationary orbit. [Sep 2018, p.59]

For much of the record he has opted for the middle ground of an unchallenging electronic music LP in the twinkly and tasteful tradition of Four Tet and Border Community, as ready for coffee table listening as a full AV show at London’s Barbican centre. ... At its most restrained Ephem:Era advances the sound of Signals in exciting directions. [Aug 2018, p.63]

Don’t Look Away is an even tighter proposition, the majority of its songs being sparsely but sensitively arranged and melodically direct. [Sep 2018, p.62]

What emerges is a futuristic and dystopian vision, but it’s also something primal. There’s a human pulse, trapped in the heart of all the noise. You hold your breath and wait for it to collapse, and for the carbine rifles to come. [Sep 2018, p.57]

This Valley is deeper and wider, thanks in no small part to Gelb’s voice, which has matured beautifully over the decades while retaining its waywardness. It’s exceedingly rare that a Gelb/Sand release is a waste of time, and Returns doesn’t buck that trend. [Sep 2018, p.63]

These are tragic celebrations, Dionysian seances for the most schizophrenic of times. [Sep 2018, p.66]

None of the pieces seems to reach a destination, and are all the more poignant for that. [Sep 2018, p.58]

Consistently excellent, the album reaches its zenith with “My Shadow Life”, a simple love song from out of the gloom: “On my life I swear that I love you/My shadow life, I swear that I love/I love you”. [Sep 2018, p.55]

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]

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

The LP’s best tracks are those where the producers keep it undercooked and Westside Gunn is kept in check--to a point. [Sep 2018, p.62]

While visually hereditary is fatally flawed by its failure to frighten, sonically it is as scary as hell. [Sep 2018, p.61]

As comebacks go the album has an almost blissful assurance. It positively levitates with calm, like someone back from a long trip who knows they have all the time in the world to tell you about their new guru. [Sep 2018, p.54]

While some will label these 12 pieces as evidence of Alex Paterson’s genius, the majority definitely won’t, and although it’s a well-produced work, it doesn’t bend or expand expectations. [Sep 2018, p.54]

Tracks run the usual gamut, aggregating pop references and stylistic tropes from the entire history of hiphop, rock, punk, techno and their esoteric subgenres, and assembling them into a harrowing Frankenstein that’s more sardonic than revelatory. [Sep 2018, p.50]

“Hot Pink” reads clearly like “BIPP”-era SOPHIE, with its urgent metallic breakdowns and deep, heavy bass lines, while the high synth registers and spatial ambient of “It’s Not Just Me” conjecture a Generation Z folk-pop-disco hybrid. As a more mainstream addition to the avant-pop trajectory of artists like SOPHIE and felicita, however, Let’s Eat Grandma are not nearly as disruptive and original. [Sep 2018, p.49]

From its cryptic title to its discombobulating assemblage of stylistic approaches in the track listing, Oil Of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides is chaotic and disjointed. ... Bringing a range of seemingly contrasting elements together, SOPHIE has been problematising commonly accepted binaries since dropping the berserk dance pop of “BIPP” on Glasgow’s Numbers label in 2013. [Sep 2018, p.49]

The London based producer integrates his maternal Polish roots in the spotty, fragmented and incidental way that only a truly intercultural artist can. [Sep 2018, p.49]

Its one of those Wobble albums that marks time between more major projects, and it's typical of his restless musical nature. [Sep 2018, p.65]

What we have here is the hangman’s blues, the alienated piano soliloquies of classical, the wary prayers of gospel, the lustful frustration of R&B, the drugged lightning of rap. Beastmode 2 is Future at his worst, which is to say, Future at his best. [Sep 2018, p.66]

There is some extremely sophisticated signal processing going on here, resulting in complex subliminal sound patterns in the spaces between beat and the 303s’ scrolling and glooping. However each track is about relentless repetitions of one monolithic kick and one acid riff above all else. While the processing can occasionally resemble some of Tin Man and Cassegrain’s recent dismantlings of acid, which float in motionless seas of reverb, the primacy of the kick ’n’ riff lends the forward momentum of these tracks a glorious singlemindedness. [Sep 2018, p.52]

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]

No News Is Good News is a grown up rap album by a grown up rapper that still manages to be utterly thrilling. [Aug 2018, p.69]

20 years of silence have created an even more authoritative tone to the declamatory rhymes here, the fury undimmed but increasingly replaced by a more simmering sense of foreboding and dread. [Aug 2018, p.69]

Gat is a gnarly and thoroughly exciting guitarist, and somehow Universalists is aberrantly gorgeous and totally fried. [Aug 2018, p.68]

As an album it’s almost entirely soporifically dull though beautifully appointed throughout (and it’s a joy to hear Beyoncé rapping) by some smart production from both main protagonists and some slick grooves from the Daptone band. [Aug 2018, p.68]

Keszler’s percussion underpins Coates’s soaring cello as Laurel Halo ensures the combination stays orderly. Its calm melancholy reflects the quoted text that ends: “Need little. Want less. Forget the rules. Be untroubled.” [Aug 2018, p.67]

This analogy of applying interdisciplinary approaches to uncover a certain reality carries through to several aspects of the album, where a folding over of electronic and acoustic space circles in on and augments a broader understanding of sound. [Aug 2018, p.67]

An agreeable mix of electro, retro-rave breaks and thumping party house. [Aug 2018, p.66]

His music is closer to an upgrade of the wigglier, more luxurious end of Megadog/ Megatripolis 90s clip-on dreadlock rave, or more recently the hallucination holiday postcards of Call Super, than to anything genuinely raw and lo-fi like Kyle Hall, Jamal Moss or Karen Gwyer. [Aug 2018, p.66]

We find reflective confessionals that are powerful and unexpectedly confrontational in their bareness. This is aloneness as selfcontainment rather than avoidance, honest emotions as seeking communion rather than victimhood. [Aug 2018, p.65]

Lamp Lit Prose sparkles with ideas even as it gets its groove on with a more developed version of his electronic R&B album last year. Everything here should be too much but with several albums under his belt, somehow Longstreth can as easily shift from one style to another as run them both at the same time. [Aug 2018, p.65]

Nasir comes closest to being an unqualified success. Those still hoping for the return of ruthless adolescent Nasty Nas will be disappointed--although recent allegations of spousal abuse from ex-wife Kelis cast a troubling shadow--but his voice is thick with middle-aged grit and gravitas. [Aug 2018, p.63]

There’s a beguiling modesty to tracks such as “Fire” and “4th Dimension”, while Yasiin Bey’s understated sprechgesang advising “Kids see ghosts sometimes” on the title track feels plausible, immanent, urgent. [Aug 2018, p.63]

For all his power as a motivating force it’s perhaps inevitable that Ye proves weakest of the first four. Left to his own devices West sounds bewildered, somewhere between awe and exhaustion. [Aug 2018, p.63]

“Ablaze”, “Beauty In Falling Leaves” and the monumental title track attain a state of angelic transcendence before crashing solidly back to earth with “The Screen”, a stone cold falling meteor of a song that leaves a crater in its wake, and is probably the heaviest piece of music they have yet produced. [Aug 2018, p.59]

Peeled back from its surrounding hype, The Sciences is a sturdy (albeit somewhat stationary) return to form. [Aug 2018, p.59]

Closer Apart is a dazzling bilingual synth pop album that blends the wavy bass and beats of kwaito and gqom with postgrime and UK funky. [Aug 2018, p.58]

There’s still no shortage of the epic thumps and crashes that made Lotic such an exciting prospect in their early days, except now they have more space. Instead of overwhelming a listener with the persistent high of audio ultraviolence, it allows for more subtle dynamics. [Aug 2018, p.57]

This album is a stunning, multivalent piece of artistry that hits an anxious and weary world like a light-bearing gift. Remain In Light is one of the most fascinating albums in rock history, and Angélique Kidjo may have just released the definitive version. [Aug 2018, p.56]

Her voice is low and dragging, richly witch-like and wise. A selection of one-off recordings and “orphans”, Quieter is loose and beautiful, sludgy but solid. [Aug 2018, p.52]

“Bounty” exalts the genre’s heritage with a lyrical pastiche of pop songs--Blondie’s “One Way Or Another” and James Brown’s “Get Up (I Feel Like Being A) Sex Machine” among them. “Flight 1235” acknowledges the shift in perspective and approach while insisting it’s his hard-earned right. [Aug 2018, p.52]

The album’s just out of reach quality is genuinely affecting, its impressionism charged with tension. [Aug 2018, p.52]

Basic Volume departs from the impressionistic mixtape approach to a more solid set of songs without Gaika losing his cinematic scope. [Aug 2018, p.56]

Hooky, featherlight and strange. [Jul 2018, p.55]

["LDN Shuffle" is] the most obviously exciting track of the set, but the more representative things are slower and more measured. [Jun 2018, p.64]

Exactly how delicately balanced their chemistry together is becomes apparent on the two solo albums that round out this three disc set. Both are decent in their own right but pale in comparison to the group disc. [Jul 2018, p.62]

The new Pusha T album is more assured and therefore effective than the last Clipse album, nowhere near the focused brilliance of their first two. All production is handled by Kanye West who’s likewise harking back to his glory days with assorted updates on his College Dropout sound. [Jul 2018, p.62]

One moment she comes on like a pure music box turnaround MC, the next like a spitting cat, her delivery sits perfectly on the fucked up thud and South London hissing spherics conjured up in the mix. [Jul 2018, p.61]

He tears apart square wave synths into sharp, staccato blocks and spreads them across Insula, twisting alien 8-bit into different melodies and frequencies. [Jul 2018, p.60]

On the tracks where Baha works with collaborators, he bends his production style to suit the vocal quirks of the artist featured alonside himself. [Jul 2018, p.59]

Thankfully, her second solo album Blueprint is not a punk revival record, but a great grab bag of tracks showing that Armendariz still has not only her patented hair-raising and blood-curdling shriek from the 70s, but a voice that can reference the evocative beauty found in the pipes of both Patti Smith and Judee Sill. [Jul 2018, p.59]

More than the spiritual feel of Impulse! releases by Sanders or Coltrane, this music recalls the groove oriented work of Turrentine, Idris Muhammad and Grover Washington Jr for CTI and Kudu. It’s warm weather music, made to be played through speakers propped in open windows, facing the street. [Jul 2018, p.58]

Pram find themselves in a rather difficult position, where it doesn’t seem as if they’ve much room to evolve without changing the atmosphere of the project completely. That said, Across The Meridian tentatively paws at a few new directions even as it remains mindful of the group’s palette to date. [Jul 2018, p.57]

Right at the top of “Change Of Tone” there’s a fragment of studio chuckle that underlines just how remarkably spontaneous and unfussed this genre-messing project really is. There are long, slow passages of astral funk, MC’d by Terrace Martin’s vocoder and guest vocal murmurings, but also moments of much darker jazz futurism, elements of freedom (like the bizarre guess-the-nextnote piano fill under the PM Dawn-like “Awake To You”) and further elements of verité and concrete. [Jul 2018, p.57]

Will depend on how indulgent you personally feel towards the Parliamentary legacy. The smart thing to do would be to purchase tracks selectively and sequence your own version of Medicaid Fraud Dogg. In other words: be wise and sample before you buy. [Jul 2018, p.55]

Age Of is arguably Lopatin’s best album to date. He achieves exactly what he sets out to. [Jul 2018, p.55]

She mostly succeeds at marrying that [transcendent black pop] to a sound that’s broader and more accessible than anything she’s put out to date. [Jul 2018, p.53]

The eight tracks and 40 minutes here feel far more porous and open than a lot of contemporary electronic music allows itself to be--edited together by Hassell from various performances, its erratic, switch-backing progress sketches large structures but leaves them light and airy, rich and heady without crowding the mix. It demands to be played on a big system, to enter the air. [Jul 2018, p.50]

Though this particularly esoteric presentation was not unique to Serpentwithfeet, few executed it as well. But just as he did with the genre tag pagan gospel and his initial handle Josiah Wise Is The Serpent With Feet, this time around Wise has, lyrically at least, mostly discarded such trappings in service of something more tangible and familiar. [Jul 2018, p.49]

On his fourth album, he seems to be wrestling with how to modernise his signature blues and roots foundation without minimising its traditional elements. Parts that would work better with stripped down production are overproduced with the layering of background vocals, keyboards and added sound effects, making the music too rich for the message. [Jul 2018, p.48]

Pared back and abrasive, the music is somewhat diffuse compared to Schofield’s earlier records. The hard edges of its rhythms are scattered, the sound so foggy it’s hard to hear. [Jul 2018, p.46]

Through poetry, wordplay and a sonic palette that seamlessly bridges the human and the mechanical, IRISIRI positions itself at a nexus of sonic and conceptual ambiguity, weaving openended narratives with a logic that eludes straightforward interpretation and exudes genuine wonder and fascination. [Jul 2018, p.45]

The Body’s central drive focuses on heaviness, both as a sonic and emotional motif, and while their creative apex I Shall Die Here demonstrates a logical conclusion of the former, I Have Fought Against It, But I Can’t Any Longer sees the band explore dramatic terror, to limited success. [Jul 2018, p.44]

It’s a satisfying--if rather safe--album. [Jul 2018, p.44]

Hendrix’s collaboration with Stephen Stills on the Joni Mitchell penned anthem “Woodstock” is one of the album’s standouts, as they push the song further out than Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young could ever have imagined, while Johnny Winter on “The Things I Used To Do” sounds like the boy got moonshine on his fingers and pain in his heart. [Jun 2018, p.72]

Ultimately, though, it’s a portrait of the artist on permanent vacation. [Jun 2018, p.72]

Benin stalwarts including Black Santiago, The Picoby Band and El Rego Et Ses Commandos all deliver, while Poly-Rythmo De Cotonou get an outing on the atmospheric, if understated “Idavi” and the boogie funk of “Moulon Devla”. Les Sympathetics De Porto Novo’s set opener “A Min We Vo Nou We” is all ragged fuzz guitar and lifted JB licks, lit from within by the incendiary urgency of the Benin sound. [Jun 2018, p.69]

At 31 minutes it’s a perfectly timed drift towards increasingly heatsick, woozy instrumental hiphop. [Jun 2018, p.67]

The addition of Steven McDonald from Red Kross and Jeff Pinkus from The Butthole Surfers lends more low end weight to the band’s already bottom heavy sound, but otherwise Pinkus Abortion Technician is business as usual. [Jun 2018, p.65]

Sings Olivia Newton-John is an album nobody asked for but that’s partly what makes it special. Hatfield’s garage-bound arrangements scuff up the squeaky clean originals to likeable effect and she throws herself into the project with gusto. [Jun 2018, p.65]

If you’re after period reproductions of 1970s rustic rock, will please you just fine. [Jun 2018, p.65

As with all Venetian Snares records, it can feel a bit of an endurance test, every possible permutation of kick, snare and hat cycled through in a breakneck half-hour until the listener is battered into submission. But Lanois and Funk elevate each other’s sound, bringing a certain unlikely prettiness to the album’s general mood of freneticism. [Jun 2018, p.64]

No 4 is the culmination of a pull towards music that’s more space horror soundtrack than contemplative melancholia, and Vantzou’s darkest release yet. [Jun 2018, p.64]

All told, there are some beautiful moments on this record, as well as a sense that the gap between what Fennelly wants his music to be and what he is able to accomplish is gradually narrowing. [Jun 2018, p.62]

The record slips easily into a catalogue that is consistent with the familiar John Maus aesthetic, which will no doubt satiate a voracious fan’s appetite for music that exists outside of time, always and at once. [Jun 2018, p.62]

What’s exceptional about Novelist Guy is the ease with which he remakes grime in his own image, gifting it a breadth and charm and appeal others have struggled for over a decade to synthesize. [Jun 2018, p.62]

Here as elsewhere, Hval manages to perfectly combine an eerie, folkish, ethereal pitch that even veers on yodelling at times, as if summoning an army of hidden folk, with an earthly sensuality that speaks of all kinds of lust, particularly the kinds that hint at lengthy afternoons in obscure cabins. [Jun 2018, p.58]

Another stellar release by this persistently valuable band. [Jun 2018, p.57]

More than any other Gas album Rausch captures the exhilaration one can feel deep in the woods, walking for far too long, marching ever forward without ever looking back. [Jun 2018, p.56]

This might not have the more overtly radical studio tricks and militant attitudes that make, say, Moodymann more acceptable to experimental music fans, but as a narrative joining fusion to ghetto house to microhouse to churchy soul to beachlounging Balearica, it’s a deeply involving piece of work. [Jun 2018, p.56]

The Automator sounds uncertain, pitching up between a return to boom-bap and less familiar territory. The first half of the album pitches for the former, while later cuts go for reinvention, plunging Keith into a mire of riffs. [Jun 2018, p.54]