A gorgeous album. [Jun 2018, p.50]

The guests (Denmark Vessey, Nick Offerman--yes, Ron Swanson himself--and Your Old Droog among others) are perfectly judged and the deeper message of the album, that relaxation and repose in 2018 are luxuries that those on the frontline can’t afford, is delivered with extra heft and power thanks to the lightness of touch and the sardonic style hiphop’s coollest couple demonstrate throughout. [May 2018, p.63]

This is music strapped for battle, the beats tooled up and live-sounding, the loops and details kept to a brute minimum by Doom so that the lines, and guest spots from Vinnie Paz and Open Mike Eagle, can really punch through. [May 2018, p.63]

Challenge Me Foolish reveals just how influential he was and continues to be. [May 2018, p.62]

Most of what they play live here is more serene and thoughtful. Not that Pirog is incapable of letting the sparks fly, particularly on “The Inner Ocean” where he opens up with an electric guitar stormer worthy of Sonny Sharrock. “Crowds And Power” perhaps references Fugazi’s glory days. “The Weaver” subtly winds the album down with Pirog on acoustic guitar and an unexpected flurry of orchestral strings. [May 2018, p.60]

This is Byrne at his best, as he calmly describes the impact of the object upon the victim’s history, feelings and anatomy that are being destroyed as a result of its violent intrusion. [May 2018, p.60]

Exorcism addresses a similarly uncomfortable subject, her sexual assault in 2016 and what it means to be a survivor of trauma. That Wilson can turn such trauma into vibrant, addictive pop music is testament to her abilities within strict limitations--the entirety of Exorcism was crafted on a Prophet 6 synthesizer--but Exorcism is unafraid not just of its subject matter but of occupying an intrinsically ambiguous place for the listener. [May 2018, p.59]

This is no mere revivalism. It’s a bridge with the past, created for the future. [May 2018, p.57]

The problem is that this music, heard purely as a piece of product rather than as part of a wider performance with site-specific logic, leaves the listener with too much time in which to speculate what wider agenda the group may be spinning. [May 2018, p.54]

It occasionally breaks into shocking moments of lo-fi howl, as on the 11 minute “Distortion”, which begins with a juddering, buzzsaw chord. The jumbled and constant flow of imagery emerges every now and then from the tumult of his guitar, so that one pulls the other in a different direction. [May 2018, p.54]

While Harris’s voice has become more manoeuvrable, the combination of echo, layering and breathy delivery push the literal meaning of her lyrics just out of reach. Instead the words are like a lure, drawing you further into the space between unfurling sequences of hesitant notes and quiet cries. [May 2018, p.49]

Well-placed details like the joyfully absurd airhorn sample in “Pachyuma” and the phased pulsing of “Orion Song” come across as both lighthearted and profound. “Moscow (Mariposa Voladora)” is a churning, chugging dancefloor banger, textured with acoustic instruments and resonating with a timelessness that unites past and present, ancient and future, here and now. [May 2018, p.46]

It's a pity that the albums is slight, with five songs, one of them a minute-long interlude, in just over half an hour, and settles for revisiting a sound Carlson knows rather than anything more daring. [May 2018, p.44]

This is von Hausswolff’s most open, personal and ultimately affirmative recording to date. [Mar 2018, p.48]

This box is not an artefact but an act, a decisive statement of Czukay’s immutable id bereft of egoistic nostalgia or sentiment. ... Cinema is a beautifully appointed and stylish tribute to a sampladelic pioneer who changed the sound of popular music forever. [Apr 2018, p.72]

The epic slog of Culture II offers up more than 20 courses of candyfloss, toffee apple and burnt syrup in lieu of any real variety. [Apr 2018, p.68]

Lala Belu is his first new recording for decades, and it lives up to the expectation generated by their live appearances. [Apr 2018, p.67]

A warm and thoughtful record. Sometimes the production is a bit light--the first half in particular suffers from a rather MOR unobtrusiveness. But Laveaux’s voice is a treasure, her guitar playing is fresh and prickly, and things get more tangled and interesting the further along we go. [Apr 2018, p.67]

A return to form. ... If anything this album is neither nervous nor holding its nerve, but powerful, solid, the work of a group who know what it is they do and how best to play to their strengths. [Apr 2018, p.64]

Plushly layered drones and percolating beats nearly bury some of the hardest, saddest words they’ve ever sung. [Apr 2018, p.63]

Each track feels like an experiment in throwing footwork principles at other genres to see what might stick, but the results are uniformly excellent. [Apr 2018, p.62]

This is jazz that’s best heard at maximum volume. [Apr 2018, p.62]

Something about its balance between geometric elegance and genuine emotiveness gets at the heart of what makes him a great composer. The playful movement lends a sense of humanity to the structure, and the structure lends rigour to the dance. [Apr 2018, p.60]

This is digital music with great big jammy thumbprints smeared all over it. The little glitches that patter through any one of UNIEQAV’s 12 instrumentals present the human at the heart of the machine.

Mozart’s Mini Mart, his first LP since On The Hot Dog Streets (2012), is militant and magnificent--as oddsome as dress wearing-era Kevin Rowland, as socially astute as Sleaford Mods, as mythomaniacal as Kanye West.

When the singing’s done the guitar returns, its tone so stretched and distorted that you can’t quite tell whether it’s purging or celebrating the lyric’s outcome. Are the voice and guitar together or not? It’s complicated.

It’s a beautiful album, easy to play and dance to, but no less than Seun’s, tinged with enough bitterness, anger and sorrow to provoke deep thought about West Africa’s richest and most problematic musical legacy. [Apr 2018, p.51]

Fela’s youngest son inherited Egypt 80 from his father in 1997 when he was 14 years old and keeps alive its joyously angry spirit. “Last Revolutionary” is a passionate tribute to the wider inheritance of anti-colonial effort and courage that comes down through Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba and Jomo Kenyatta, as well as the Nigerian founders. It gives way immediately to the signature title track, which owes much of its airplay to a typically intense but refreshingly unmannered Carlos Santana feature as well as some of Seun’s most intense tenor saxophone. [Apr 2018, p.51]

Carter has created a complete work that simultaneously looks back over its shoulder and glares straight into the eye of the future. [Apr 2018, p.50]

The Blow excel at cold wave beats and detached machine pop. But much of this sounds a bit too defeated, or needs some more of their nicely weird online humour to offset the gloom. They sound stronger and more substantial on the souped up “Get Up” which embraces its own Debbie Downer side and promises “I want to come through, persist/ I’m going to form all my selves into the shape of a fist”. [Apr 2018, p.50]

It’s not a bad record--if nothing else it goes some way to atoning for the disappointment of AC/DC rather than Ghostface landing on the Iron Man 2 soundtrack--but it could have been so much more. [Apr 2018, p.50]

The result is often similar in sound to the classic Malian groups, but much gnarlier. ... The drumming is a pummelling, clattering hailstorm of toms and snares, thrashed out at heart attack tempos. It’s all-consuming, exhilarating and fearfully hard playing, and as a truly disorienting backdrop to a virtuoso band, it pushes Tal National’s music into the realm of the unique.[Mar 2018, p.51]

The album’s strongest moments aren’t the existential musings of “Marathon” or “World Of Flaws” but the palpable joy when he reflects on his everyday life in the ebullient title track, and the problematic yet precious local pride of “Brixton Baby”. [Mar 2018, p.47]

Belief is one of his more structurally conventional turns. [Mar 2018, p.58]

Haino’s signature detonations and Yacyshyn’s punctuation leapfrog each other, creating a Möbius strip of energy that escalates freely without falling--a tightrope walk that American Dollar Bill has been building towards all along. [Mar 2018, p.48]

Drift is thoughtfully and firmly wistful, an acoustic fireside plainsong with odd interference from a distant radio and neurotic strings (“Sleep”) or, in the vein of a Yankee Tindersticks, practising delicate odes to the simple pleasures of touch, free time and, perhaps, the timefree. [Mar 2018, p.50]

Craft and primitivism are often presented as opposites, but here they complement each other so completely that you couldn’t have one without the other. [Mar 2018, p.55]

The live material captures a potent clash of styles and reminds that progressive rock was not necessarily a pseudo classical confection. [Mar 2018, p.66]

Estrella Sanchez and Amor Amezcua (daughter of Mexican rave icon Bostich) avoided the trap of a rushed debut album, and Pasar De Las Luces justifies the simmering approach, albeit too long at 64 minutes. [Mar 2018, p.58]

I’d say that the seething intransigence of Impossible Star is precisely what makes it so compelling. A release whose glittering details and dusty undertow can’t obscure how appalled it is. [Feb 2018, p.51]

Unsurprisingly, Badu’s is the least pretentious, the least bogged down in gushing musical detail; it’s also the most politically woke and personally reflective. It is perhaps the most in tune with Fela’s own unique worldview, with eternal struggle as a way of life. [Feb 2018, p.65]

Souleyman’s most recent excursion is seriously upfront music. The Syrian singer’s electro-hype dabke burnouts seem to have been ratchetted up to a degree that makes his own past efforts seem quite mellow. [Feb 2018, p.59]

The closer “World” is the culmination of these trials, in which fragments of sound--runs of keys with the uncanny quality of speech, shadowy static, heavily abstract synthesized choirs--drift in a deeply organic and warm silence. [Feb 2018, p.58]

The ninth album from Wolverhampton born singer-guitarist and producer Stephen James Wilkinson is even more vague and numinous than 2016’s A Mineral Love and far better for it. [Feb 2018, p.58]

I Like Fun isn’t as dazzlingly hyperkinetic as 2013’s Nanobots but retains the rich melodic content, complex songcraft and dynamic impact of 2015’s Glean and 2016’s Phone Power. It’s also their funkiest album since 2007’s Dust Brothers-assisted The Else. [Feb 2018, p.56]

Xylouris and White seem to have decided take advantage of all available resources, adding stylistic, instrumental and emotional variety without sacrificing the looseness of their early work. The busman’s holiday is over, but the party continues. [Feb 2018, p.55]

Thanks to Tune-Yards’ trademark genre splicing--demented nursery rhyme chanting, jerky rapping, tortured harmonising and stuttery 808 beats--Private Life shows there’s still space for playfulness amid the polemic. [Mar 218, p.55]

Most songs are laid over a percussion track that despite the occasional presence of Max Kennedy Roach is mostly programmed and staccato. It’s not a classic, but the songs are as urgent and effective as ever and you’re recommended to complete the course. [Mar 2018, p.53]

Chosen topics prove less crucial than his relentlessly tedious delivery. [Feb 2018, p.51]

Not everything is great--in particular “Lifting You” with Ed Sheeran is about as limp as you’d expect--but even the clumsier moments feel relevant and contemporary. [Feb 2018, p.51]

They feel energised with Keenan back in the fold, and while the pronounced riffs on the introduction of “Little Man” might hark back to their hardcore days, the emphasis here is on groove. [Feb 2018, p.46]

What unites them through the funk of “Zipper”, the smooth, slightly cheesy pop of “Hottie” and the sudden bursts of metallic dissonance on “Sister/Nation” is a sense of hiphop starting over, moving beyond iconography and iconoclasm into a world where they have absolute freedom to make shit up as they go along. [Feb 2018, p.46]

If there’s a heaven for a gangsta, Eazy-E is smirking down on South Central serene and secure that G Perico is doing immaculate justice to his legacy. [Mar 2018, p.61]

Much of their output since has been consolatory rather than essential, and ultimately Clone Of The Universe can’t quite escape that tag, but Fu Manchu remain justly loyal to old production values--absurd amounts of bottom end and tube fuzz, basically. [Mar 2018, p.58]

These tracks embody the heartache arising from Remy struggling with her place, and the place of her sisters, in the world of male power and dominance. [Mar 2018, p.57]

The fit between Laurie Anderson and Kronos Quartet--whose list of previous collaborators includes Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass--is so natural it’s almost a wonder they haven’t worked together previously. [Mar 2018, p.53]

Absolutely gorgeous. ... It’s as clear, translucent and dazzling as the medium it both plays with and describes. [Mar 2018, p.52]

Pissing Stars sees his songwriting separate more fully from the motherships of Silver Mt Zion and GY!BE, skirting new fringes only a solo artist could reach. [Mar 2018, p.52]

Tahoe is a record for after the fall, after the collapse, a compulsive soundtrack for an age that is both post-natural and post-virtual. [Mar 218, p.46]

What's so delightful is how everything instantly clicks back into place for the listener who is familiar with Dab's work, how accessible and pleasurable his sound is for anyone coming to it for the first time. [Mar 2018, p.46]

The first few listens don’t disclose the full complexities of Simon’s work – it remains semi-horizontal and distant, like a tired shrug. But after several repeats, the circular motifs begin to, if not get under the skin, then at least claw at it a bit. [Mar 2018, p.44]

The execution is elegantly minimal and yet alive with textures and warmth, despite the album's melancholy and often morbid content. [Mar 2018, p.55]

A confidently created body of work that shows her strength in piecing together abstract compositions. [Oct 2017, p.65]

The results isn't always compelling; at times the trio lean on cliched sounds--ominous synth tones, for example, or whirring stock effects--that have also crept into previous release. But more often, the pieces on Rainbow Mirror avoid banality through forced patience. The extended track lengths greatly benefit Fernow’s chosen range of sounds and moods. Given the room to stretch and develop, he and his colleagues maintain a level of subtlety throughout. [Dec 2017, p.56]

A cohesive album in the traditional sense, Hesaitix is an epic world-building exercise littered with simulations of natural beauty. [Dec 2017, p.55]

Distorted and wobbly piano samples summon up the spirit of 1990s rave, but in a quietly euphoric way. Harmonies occasionally jut out, seemingly more a product of chance than by design. [Oct 2017, p.49]

Impossibly both epic and restrained; somebody call CERN. [Nov 2017, p.67]

Far from consistent, its best tracks are those unconcerned with hooks or choruses, maintaining a stealthy pace but humming with all the frantic, pristine detail of the best Future tracks. [Dec 2017, p.64]

Throughout there's a strangely prosaic lyricism at work making the mundane threatening. [Dec 2018, p.48]

Moving between diverse musical contexts, with self-assurance yet also unflagging inquisitiveness, open to the unexpected even within the familiar contours of Ruby My Dear or ’Round Midnight, Smith continues to renew and transcend his legacy. [Dec 2017, p.58]

He might be a slightly better rapper [than his father Will], he’s certainly a more adventurous artist and the fact that he’s a product of his generation shouldn’t detract from that. [Jan 2018, p.78]

All the more powerful for jumping from comic invocations of Ric Flair and Friday The 13th to casual and viciously flippant references to Xanax and other addictions. [Jan 2018, p.78]

Female defiance and desire in a glossy, dystopic package. [Jan 2018, p.77]

Post Self is an extreme, and extremely good, record, as moving as it is troubling. [Jan 2018, p.69]

he way the music suddenly jerks into life from stasis to movement is fine and the whole thing is beautiful and embracing and makes you think peaceful thoughts. By mid-afternoon though things get really ragged. ... Whatever made those earlier tracks sound so great is missing now. [Jan 2018, p.62]

This ludicrously exhaustive deluxe edition includes hour after hour of live takes, demos and interviews. Fascinating, but none of it overshadows the original album. [Dec 2017, p.70]

Fans will find things to love here, I’m sure. But Savage Young Dü won’t be making any converts. [Dec 2017, p.69]

Diggin’ In The Carts is the most inventive video game music compilation in living memory. [Dec 2017, p.67]

The Saga Continues is a somewhat unwieldy collection of Wu offcuts with seemingly no concept. Less an album than a collection of outtakes. [Dec 2017, p.64]

Amalie Bruun (aka Myrkur) returns in feral form with a fresh set of frozen warnings and blackened ballads. ... On “Funeral” she teams up with Chelsea Wolfe for a duet that never quite gels and feels frustratingly half formed, while “Kætteren” confusingly slips a sliver of traditional Scandinavian folk music into the mix. Even worse is end track “Børnehjem” where demonic child whispering over Myrkur’s medieval monkish chant evokes Blair Witch memories and ultimately drags the whole album down. [Dec 2017, p.60]

Moore responds by occasionally holding on to his riffs, exploring their textures before returning to chop and grind mode. Such moments help break up the pair’s machine-like momentum, which in places makes tracks blur together; some actually sound like reprises of each other, somewhere between natural motifs and a well of ideas running dry. But the thrill of Moore and Hayward’s best right hooks and body blows justify the amount of punches thrown. [Dec 2017, p.55]

The update here is that the music is from Glasgow, a city apart from the more cosmopolitan hubs of the global dance network, and one that’s increasingly recognised for its ‘scenius’. It’s perhaps these dislocated elements that make Golden Teacher a solid though ultimately unspectacular British curiosity. [Dec 2017, p.52]

The quartet sound vital here, powered by a passion that is infectious and thrilling. [Dec 2017, p.52]

There are no radical leaps forward from the previous album, but that matters not a jot. The soil in this territory is rich, the flora is fragrant, and the echoes of the past harmonise together like happy memories. [Dec 2017, p.51]

What works so well here is that all the elements are pursued with equal intensity. It is not that noise cedes to the electronics, or the guitars make way for the voice, or turns are taken. On the contrary, everything is plugged in, blindly ongoing without lessening. [Dec 2017, p.50]

The Icelandic icon moves ever closer to the Platonic ideal of what it means to be Bjork. [Dec 2017, p.50]

The record inevitably calls to mind such seminal sci-fi soundtracks as The Terminator and Blade Runner. ...The album is nonetheless imbued with an intrinsic purposiveness which emphatically renders its sounds meaningful in excess or independent of conceptual determination. [Dec 2017, p.49]

When she laughs that she’s never read Robert Greene’s self-help manual 48 Laws, not only is she declaring her album a bullshit-free zone, she’s redefining priorities for 21st century grown-up rap. On this form you have to hope her approach prevails. [Nov 2017, p.70]

While not as suck your frozen heart out bleak as her last album, Abyss, Hiss Spun explores metal's darkness on a more intimate scale. [Nov 2017, p.67]

As a cranky comeback album, it's as welcome as the amped-up reprise of Dr Jacobi as podcast prophet on Twin Peaks: The return. [Nov 2017, p.67]

While he operates in similar sonic territory to Ariel Pink, Mondanile is as disarmingly gentle as Pink is strutting and cocky. [Nov 2017, p.67]

An album both generous and balanced in its patient give and take, upbeat and open, full of enthusiasm and joy. [Nov 2017, p.67]

The mood of the album is always upbeat, ending with the forward looking “Vorfreude 2”--the German word meaning an anticipation for future pleasures--and doesn’t venture into any of the weirder, harder, filthier, squelchier corners of electronic music.[Nov 2017, p.66]

The voice of singer Rolynne provides a fluency and depth missing elsewhere; her emotional precision and expression cut right through the ornament of this otherwise rather forgettable album. [Nov 2017, p.66]

Ununiform demonstrates that Tricky has retained his sense of adventure; even at its most opaque and cryptic lyrically, his music remains hypnotic. [Nov 2017, p.64]

Clark’s fifth album isn’t a retreat to an earlier style--if anything it’s even brighter, bolder and broader than St Vincent, even more given to IMAX worthy gestures-- but Clark does appear to have reconciled the streamlined automation of her new aesthetic with the orch pop crafting of her first three records, Marry Me (2007), Actor (2009) and Strange Mercy (2011). [Nov 2017, p.64]

It’s all extraordinarily listenable thanks to Woolford’s clear vision in tracing various threads of connection between these forms of electronic funk. However, sometimes the direct, hyperspecific references, which can have such impact in club contexts, distract from the flow in the context of an album, and the moments where he navigates the spaces between those specifics become the most enduringly impressive. [Nov 2017, p.62]

O’Dwyer’s explorations of forgotten spaces, ways of listening and acoustic phenomena are as rich as ever, this haunted collection of subterranean sounds revealing even greater depths to her sprawling, strange work. [Nov 2017, p.61]