Whether it’s political (the second half looks pretty Brexit: “Aftermath”, “Catastrophe Anthem”, “Living Fantasy”, “Un UK”) or more private, there’s something at stake in every track. [May 2017, p.61]

The more they change, the more ADULT. sound the same: pared down electro pulses, synth jabs with industrial elbows, and Nicola Kuperus’s passive-aggressive post-Slits lilt. [May 2017, p.61]

When he muses on ideal love it comes off like How To Dress Well with a bit of a John Mayer wink--Vulnicura this ain’t. Longstreth is a talented producer and arranger and it shows here. ... Shame about the lyrics. [May 2017, p.59]

The weakest moments of this set are those that try to bludgeon the listener with noise. [May 2017, p.57]

As the 12 minute “The Lure Of The Mine” closes out this odd and enigmatic record in typically relentless fashion, the sensation is one of standing back and watching, impressed but stubbornly, confusingly unmoved. [May 2017, p.56]

There’s one serious misfire, a skit where Crazy Titch reassures us that everyone in his prison block agrees you’re never “too gang to listen Stormzy”, but mostly his wariness lends the album a series of unresolved tensions more perfectly poised than any other grime album to date. [May 2017, p.55]

Arca’s operatic tone adds another layer to the expression of emotion and open sexuality in his work--“Piel” and “Coraje” being particularly striking. Ghersi’s voice emerges quietly, piercing through foreboding sonics with sombre gentleness. [May 2017, p.54]

The album never quite wallows in gross out carnage or tragedy or blame (though these are here, for sure), but spins these yarns, perverse detail at a time, with the laconic humour of a short story by Richard Brautigan or Thomas Pynchon, stopping just short of mockery. [May 2017, p.53]

[Arthur Jeffes] often seems over-cautious. ... Yet when Jeffes reins in a tendency to over-orchestrate, he shares his father’s talent for painting delightful scenes with limited palettes. [May 2017, p.53]

The record is a meditation on masculinity, both lyrically and musically. But it is a sombre, barely lustful masculinity that growls and shrieks and howls and tells stories here. [May 2017, p.52]

Mr Mitch’s productions are as fastpaced, tight and spirited as his DJ sets. He makes the most of these sparse landscapes, marking a path for a complex of emotions to bleed though. Part of the album’s charm is that Mitch doesn’t shy away from adopting a pop sensibility nor embracing love as his subject matter. [May 2017, p.51]

Marshall’s electronic, krautrock-ish backing tracks extended what Lanegan had previously laid down on previous albums Blues Funeral and Phantom Radio. Gargoyle however has more of an early 1980s UK electronic rock feel, with Lanegan’s rough vocal rasp sawing through musical timbres reminiscent of what was being played out at Manchester’s Factory. [May 2017, p.47]

This is fierce, uncompromising music. [May 2017, p.47]

The pop elements apparent on Uyai are deployed imaginatively and effectively rather than as a means of demonstrating the group's impeccable taste. [May 2017, p.48]

The crisp and urgent execution on this recording has been immaculately produced, the overall result being an immediacy that only an accomplished performer and ensemble can achieve. [May 2017, p.47]

The first half of the album presents a disparate sequence of songs, the punky “I Want To Tell You About Want I Want” mixing with a rather laboured piece about Virginia Woolf’s and Sylvia Plath’s suicides (“Virginia Woolf”). ... This second half finds Hitchcock at his most purposeful. [May 2017, p.46]

Bassist Haz Wheaton and drummer Richard Chadwick provide the solid underpinning, while Brock's knack of fashioning and delivering strong melodic and verbal hooks is plentiful in evidence. [May 2017, p.46]

There are still hints of Gnod's more psychedelic aspect, but these tracks feel lean, stripped back and sharp-eyed. [May 2017, p.46]

Narkopop has a symphonic majesty, a sense of form and forward movement that no prior Gas record quite reached. Voigt's forest no longer merely murmurs; it positively exults. [May 2017, p.46]

All of the six songs feel epic in structure, each gradually building from a subtle breeze into a fiery windstorm as Michael and John Gibbons's sustained guitar mantras bleed into each other. [May 2017, p.44]

Darran Cunningham's most immediate and body-rocking record to date. [May 2017, p.44]

A warm and immensely good natured record. [Apr 2017, p.63]

The album is strong in the style, but offers no real surprises, with the familiar mixture of clacking Tuareg rhythm and scorched Sahelian riffing best illustrated here by the fiercely motorik “War Toyed”. [Apr 2017, p.63]

The album then settles into a solid groove of high end electro pop with just enough dust to keep it grounded. [Apr 2017, p.62]

His first Ninja Tune album Providence showcases an altogether darker side. [Apr 2017, p.62]

As per usual, Grails prove frustratingly difficult to love or hate. [Apr 2017, p.60]

In Arbouretum’s case the song remains much the same, but its continuation is more than welcome. [Apr 2017, p.60]

Undertow makes great use of Baljo’s guitar and Olson’s saxophone; looping them into churning, oozing grooves that recall the metallic swamp of Gnod’s Infinity Machines LP. Within this sickly ambience, bursts of electronic noise erupt and sputter but never dominate. [Apr 2017, p.59]

Wire’s newest material sounds like a figment of where Roxy Music might have gone if Eno had stuck around. This is most evident on the menacing, glamorous swagger of “Forever And A Day”. But the sound, if grounded in the past, is focused on the present. Wire still make distinctly modern, distinctly European music. [Apr 2017, p.59]

The threat of salvation has never sounded more eerie. Wake In Fright is about the horror of being too much alive, the horror of all the things people do to escape life while forgetting that any attempt at running away from existence only results in a tightening of its shackles. [Apr 2017, p.

The whole album sounds less written, performed and recorded, more like it’s streaming directly from Thundercat’s brain to the listener’s. [Apr 2017, p.57]

The utter rubbishness of Britain, its cruelty, inequality and blatant cultural crapness is once again perfectly captured by Sleaford Mods, a couple of middle aged blokes who are as grizzled and worn as the stuff Williamson shout-sings about. [Apr 2017, p.57]

Now more than ever, political songs need engagement and direct prescription. In that respect Spirit rarely cuts it. But as with many DM albums, it can still resonate in quieter moments such as “Cover Me”, and the group’s continued existence is one of the great love affairs between man and machine in modern music. [Apr 2017, p.56]

Only occasionally, as on the Daft Punk-ish disco of “Real Time” does it feel generic, and when it gets really sophisticated--as on “True” where How To Dress Well sheds his recent 1980s pop affectations to operate in pure (and not in any sense alt) R&B mode--its ambition is clear. [Apr 2017, p.56]

A Common Truth is far more intimate, focusing on arrangements and whispered songs erupting around Foon’s distinctly emotive cello. Due to the shifting blend of fear, despair, togetherness, hope and anger that characterises the battle for climate change awareness, her song cycle aptly seeps its way into all nooks and crannies of the emotional spectrum. [Apr 2017, p.55]

With its crashing together of narcotic pop, serialism and motorik rock, Find Me Finding You is in a similar mould to Sadier’s compatriot Pierre Henry’s concrète pop nugget Psyche Rock. Or, closer to home, Stereolab. [Apr 2017, p.55]

Refusing facsimile, Galás’s music attains its weight and power not from its oddity but from its humanity. [Apr 2017, p.53]

Although the album is ostensibly live, the natural effects Galás can create in her voice places the album in an uncomfortably solitary place, as if the audience has been struck dumb, the piano close, Galás herself able to fly like a spirit to any point within the church’s space. [Apr 2017, p.53]

There’s a sense of indecision to the overall sound of the album, which results in a fragmented listening experience. [Apr 2017, p.52]

Less successful is “Turned To Stone”, a somewhat sluggish performance that indicates a temporary loss of direction, hobbled by formless vocal grunts that are accompanied by bouts of panic stricken death metal guitar noodling when the otherwise omnipresent grim mood falters. Mercifully Obituary swiftly regain their footing and kick back with “Straight To Hell.” [Apr 2017, p.52]

A fascinatingly fractured yet whole album, it is the sound of a man not only investigating but celebrating the full cultural spectrum of his existence. [Apr 2017, p.51]

The album is ultimately defined by its ten minute centrepiece “American Dream” and the 14 minute closing title track. Both beatless, these two are painted in broad, expansive strokes by Martin and further shaded by some of the most mystifying motifs of Carlson’s career to date. [Apr 2017, p.49]

Contact may be more consistent than earlier albums, but some of the edges have been filed down and some of the physical intimacy that had such an impact by virtue of being too close for comfort is dialled down. [Apr 2017, p.47]

Only time will tell which albums will ring out as genuine artefacts and which will be revealed as little more than sound and fury, signifying nothing. [Apr 2017, p.46]

The pair’s soundtrack is trippy and foreboding, swaying between melancholy cosmic laments on slo-mo keyboards (“Leaving Moomin Valley”), mysterious Middle Eastern whines (“Hobgoblin’s Hat”), extraterrestrial dream sequences on thumb piano and wooden glockenspiel (“Most Unusual”) and a giddy blast of what sounds like computerised rodents squeaking with speeded-up glee (“Party Time”). [Mar 2017, p.65]

Godfather is no mere retread, not the sound of youth but an idealised memory of it. [Mar 2017, p.56]

Chasny’s vocals in particular, hushed and double-tracked, tend to sound like the performance of awed transport rather than awed transport itself. In that sense Threshold’s instrumental numbers--which on so many albums feel like interludes or filler--are standouts. [Mar 2017, p.54]

At every turn it bubbles with the delight of discovery, and shows the alchemical reaction between the two studio personae coming along very nicely indeed. [Mar 2017, p.54]

Every track is a killer. [Mar 2017, p.54]

The pop craftsmanship on display throughout Pangs is just the thing to make vinegary dregs go down easy. [Mar 2017, p.53]

It is psychedelic in the best sense of the word, evoking constant movement, but a motion that is always interior, burrowing deep into the psyche of listener and player alike. [Mar 2017, p.52]

Falkner's presence helps tighten up Moore's game with out diluting his essential weirdness, while Moore encourages the usually perfectionist Falkner to cut loose and re-engage with the taste for lo-fi leakage. [Mar 2017, p.50]

Anyone interested in just how far out and far in British music can be i 2017 should have Stillness spot-welded into their systems right now. [Mar 2017, p.50]

Kingdom's debut album is all pop. Not in the formulaic sense, but in its sophisticated amalgam of everything that is skilled and aesthetic from both mainstream club production and underground dance subgenre. [Mar 2017, p.49]

There’s a strong sense on Children Of Alice of each member of the trio’s strengths--Cargill’s ear for synth sounds and eerie melodies; Roj’s rippling tone patterns and rhythmic momentum; House’s collages glued together from the subconscious--both coexisting and combining into a greater whole. Yet its threefold approach to listeners’ minds--as, simultaneously, musique concrète sonic buffet, richly nostalgic hotpot of beloved reference points, and hieroglyphic recipe book--is less cohesive. [Mar 2017, p.47]

Anjou’s transition from post-rock to power ambient now complete, Epithymía sees these musicians extrapolate into new directions masterfully, squeezing out a mesmeric minor masterpiece in the process. [Mar 2017, p.45]

[A] finely crafted and very songwriterly affair (with echoes of Talk Talk, The Auteurs and Roy Harper). [Jan 2017, p.74]

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]

Zubot’s production creates a sense of vastness, placing Tagaq’s voice low in the mix with strings and drums or conversely counterpointing it to instruments to create icy thick layers of noise. However, his maximalist approach fails the more poppy tracks. [Feb 2017, p.45]

A confused but compulsive listen. [Feb 2017, p.60]

Cutting through the tedium reveals a moderately engaging narrative of low level criminality with solid insights ranging from the cloying to mildly provocative. [Feb 2017, p.59]

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]

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

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

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]

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

The next person who decides to write a book on Miles Davis, or agrees to play him in a movie, will find this set invaluable. But for the casual Davis fan, it’s bound to be a bore and a chore. [Nov 2016, p.76]

He doesn’t sound quite engaged anywhere on Lady, Give Me Your Key – more like a talented but wayward kid trying out for the school show. [Nov 2016, p.75]

It’s wild, almost bacchanalian, Ambarchi leading everyone to shared euphoric experience with his guitar--then it’s over, and everything dissolves rapidly into a dazed silence [Nov 2016, p.57]

The vinyl pressing is high quality and these albums deserve every extra crumb of clarity analogue can muster. ... Clear the shelves. [Dec 2017, p.74]

Here’s a Kool Keith album you don’t need to take in 20 minute doses. Lap it up. [Dec 2016, p.71]

Monument Builders itself could do with some of that malfunction, some warped colour and cathode ray snow. [Dec 2016, p.69]

The tracks don’t so much develop as flow--and don’t so much flow as slide slowly, tidally, from one pole to another. Those poles are, to put it crudely, a smooth Badalamenti-like gloom and a more polyphonic, Vangelis-style choral sound. [Dec 2016, p.69]

This is liminal pop music for sure, with Pioulard’s bedroom-recorded mixture of field recordings, dubbing tape experiments, ringing acoustic guitars, glockenspiel and murmuring vocals creating cloudlike, ephemeral textures. [Dec 2016, p.67]

Youngs’s knack of picking resonant phrases is at peak levels. [Dec 2016, p.66]

She draws you into the shadows and crumbling concrete of America, a nation in which, as Knowles pointed out in a recent online essay, “a former Ku Klux Klan leader is running for Louisiana senator.” [Dec 2016, p.54]

America’s National Parks is as consistent musically as it is conceptually diverse. What appear on first listen to be reserved essays on grand topics are steadily revealed to be eloquent statements of a mature and unified vision, realised with collective mastery. [Dec 2016, p.64]

Rather than confessional catharsis, Highway Songs has the diaristic, sketchbook feel of the compulsively creative. [Dec 2016, p.64]

This music reminds you how alone you are; it consoles you through its insolubility, comforts you by jabbing you in the chest and letting you know how complex the struggle is, how inaccessible we are to each other but just how universal our pain can be. [Dec 2016, p.63]

This is the adult Metallica at last, monolithic, grandiose and grizzled. Maturity suits the band, makes them a weightier proposition than the pursuit of former glories ever could. [Dec 2016, p.62]

The whole album has a distinct and mothball-smelling late 90s vibe, the parts gelling with a certain clunkiness that characterised their last album Low Impact, as if the two were taking a vacation in their own pasts. Like other people’s holidays, it isn’t always as fun for the onlookers as it may have been for them. Nevertheless, Analogue Creatures features some genuinely lovely work. [Dec 2016, p.60]

Throughout, what’s so revelatory and gratifying is hearing Zedek pushed by others and pushing others in turn. [Dec 2016, p.58]

It’s a gorgeous sounding album, with a fat, woody drum sound and well-defined bass frequencies that are headphone umami. [Dec 2016, p.57]

Broken Knowz sounds cleaner, more restrained and organic than his previous material. [Dec 2016, p.56]

What makes Lodestar a genuine progression from what has gone before--is the sinking and deepening of her voice. It is still neutral enough to act as the conduit it always has done, but the milkmaid’s lilt has been transformed into a maven’s burden. [Dec 2016, p.55]

Without bass or rhythmic anchor, the pair create a sense of immeasurable depth, as though listeners bob helplessly on the surface above an unfathomable abyss; a feeling heightened by how Gordon’s vocals often resemble abject cries into the void. [Dec 2016, p.55]

This constellation of miniature masterpieces is arguably the finest introduction to the Ra universe there is. [Jan 2017, p.84]

The audio material is an illuminating reflection of the group’s transition from pop copyists to psychedelic adventurers, en route to becoming champions of rock’s progressive faction. [Jan 2017, p.82]

Woptober, his second album as a free man, returns to the knotty, impenetrable rabbit holes of his storied mixtape run. [Jan 2017, p.77]

Trap Or Die 3 is a uniformly strong effort. [Jan 2017, p.77]

What's Your Sign is a brash, vigorous session that maintains discipline and freedom in equal measure. [Jan 2017, p.74]

The Silence are less pastoral and more raucous, from the sax-laden opener "Rituals Of The Sun" onwards. There's a healthy dose of early 1970s British prog throughout too.

Mandel's combination of virtuosity, shopworn aesthetics and lustful neediness is ultimately winning. [Jan 2017, p.73]

Sounding like nothing else out there, distinct even from Tribe's previous work, We Got It From Here is political without being preachy, fun without being unintelligent and next level out while being street corner down. A superb swansong. [Jan 2017, p.71]

Eno's striving nature and his ability to morph sounds, alter moods and conduct psychoacoustic experiments still yields weird and enjoyable fruits here. [Jan 2017, p.64]

Dense, frustrating, perplexing and fun on record, Demdike's sound works best when bleeding osmotically into strange visuals. [Jan 2017, p.63]

Building a strong, solid foundation for his skyscraper of words, the rapper channels everyone from Malcolm X to James Brown into a mountainous manifesto of beautiful blackness that is reflective of the struggle for dignity and equality, while also working towards the banishment of stereotypes. [Jan 2017, p.61]

Totalling a scant half hour, the album’s fleeting length leaves me wondering whether some tracks exhaust all potential within their mayfly-like timespans. But it captures a moment, and judging by the collaborative rapport between Levi and Coates it suggests, hopefully it’ll be the first of many. [Nov 2016, p.59]