The production, courtesy of DJ Dahi, No ID and James Blake, spirals outward from the world this Long Beach native’s peers inhabit and into satisfyingly experimental territory. [Oct 2016, p.65]

Most of SremmLife II’s successes are confined to its front half, but the brothers have a strong enough pop sensibility to reward your attention even when they’re on autopilot. [Oct 2016, p.65]

The sum is Ocean’s most thorough reading of his world to date. [Oct 2016, p.65]

The laser-like concentration on groove and gorgeous textural flutterings just about keep them away from pastiche; the result is like having honey poured in your ear for 50 minutes. [Oct 2016, p.64]

The results are tougher and less poised, less prone to pastiche or ironic self-identification. But in the process he’s become a bit workmanlike: you feel he could knock these tunes out to order and they’d all be creditable, but not much more. [Oct 2016, p.63]

Stripped of the visuals, the seemingly endless succession of minor variations (75 tracks between the two collections) on the same sets of glossy and pleasant synth arpeggios can be at once bitty and overwhelming. [Oct 2016, p.63]

Stripped of the visuals, the seemingly endless succession of minor variations (75 tracks between the two collections) on the same sets of glossy and pleasant synth arpeggios can be at once bitty and overwhelming. [Oct 2016, p.63]

There’s a strongly conceived sense of contrast and drama to “Sorcerer” and "Copter," the latter transforming from overwrought mid-80s action show theme to a slick and drugged R&B jam. [Oct 2016, p.63]

The vocal arrangements almost all verge on the irritating--overblown neo-gospel--but there’s too much good here to deny on that basis. [Oct 2016, p.63]

Become Zero sees Chesley using digital processing for the first time; “Radiate” benefits greatly, evolving over nine minutes from treated bowed dissonance into churchy ambient drone, while “Machine” adds layers to an initial loping pulse until it’s an enveloping roar. [Oct 2016, p.61]

Rich and resonant. [Oct 2016, p.61]

Do Not Disturb, VDGG’s 13th album and their third since regrouping in 2005, bears little evidence of engagement with music’s outside world, but it’s creative and sprightly on its own terms. [Oct 2016, p.61]

Tracks like “It’s Not Me” and “All-Seeing Eye” feel like works in progress and weigh down an already overlong album. Yet the album has its superlative bursts, like the fingerpicked coda of “Goodbye” and the gnarly biker metal guitars on “Alarms” and “Goatfuzz”. [Oct 2016, p.61]

Masculin Féminin documents a youthful band impulsively pouring noise into rock, free of machismo or the urge to ape what was then hip. [Oct 2016, p.61]

The songs have an irresistible quality of self-reflection. [Oct 2016, p.60]

As the album progresses, uneasiness is subliminally incorporated into otherwise deceptively easy rockin’ tunes. [Oct 2016, p.60]

It has a few surprises and sharp edges, but the structures are unstable. Like the post-rock improv of Aethenor, occasional bolts of energy strike and convulse the players. In its second half, however, 13 finally picks up momentum. [Oct 2016, p.60]

Diehard metalheads will continue to grumble, but Opeth are never going back to their old sound, and with Sorceress they’ve proved the wisdom of their choice. [Oct 2016, p.57]

Its exploratory, playful, even mystical temper, slipping easily between the emotional zones the history of song traverses, suggests a boredom with eschatology. [Oct 2016, p.55]

If Atrocity Exhibition doesn’t connect with quite the same power, it’s not for lack of commitment or craft. [Oct 2016, p.53]

he duo of Alexander Tucker and Daniel O’Sullivan come closer than on any previous effort to reconciling the two halves of their musical personality. [Oct 2016, p.52]

This feels like a love letter to dayglo dreams of the online world of 20 years ago, with beats and samples too evolved, too exuberant to sink into mere nostalgia. [Oct 2016, p.51]

Fires Within Fires is the summation of 30 years of experimentation in tonality and texture. Yes, Neurosis are firmly positioned within the extreme metal underground, yet their music, with its ability to generate images of beauty akin to those many of us have experienced in our own lives--not to mention the loss that accompanies them--challenges this categorisation. [Oct 2016, p.49]

One of the hardest and most consistent recent statements in US hiphop. [Oct 2016, p.48]

Jenssen can't maintain the balancing act throughout Departed Glories and only really pulls it off intermittently. But when he does it casts a lovely autumnal light somewhere between Folke Rabe’s pastoral minimalism, Andrew Chalk’s haunted pools of tone, or even the lambent string arrangements of Debussy’s Jeux. [Oct 2016, p.48]

The outcome is a record you could forget you're even listening to. [Nov 2016, p.66]

The Divine Feminine is well-intentioned and well-staffed, but ultimately lacks the sort of specificity in vision that would do its subject matter justice. [Nov 2016, p.61]

Darkthrone do pretty much what they please, divorced from scene politics and free to enthuse about Ron Hardy mixes or delivering the post. [Nov 2016, p.56]

Swagger can be infectious and the album works as a playful, blissed out hymn to the dancefloor. [Nov 2016, p.55]

Ultimately only the title retains the tang of locality. [Nov 2016, p.73]

[An] excellently focused overview. [Nov 2016, p.70]

Producers of Stranger Things, look no further: we have that second series soundtrack for you. [Nov 2016, p.70]

Once this inward looking tendency was a strength; now it seems safe. [Nov 2016, p.68]

This is a synth album of considerable finesse, a soundtrack to imaginary films. [Nov 2016, p.67]

It feels distasteful to rate so powerful, so raw an album in any aesthetic terms and yet it brilliantly, blackly, radiates life. Skeleton Tree is a work of mourning, yes; a work of reverie, yes; and also an immensely moving attempt to reach out of blackness towards life. [Nov 2016, p.65]

The Sun's Tirade is a master class in restraint and pacing. [Nov 2016, p.64]

They're entering into new territory now and have yet to push as far out as they need to. [Nov 2016, p.62]

It's a genuine pleasure to hear an ensemble this aesthetically united working at such a high level. [Nov 2016, p.61]

Human Energy is a rainbow emerging on a clear summer's day. [Nov 2016, p.61]

This wonderful music is most certainly bleeding freely from somewhere deep inside Jenny Hval. [Nov 2016, p.58]

The result is one of the year's most thought-provoking electronic works. [Nov 2016, p.56]

You Know What's It's Like presents the emotional cente of dal Forno's work with a clarity previously absent from either band. [Nov 2016, p.55]

Color is an album of two halves, with gloomier hues on side two. [Nov 2016, p.53]

Ultimately the album's strength lies in the way its civil facade barely masks Trim's enduring unresolved issues, its portrait of an MC looking to simultaneously escape, dominate and earn the acknowledgement of a scene he transcended a long way back. [Sep 2016, p.62]

On top of the crisp, sympathetic playing, the songwriting and vocals stand out with tunes that could have come straight from the Treasure Isle songbook. [Sep 2016, p.59]

The album feels like paten's mostly mechanically calculated and precise output to date. [Sep 2016, p.59]

The mix between organic and technological sonics, including the harmonious tones of Williams's own voice, makes for a mesmerising debut. [Sep 2016, p.59]

A compelling tribute from one iconic vocalist to another. [Sep 2016, p.59]

[JR Robinson] edited them later into a musical Frankenstein breathing life into the stories of monsters. [Sep 2016, p.59]

Everything that 30 years ago made Dinosaur Jr a lightning bolt of enervated languor is present here. [Sep 2016, p.59]

Dragged out doom riffs and saw-edged unison vocals capture their fury and helplessness. [Sep 2016, p.59]

At times the tracks become as texturally rich and contradictory as those of Actress on 2014's Ghettoville. [Sep 2016, p.58]

WWWINGS deliver an album that has the rumbling force of feet stomping in unison but which is finished with a hi-tech sheen. [Sep 2016, p.57]

Walker's latest project effectively balances the saccharine with hovering fear, demonstrating his continued capacity for writing cinematic music invested with strange drama. [Sep 2016, p.57]

The songs' parts don't always transition as smoothly as the listener might like, making them feel like a long sequence of moments rather than a single, shifting musical experience. ... Still, when Pack and Pendleton are gliding above the battlefield, voices and violins arcing slowly around one another, there's a real beauty here. [Sep 2016, p.56]

The results are deceptively impressive. [Sep 2016, p.54]

Earl has delivered a remarkably clear and impressive record. [Sep 2016, p.52]

As half-familiar figures and distorted memories of long forgotten acid mood jams drift in and out of view, one is reminded that sometimes the most exotic species are those living in our own minds. [Sep 2016, p.50]

Judging by the music on And The Anonymous Nobody, their sights are set firmly on the future. [Sep 2016, p.49]

The raps are often unaccompanied by beats, and this decision, combined with Diggs's deliberately rigid flow, results in a poetry slam aesthetic with only the faintest of links to the generic conventions and pleasures of hiphop. [Sep 2016, p.47]

Bowles still makes his most emotionally compelling statements with his banjo. [Sep 2016, p.46]

Those nostalgic for the Aphex sounds of old may find them here, but served up rotten and misshapen, as an agreeably queasy warning that nostalgia can only get you so far. [Aug 2016, p.46]

Black Bubblegum is Copeland's most surprising release for a long time; it's also perhaps the most obviously approachable record he has ever been involved with. [Aug 2016, p.48]

On Centres, the songs have a lyrical content that makes their meaning more discernible. [Aug 2016, p.48]

The comparison between [The Disco's of Imhotep] and Ancient Echoes revealing the absolutely consistency of Moss's vision over the years. [Aug 2016, p.50]

Sumac's rock thunder becomes more involved as they sink deeper into their own personal spaces, uncorking emotions and letting loose inner demons, while still fully functioning as part of a group experience. [Aug 2016, p.58]

Promise Of The Real can't match Crazy Horse's lumbering majesty, but their youthful energy and sweet harmonies are infectious. ... The attempts at collage are pretty corny, with crows, pigs and bees all wandering into the mix. [Aug 2016, p.58]

I'd like this to be much more depraved, or just for El-P to fully embrace his Eno role for another solo album of weirdness. [Aug 2016, p.59]

Drumming that starts off in a motoric groove warps into something way more minimal and amateurish, something undanceable, yet difficult to resist at least shrugging along to. [Aug 2016, p.59]

Dead Ringers lack the singular vision needed to hold so many digressions and disparate references together. [Aug 2016, p.61]

This is swirling, volatile music, awash with synths and scorched to a turn by Mulholland's guitar. [Aug 2016, p.62]

An engrossing collection. [Aug 2016, p.63]

Still Brazy is thoroughly and unapologetically regional, but its thematic engines are universal. [Aug 2016, p.63]

Much of Lil BIG Pac concerns his experience behind bars. It would be eerily prescient if the criminal system weren't so predictable. [Aug 2016, p.63]

This intelligently compiled collection brings together the best (and sometime worst) of these mostly forgotten groups. [Aug 2016, p.66]

The songs with less specific and less contemporary references hit harder. [Jul 2016, 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]

Somewhere in Asphalt For Eden is buried beautiful music. [Jun 2016, p.62]

Built around the usual sluggish grammar of instrumental hiphop, the tracks seems at times to collapse in on themselves, swollen with lugubrious 1970s jazz funk keyboards, strategically aimless organ vamps and miscellaneous concrete samples. [Jun 2016, p.60]

It's just a coarser, clumsier version of the updated industrial bashing of their last album, without the dreamy coronae of guitar.[Jun 2016, p.60]

The line-up sounds tantalisingly promising--but the hoped for bass-heavy meltdown never fully materialises. [Jun 2016, p.58]

Strongly guitar based, their music alternates from being dreamily subdued one second to full on, hair flailing freak out the next. [Jun 2016, p.58]

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]

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]

Almost without exception, these 11 tracks lurch along at a donkey's pace that seems designed to signify grace and dignity, while the crystal cave reverb applied with such liberality by Randall Dunn, producer of choice for the likes of Sunn 0))), Wolves In The Throne Room and Earth, seems after the nth track to cloak a more profound problem, which is that much of the material on Strangers is thin pickings. [Jun 2016, p.54]

Glasper is undoubtedly a class act, but the lacks the wildness a Madlib or a Flying Lotus might have brought to this project. [Jun 2016, p.54]

Fool is the stunning debut from a young Dutch producer. [Jun 2016, p.53]

This is a rare gem of an album that projects Kacy and Clayton into the category of all time great folk duos. [Jun 2016, p.50]

Extended periods of concentration can create a flow state in which work feels effortless, even meditative, and it's this state that Eyes On The Lines evokes. [Jun 2016, p.50]

Tooth works brilliantly as a whole, each piece building up tension to breaking point and refusing to offer resolution. [Jun 2016, p.48]

This meld of savoury-sweet singing, moreish melody, glistening texture, strange space and surprises galore makes I, Gemini the best pop-not-pop album since Micachu & The Shapes' Jewellery. [Jun 2016, p.47]

Recognising that electronica isn't bound to depict the future any longer has given Pritchard the key to his most consistent and enjoyable work yet. [May 2016, p.54]

A deliriously infantile playhouse of sound. [May 2016, p.51]

We Are King is a lush, dynamic, and expertly crafted album that constructs a unique soundworld. [May 2016, p.50]

An album which largely plays assured and empty. Genesis is home to a few brilliant moments, however. [May 2016, p.49]

It's delightfully ponderous. [May 2016, p.48]

An album of authentic 80s nostalgia that followers of the filmmaker's canon are bound to treasure. [May 2016, p.46]

Susanna's lucid singing shines through the thematic murk, and her instrumental settings are well-defined and ingenious. [Apr 2016, p.58]