Raum is the sound of a band who have figured out how to write their future while simultaneously holding meaningfully to their traditions. [Apr 2022, p.50]

Imagine cLOUDDEAD jamming with Wilco, with David Lynch producing, and you're only halfway there. [#257, p.70]

The recipe still works. [Mar 2012, p.52]

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

Unlike many electronic producers whose work echoes the chill of black metal, he retains a certain subtlety – each jolt of sound is unburdened by grand posturing. [Apr 2020, p.52]

Retaining his passion and knowledge for psychedelic music in all its multifarious shifting forms, together with a long incubated yearning to steer his guitar sound in the direction of Jimi Hendrix, on Little Eden Saloman intermittently flashes back and storms straight ahead with a honed set of crafted songs and short-fused acid/garage rock explosions. [Sep 2021, p.62]

For most of the album, the core group explore Lewis’s own compositions, with the leader and Hoffman engaging in thoughtful conversation as Jaffe conveys pulse rather than time. [Apr 2023, p.56]

She’s done it again but, as ever, differently. [Oct 2023, p.56]

The grooves, textures, feel and playing here are immaculately realised but the unique way this band put together what they can do makes it, as ever, way more than just retro-psyche. Perhaps their best, most fully realised record yet. [Oct 2023, p.56]

The oozing synths of “Umbra” slide deliciously in and out of phase to an ethereal keening. .... Elsewhere, she hacks and revolves samples into chittering humus – an overripe garden of imagination, bustling with enthusiasm, circuitry and life. [Jun 2025, p.64]

It all sounds wonderful, sparkling and glistening. Yet it doesn't make a dent that one might expect. [Oct 2008, p.56]

Animals is a riotous, communal affair that doesn’t so much straddle the line between hiphop and jazz as wrestle with both traditions and emerge with something grand. [Sep 2023, 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]

Consists of a reasonable ten discrete songs that feature a manageable number of guest vocalists. ... His focus on hybridity and virality keeps his work fresh and intriguing. [Oct 2020, p.52]

Green commandeers her forces, keeps things simple, and makes irresistibly confident and sharp guitar pop. Addictive. [Aug 2021, p.65]

Martyn is very good at what he does: the record radiates maturity, technical chops and a cool, sometimes poignant emotionality. [Jun 2014, p.62]

A defining album that should lift her out of the 'sounds like' territory. [#248, p.65]

The comforting familiarity of the Boards' muted beats, synth washes and glowing keyboards is just as potent and valium soaked as it was on their brilliant 1998 debut. [1/2001, p.71]

Even when the album’s second half remembers it was supposed to be a rock record, its raw proto-punk remains perfectly strange, with guitar licks alternating between J Mascis’s fuzzy melodicism and John Frusciante’s soothing warmth as they drift across a busy, restlessly baroque pop background. [Sep 2022, p.54]

Getting the full measure of this quickly hermetic collection depends considerably on how you shuffle and deal formats. [May 2008, p.57]

Recorded during a post-tour chill, the album writes a caustic, often dejected and cynical travelogue. ... Meanwhile, subtle slivers of sarcasm and dry humour punch through this acerbic sound. They find their way in bass-led, sumptuous lounge sludge on “Smoker’s Piece”, assess the “Current Situation” with screeching dissonance and pained shrieks and bemoan the grey daily life on the closing “Every Thing, Every Day”. [Apr 2021, p.54]

As empty experiences go, New album is one of the best. [Feb 2012, p.68]

The album is a fairly effective sampler of Ambarchi's various modes. [Dec 2012, p.58

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

Somebody’s Knocking is marginally more rockin’ than 2017’s uninspired Gargoyle – due to a slightly increased emphasis on guitar – but it doesn’t measure up to 2014’s Phantom Radio (or its EP companion No Bells On Sunday). [Oct 2019, p.63]

While The Singles fails to represent Can’s adventures in untethered improvisation and oceanic drift, if you wanted to hand somebody one record that told them what Can was, you could do far worse. [Jul 2017, p.67]

Coomes and Weiss' compact set up maintans an awkward dynamic balancing natural elegance with barbed experiment to sustain the music's flux of design and accident. [#235, p.64]

For just a few moments [on "Slow Your Roll"] there’s an unmistakeable sense that what’s already a decent album could have been a whole lot better, could have been inspirational. [Sep 2017, p.50]

Maus’s genius is to splice nostalgic sonic expectations for the future with new structural realities. [Nov 2017, p.60]

Having all this material together is bittersweet – rather than four distinct sets, couldn’t these styles have been brought together in a more innovative way? Arca’s work is invariably surrounded by much chatter about disrupting musical forms, but four albums divided into four distinct moods feels like an unusually conservative vehicle for her ideas. [Jan 2022, p.59]

Hallucinogen moulds diverse influences together into a perplexing whole. [Dec 2015, p.51]

I Love You is rich enough with textural ambiguities and seething digital soups to easily warrant repeat visitations. [Feb 2012, p.65]

A warmer, more deeply hued record than previous productions. [Jun 2015, p.49]

Unforced, almost conversational asides give the music an intensely focused off the cuff feel. [Dec 2014, p.46]

The music shines with solitary delight. [Feb 2015, p.46]

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

When dealing with the more fully formed of the original songs, the album is extremely strong. [Apr 2013, p.58]

Their focused, cleverly crafted pop fiffs are impressive, for a time.... But by the fifth track, things start to go wrong. [Mar 2008, p.48]

This is unmistakeably a Loraine James record – the synths are capacious and the beats are intricately counterintuitive – but Eastman’s work has clearly been generative. [Oct 2022, p.44]

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]

While Lattimore is willing to put her instrument through some effects, she never subdues its essential character. Its inherent lightness gives records that bear her name a yielding quality that contrasts with the stark clarity of Baird’s solo work, let alone the body blows delivered by her combo Heron Oblivion. [Dec 2018, p.44]

Ashin, in giving so much of himself away, leaves little scope for the kind of mystery that might enable his musical settings to transcend their functional pop status. [Feb 2013, p.60]

A rewarding new departure. [#242, p.72]

While PTSD is sometimes a slog, it's always substantial. [Jun 2014, p.63]

With Drumm at the helm, the album resolves itself as a spooky and nuanced maelstrom. [Nov 2012, p.56]

While the lack of fixed personnel gives the album a gloriously freewheeling mixtape feel, Remy’s lyrics and persona in these songs, – particularly the wondrous title track and the miraculous “Tux” – demonstrate both a sleep deprived hunger for changes of spiritual and musical trajectory – sometimes within a single song – but also a recurrent return to elemental, physical needs, and the sheer lambent wonder of the grooves and hooks always keeps you rapt. [Mar 2023, p.60]

This collaboration feels like his most companionable, as he flexes and grouses through many moods, always in the service of the song. [Mar 2015, p.47]

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

He's nowhere near as agile as he once was, but that slack is picked up on a handful of collaborations with sharp young rappers like Lil Herb and Vince Staples. [Sep 2014, p.65]

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]

As a pop album, Channel Pressure falls short, primarily because the songs simply aren't as good as their impeccable references demand. [Jun 20111, p.46]

Guero turns out to be much stronger than its provenance suggests. [#256, p.66]

A set of powerfully written and unfussily executed songs. [#248, p.50]

If the crackling electronic chaff of previous efforts seems less dominant this time around, it most likely because the group have learned to skillfully incorporate it into their increasingly accomplished and accessible songcraft. [Nov 2008, p.74]

Like O'Rouke, Ambarchi skips light-footed across vast terrain in under an hour, and comes out with something that resonates perfectly. [Mar 2012, p.50]

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

The refreshing result being space music that is neither soporific nor dystopian. [July 2013, p.54]

Jimmy and Swae kick gleeful and indistinguishable spring-loaded raps about nothing in particular. [Feb 2015, p.57]

Chenaux's mastery over his effects is remarkable, but occasionally off-putting. [Feb 2015, p.44]

The intelligence and emotions of the lyrics also capture the accidental complexities of the pop of yesteryear when light entertainment could find itself the place for heavy themes. [Oct 2015, p.60]

In spite of the road drill rhythms, punished percussion and damaged vocalising, though, the collaboration fails to fully connect. [Apr 2016, p.46]

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

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]

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

This is a deep but balanced record, elegant in its melancholia and experimental. [Jul 2017, p.57]

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]

Musically it’s a joyous triumph: vocally Estelle is utterly assured but naturally ebullient, the sound of someone totally at ease. [Nov 2018, p.68]

Choirboys sing the poems of Nils Christian Moe-Repstad over Eivind Aarset’s guitar, but as with the more expansive orchestral passages, it can come across as earnestly ecclesiastical. The most affecting pieces are those where Henriksen and Bang strip it down, such as on “The Swans Bend Their Necks Backward To See God”, where pitched down trumpet lows like foghorns over the Humber valley. [Nov 2018, p.68]

Thankfully here, in spite of the occasional song in Latin or mention of the Peninsular War, Batoh succeeds in stripping things all the way back to a jewel-like clarity. ... Even when things do take on a heavier and more expansive turn, technique, structure and lyrical meaning are powerfully combined. [Feb 2019, p.44]

John Foxx’s last few records have been both a late career second wind and a shameless romp through 20th century art rock tropes – but here it’s done with a level of glee and fuck-it energy that makes even the obvious references hard to resist. [Sep 2020, p.64]

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

Pungent and atmospheric. [Nov 2021, p.62]

Glover’s voice is intimate and unguarded, as if every song were being run down for friends, but it’s hard to imagine them sung in any other way, without losing the burr of nostalgia suffusing them. [Dec 2021, p.58]

Tyondai Braxton’s own Telekinesis is a symphonic work that sounds like a lost sci-fi film soundtrack. It has the clustered, hovering awe of György Ligeti’s Atmosphères and the eerie arpeggiated angles of Herrmann soundtracks like Vertigo and The Day The Earth Stood Still. [Dec 2022, p.50]

As The Forest In Me progresses, it’s interesting to consider which sounds are made with purpose and which are accidental – what is substance and what is ephemeral. When locked in to Xylouris and White’s deeply connected sound, it can feel like great secrets are being offered up to the listener, but heard in passing it’s barely anything at all. What magic. [May 2023, p.59]

I consider 2018’s Digital Garbage one of their finest albums and the fact that Plastic Eternity doesn’t quite measure up to its scorching brilliance is understandable – few records do. This one is looser, less wound-up and perhaps a little less cohesive. But it is always, always nice to have them back. [Aug 2023, p.62]

Founding Melvins members Buzz Osborne and Mike Dillard join forces with electronic musicians Void Maines and Ni Maîtres (aka Gareth Turner) for a lively and experimental session. Both guests are let loose on “Vomit Of Clarity” where, by way of introduction, they squeeze out an involved synthesized sound collage – an effectively intriguing interval to herald in the main event. [Jul 2025, p.61]

These half-asleep compositions inhabit the porous spaces between songform and atmosphere, the result being a remarkably relaxed album that is perhaps the strongest of the trilogy. [Nov 2025, p.52]

As ever, he works with a solid dub toolkit, but tracks like "The Well Is Poisoned" (co-written with Brian Eno) and "Hiroshima Dub Match" sound newly anxious. [Nov 2025, p.56]

Both Ishibashi and O'Rourke have spent lifetimes devoted to improvisation, and even if they only pick up a conventional instrument here and there on Pareidolia, the magic they weave on computers is no less spontaneous. [Oct 2024, p.54]

His music has an airless, contrived and over-polished quality. However, the production style developed by his team of collaborators is glacially impressive, if gloomy. [Apr 2015, p.66]

Live From KCRW suffers from the stilted atmosphere that plagues most live radio sessions, with the audience, Cave and his Bad Seeds all on their best behavior. [Jan 2014, p.59]

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]

Dream A Garden only starts to sound radical when it breaks the bounds of its songforms and an eerie melancholy steals in. [Mar 2015, p.48]

Both NV and Deradoorian maintain their musical identities but balance each other’s urges with concision to the point where the record emerges as a holistic, kaleidoscopic transmission from a duo at play with each other and with the possibilities conjured by their shared will. [Jul 2023, p.51]

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

There are occasions when vocal inadequacy can be more emotionally fetching than full-throated virtuosity.... This, however, is not one of them. [#239, p.57]

Consistently entertaining. [#215, p.69]

Where Shine New Lights doesn't radically deviate from TJO's design concept, but it does favour a more minimal feng shui. [Feb 2014, p.51]

He's certainly dextrous enough as a rapper to accommodate this musical schizophrenia, bobbing and weaving with a raw aggression that also serves to mask that he has little to say. [Mar 2012, p.69]

A minor pleasure of the album is the beautiful way it's edited together, a gently manipulated impression of random accidents. [Sep 2015, p.47]

It’s rich fare and authentically live-sounding. [Sep 2021, p.50]

Chrystia Cabral follows up her 2021 prog meets chamber pop album The Turning Wheel with an unexpected but delightful mash-up of late 1990s radio sounds. [Jun 2025, p.60]

Foreign Body evokes alienation from a bottomless chasm of introspection. [Mar 2012, p.57]

The Sonics actually sound like they're back. [May 2015, p.53]

You might not think you need new versions of these. But you’d be wrong. [Nov 2017, p.52]

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]

It’s an overegged pudding at times, but to its credit Versus is anything but polite; with brass and bass to the fore, Craig chips away at our preconceptions--he’s here for more than the black tie and polite applause. [Jun 2017, p.61]