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

The Crying Out Of Things, their latest album as a duo since 2021’s I’ve Seen All I Need To See, builds on the idiosyncratic elements of their established sound – monstrous distortion, crushed electronic beats and samples, scorched screams, fragments of punk, metal, pop, hiphop and dub – and the results are thrillingly, crushingly bleak. [Dec 2024, p.42]

For music as heavy as this, the performances and production are impressively agile and light on their feet. Ultrapop is clear-eyed and enraged, pristine and pulsing with adrenaline. [Jun 2021, p.46]

Barring the title cut’s debt to Steely Dan, the pomp is dialled down just enough on Deleted Scenes for the band to flex their fusionoid chops, adding a whole other element of kookiness to their already brow-raising style. [Jul 2020, p.56]

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]

For music built around the shrouding and decay of its composer’s bodily presence, Thresholder feels curiously non-corporeal. In large part that’s attributable to the purity of Craig’s voice. ... But elsewhere--when melting between the tremulous organ tones of “And Therefore The Moonlight” or forming grainy cirrus wisps in “Sfumato”--Craig sounds as though he’s already shed his physical shell and ascended into the cosmos. [Dec 2018, p.46]

Good as the present iteration of The Chills is – featuring Erica Scally on guitar, keyboards, violin, Oli Wilson on keys, Callum Hampton on bass and Todd Knudson on drums – it’s Phillipps’s darkly catchy writing that dominates this seventh studio record from the band. He has a synoptic vision that takes in everything from fake news to cargo cults. An essential contemporary voice. [Jun 2021, p.48]

The Pyramids may not be breaking new ground here, but Afro Futuristic Dreams is arguably the best thing the reunited group have created. [Nov 2023, p.46]

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]

A sense of foreboding and emotional struggle is expertly crafted, so much so that at times it can feel like there’s little air and no escape. Outside of the songs, there’s a more uncanny, ineffable sense of power on the instrumental jig or reel passages of “Master Crowley’s” and “The New York Trader”. [Jul 2023, p.55]

The Hard Quartet manage to create a collection of tight, fun songs that feel at once old-timey and modern. [Oct 2024, p.52]

Hot Rats is testament to the power of the overdub, and as such, The Hot Rats Sessions mostly consists of a selection of instrumental parts presented in isolation, which won’t be of interest to all. As with the album, the rambling blues jams are the least interesting, and the real magic is in the origami-like marvels of “Peaches En Regalia”, “Son Of Mr Green Genes” and “It Must Be A Camel”. ... Most remarkable are the outakes.

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]

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]

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]

Darkness At Noon works because it doggedly pursues its convictions through to a satisfying conclusion and in doing so creates its own kind of offbeat logic. [#254, p.53]

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]

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

It’s the genuine connection of Bowles, Toll and McMurry that makes it all bounce, which is hardly what one might expect from a banjo fronted group. [Aug 2024, p.48]

The group’s take on their core material has never been overly reverent, but they are in masterful command of the style’s essence, and their previous excursions beyond the boundaries mean they can keep it fully upgraded for novel deployments on cuts like the razor-sharp “Çıt Çıt Çedene”. [Jun 2023, p.65]

A Short History Of Decay is a stirring suite of studiosculpted alternative rock that jettisons most of their heavy music influence while finding new routes to scoured ears amid plumes of dreampop drift. [Mar 2026, p.60]

His music, which radiates humour, tenderness, frustration and audacity, remains seductively mysterious. [Dec 2018, p.54]

The duo fashion a collection of bright funny and often extremely beautiful songs that bristle with invention. [Aug 2010, p.58]

The album is warm and lush, mixed and engineered by David Darlington, who has worked with Eddie Pamieri and Wayne Shorter. It’s a different side of The Arkestra in a convincing, throwback fashion – to a time when new jazz albums came fast and each was an event. [Nov 2022, p.68]

Heart’s Ease picks up directly from where Lodestar left off. The lightness of touch of that earlier album, the delicate and sparse instrumental backing, so unobtrusive it enables rather than dominates, and her knack of filleting songs down to their bony essence, are all elements Collins pursues further here. [Aug 2020, p.52]

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]

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

While rock fans may be disappointed by Yo La Tengo's fleeting venture into playful jazz, the group continue to produce music that's full of gesture and emotional intensity. [#231, p.73]

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

Such unashamed prettiness in a production is rare, and it's rarer still to achieve this without sliding into a quagmire of tweeness or an insufferable knowing smugness. [#252, p.62]

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]

On their sharply delivered follow-up, they delve into darker realms of the genre utilising the combination of abrasive though sparsely used guitars and dub inflections to exhibit something similar to This Heat, or maybe even present day British noise rock collective Gnod. [Jun 2019, p.65]

While ultimately not as inventive as some of Child’s earlier outings, Crash Recoil is nevertheless an urgent, kinetic techno record. [Apr 2023, p.60]

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]

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]

Boss, Magik Markers' most straightforward set of rock songs, is still rife with a liberating freedom. [Oct 2007, p.62]

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]

The Patience is a little less introverted [than 2021's Elephant In The Room], looking beyond the shutters of lockdown, and feels like Jenkins is maturing into an artist who is aware of how his frustrations need to breathe, wait (hence the title) and take time to coalesce. It’s his best music since his early mixtapes, and certainly his best official album since 2018’s remarkable Pieces Of A Man. [Sep 2023, p.57]

In terms of idiosyncratic yet thoroughly danceable electronic music, Cunningham remains nearly peerless. [Nov 2023, p.46]

It’s a much rougher around the edges effort than 2019’s GREY Area, but it works because Simz is an alum of the pirate radio days; this is her forte. Sonically it’s a dream. [Jul 2020, p.59]

Horse Lords music has never been untidy, but this LP’s seven tracks evince a hyper-focused precision. Even when they flirt with entropy during the last two minutes of “May Brigade”, the transition from rhythmic grid to textural layering is immaculately executed. ... This may not lead the people to call for Comradely Objects rather than Ed Sheeran or (name your preferred chart topper here) but it’ll do the job just fine the next time you need some new minimalist jams for a highway drive. [Nov 2022, p.62]

Sounds as if it could have been recorded in the city 50 years ago with a hotshot producer like Bones Howe or Curt Boettcher at the helm. ... “If You Don’t Know Now, You Never Will” might be the best example of this delicate balance, with the track “Fools” being the second; even though that song sometimes leans into mid-1970s schlock territory best left to Boz Scaggs or Andrew Gold. [Jun 2019, p.65]

Limned in choirs, organs and brass, the languorous “Snow Is Falling In Manhattan” flips dolour into something magical, and transcendent. Strip away that prairie pedal steel and loosen the seams, and “Darkness And Cold” would be the kind of standard Leonard Cohen might test drive, were he still with us. [Aug 2019, p.59]

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]

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 mood is always unsettled and unsettling, either furious or fragile. [#258, p.67]

Listening to Sarah Davachi's newest album in the scorching heat wave outdoors, the world slows to an ominous crawl. As the sombre organ notes take hold, a bird with a worm wiggling in its beak becomes a dark omen. Branches move ominously with the slight breeze, filtering brief flashes of sunlight. Every little detail gathers unbearable weight, falling deeper into a hypnotic abyss. [Oct 2024, p.50]

Viewfinder may end on a questioning note, but its music is warm and expansive, the sound of an inspired composer coming into the light. [Oct 2024, p.49]

Tender without being overly sentimental, this is music with real feeling. [Dec 2018, p.59]

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]

While lightness and a wondrous sense of possibility colour the album, there’s also depth. Every track is made of layers of glimmering melodies that collide in dissonance and fade away in consonance. [Aug 2022, p.58]

A band aware of where they’ve been but also reconnected and plotting a future. [Nov 2023, p.46]

Crackle and hiss are still in evidence, but the effect is toned down, and less suggestive of sonic patina than of the hostile climate of a world far removed from the languid, sun-dappled pools and rolling vistas suggested by 2005's The Campfire Headphase. [Jul 2013, 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]

The diversity of the record, it’s ability to flow from gnarly jazz to doomy funk of to peachily perfect quiet storm pop like “Conmigo”, never feels forced; and there’s a new wisdom and wonder to Muldrow’s voice that leaves things suggestive more than doctrinaire, open rather than sealed, playful rather than penetrative. Superb. [Dec 2018, p.63]

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

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]

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]

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

Each artist has taken her songs on their own terms, with out grandstanding, and this approach has yielded some inspired performances. [Jul 2015, p.46]

It's the multilingual, mulch-direcctional, half sung, half spoken vocals that really make The Visitor though. [Jul 2013, p.66]

Clamber aboard and settle in for a very sweet ride. [Jul 2011, p.55]

With Exai they've created a work which reveals renewed faith in their own identity and which should act as compass in years to come. [Mar 2013, p.57]

LEGACY! LEGACY! is just as much a celebration of Chicago musical talent. ... It also demonstrates Woods’s vast talent as singer and songwriter. [Apr 2019, p.69]

It feels like a resumption of a music that has been going on uninterrupted, in private, like it was music playing itself forever. [Jul 2015, p.48]

A whole album of these bolts would be nuts, in a good way. [Jul 2013, p.66]

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]

It’s no radical departure, but Gamble nonetheless conjures a new and unsettling sense of richness from differently focused materials. [Oct 2017, p.52]

Bright, booming and unhinged in its musical complexity, Big Mama is electronic music pushed to its most futuristic and utopian possibilities. [Apr 2026, p.58]

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]

On The Comeback Kid Marnie Stern has returned bolder, brighter and stranger than ever, an artist in complete command of her idiom. [Nov 2023, p.51]

An impeccably crafted sonic exploration of environmental destruction and renewal, whose haunting soundscapes evoke the textures of fire and ash. Many tracks work with rhythmic, noise shaping filters, lending a throbbing, breathing, convulsive quality. [May 2025, p.66]

Again and again the same transition is repeated, as the album slips between the utopian and the real. [Jul 2015, p.49]

Largely Chewed Corners has the sound of an artist at complete ease with a vocabulary built over 20 years and its parameters. [Jul 2013, p.67]

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

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

It moves with a tighter, more mechanistic gait than 2012's similarly relentless Sagittarian Domain, but it's no less transfixing. [Nov 2014, p.72]

Listened in sequence, the nine cuts are like chapters of a hike through a black pine forest, where the air is sharp and time stands still. A sense of foreboding makes way for desolation, ultimately unearthing liminal pockets of awe. [Dec 2023, p.52]

Accompanied by dohool drum, Heydarian plays with harsh and montane clarity; motif and pattern emerge within a matrix of rapidly and continuously strummed chords, giving the six tracks a drone-carved, severe beauty. [May 2025, p.66]

So many groups enthused by punk's initial promise have done little more than dance around in its corpse. Sleaford Mods have managed to animate its ghost. [Jul 2015, p.52]

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]

The focus is on the uniqueness of their music (check out the Deep Purple inspired organ solo on “Forest Dweller”) which infuses progressive song structures with foundational black metal’s penchant for folk melodies and historical narratives. [Jul 2023, p.62]

Wet Tuna always sound as if they’re trying to escape the constraints of product and profit. “Disco Bev” is delightfully sour and affectionate, “Sacagawea” more expansive and produced sounding, but it all hangs together brilliantly, even as it falls (dis)gracefully apart. [Oct 2019, p.52]

This new set sees them nailing their sound to tighter structures a little, but there’s still that delicious ill-discipline at work throughout. [Apr 2020, p.56]

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]

The album cuts across a plethora of genres, refusing to be static. “La Vacanza” and “Sublime” completely submerge you into this dream state, slowing down, giving a reprieve from the increasing intensity. [Sep 2023, p.56]

The results are at times brazenly brilliant. [Mar 2013, p.65]

Oddisee is a hyper-eloquent, charismatic rapper, and this album is buoyed with lyrical wit and lush instrumentation. [Jul 2015, p.57]

Iconoclasts finds von Hausswolff at her most unabashedly accessible and soulful. [Jan/Feb 2026, p.86]

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

Avalon Emerson & The Charm will find favour with anyone into Cocteau Twins, dreamy bedroom synthpop and anything Balearic. “Entombed In Ice” feels nostalgic but fresh, Emerson’s vocals floating effortlessly overhead. [Jul 2023, p.63]

It may look wildly out of control but closer inspection reveals the symmetry and order that supported the garden’s historical design. [Nov 2017, p.53]

Whether K Bay is progressive rock or not, White hooks you in with his big warm voice and big tunes, and then goes weird on you in such a strong way that he can’t really be asked to leave. [Aug 2021, p.55]

The album is imbued with the expectant, febrile energy that comes with having forged ahead into unknown spaces with out the means or desire to backpedal. [Jul 2015, p.58]

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

Where as The Notwist traffic in mellow tempos and beautifully seamless surfaces, Dose and Jel conjure all manner of conniption ta[s and noise. [Jul 2011, p.62]

Like all the music collected on Off The Record, "Lake Shore Drive Five" serves as a testament to McCraven and his band's ability to make improvisation sound focused and intentional, even as they take us on an unexpected journey. [Jan/Feb 2026, p.88]

The result is an enriched soundworld, more ambitious than her much discussed debut, Tragedy. [Aug 2013, p.53]