PC Music Volume 1 resembles the soundtrack to a posh private schooler's teen sleepover--glossy, giddy, sparkly and shallow. [Aug 2015, p.55]

This trio are rarely an ecstatic proposition, preferring the slow burn to the white flame, but in truth there's little heat here at all. [Aug 2015, p.54]

Risveglio seems keen to be accepted on its own terms rather than a simple curio. This it warrants, and rewards patient listening.

The new songs continue to hold the line narrative of the last few Yo La Tengo records without adding much new. But at moments when the performance is so assured, the hairs stand up and you're reminded anew of how the group got you to care. [Aug 2015, p.56]

His songs are still gauzy and intangible, the breathy vocals offering lyrical wisps that only hint at turbulent emotions. [Aug 2015, p.58]

At heart they're still most comfortable plying scruffy barstool romanticism woven from the same plaid as contemporaries The Replacements and Dinosaur Jr. [Aug 2015, p.58]

The set concentrates on one style and tends to accentuate the crossover aspects of its kinship with house and techno. [Aug 2015, p.55]

A range of compositional strategies are succinctly worked through, pivots in structural dynamics executed with an often startling sharpness. [Aug 2015, p.52]

The methods of its creation are the most interesting thing about Melk En Honing, but the music has impact and staying power. [Aug 2015, p.48]

[Bachman] offers a pretty good idea of where he's coming from. If it sometimes feels like the stream of America pimitivist fingerpicking artists is neverending, Bachman does at least apply his digits to a variety of instruments. [May 2015, p.56]

If anything, it sounds over-finessed at times, the slick mixing resisting the rawness and density that is the album's most vital quality--the duo is at their best when the few fragments of eclectic prettiness get swamped in cacophony. [May 2015, p.58]

Much thought has gone into the arrangements and programming, and that provides surprises as well as variety, but the consistent bottom line is respect for the songs, which is surely the best way to pay tribute to Collins herself. [May 2015, p.52]

Where the 1982 take was hollow and grating, the gaps and silences gradually roaring with accumulating noise, this version is euphoric and transparent. [Jun 2014, p.42]

Boosie's attempts to remain commercially relevant in today's rap climate, however, makes the album a diluted draught of medicine and mediocre chart fodder. [Jul 2015, p.57]

Their latest effort, All Tense Now Lax, impresses both for the nuances of its industrial abstractions as well as how vigorously it avoids recognisable styles. [Jul 2015, p.48]

Sonnet isn't as compelling as Hymnal, with its fine balance between abstraction and form, but it's an illustration of Meluch's abilities as a skilled purveyor of rural psychedelia. [Jun 2015, p.52]

Sauna Youth are a tight unit, their constituent parts meshing into a formidable wall of sound, but it might be an idea to lose a member or two, subtract an element and make space for uncertainty. [Jun 2015, p.52]

His voice is better suited to confiding, but it's slapped on top rather than properly featured, and this seems symptomatic of the muddy arranging, But the aim is to swagger and excite, and the group's ragged fervour is not in doubt. [Jun 2015, p.50]

Toure's tone is richly sonorous, his vocal strength such that he actually buttresses and strengthens the tracks... It's a great shame that the sound quality falters on the later tracks. [Jul 2015, p.58]

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]

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

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]

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

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]

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]

Everyone Was A Bird is a lot more than a pictorial guide set to music. [Jun 2015, p.46]

Baird's mixture of history-steeped elements keeps her songs from being tethered to any given time period, including the present, which makes them apt vehicles for words about relationships fraught with uncertainty. [Jun 2015, p.42]

An album whose sustained brilliance reveals both an artist liberated from the need to try too hard, and finally armed with more to express than sarcastic teenage angst. [Jun 2015, p.55]

They're indubitably human this time around. [Jun 2015, p.54]

Sol Invictus is a looser, more relaxed record than its predecessors, occasionally dropping into a lounge ballad mode that suits Patton's vocals. [Jun 2015, p.52]

His latest disc is only occasionally compelling. [Jun 2015, p.50]

The album's so-called simple songs might be ambiguous enough to leave you wondering what they're about, even as you're thinking that they were written just for you. [Jun 2015, p.49]

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

The atmosphere is underwrought, miserable, monochrome. [Jun 2015, p.46]

The Clearing isn't a work of artfully suspended melancholy which leaves the listener wanting and wondering00it gestures ahead toward comfort and resolution. [Jun 2015, p.48]

Cave and Ellis have created a brave and fittingly incongruous score. As a standalone album, however, it doesn't walk so tall. [Jun 2015, p.45]

Out of a dangerous, pitfall-laden area of song, she makes a variety of riches. [Jun 2015, p.48]

Dean McPhee's guitar sound is both richly textured and strikingly direct. [Apr 2015, p.63]

His drumming combines an organic sense of living pulse, but preserves a precision and sparseness that pulls it back to the rock-tick of motorik. [Apr 2015, p.63]

Most of Infinity Machines' 110 minutes consists of lengthy, evolving jams build upon elephant's heartbeats bass beats overlaid by slowly building washes or jabbing trills of analogue synth, brain-sucking white noise and wailing saxophone. The later adds greatly to the miasmic atmospheres. [Apr 2015, p.56]

anyone who buys this with the idea of getting significantly reworked material will be disappointed. [May 2015, p.63]

One has to look back to the golden age of the West African guitar bands to find this level of complexity executed with such brazen confidence and ability. [May 2015, p.59]

Summoning Suns is too derivative to be a major work, but it shows promise. [Mar 2015, p.46]

This is the first music that feels genuinely post-referendum. [Jan 2015, p.68]

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]

Over melodic, it sounds like it was made by a TV composer working to a brief for a rave episode. [Apr 2015, p.65]

On tracks with genuine maverick talents like E-40, his fundamental lack of character appears (or disappears) in sharp relief. [Apr 2015, p.65]

The Wire agenda stays constant in a changing world. [Apr 2015, p.63]

In Black & Gold has a poise, purpose and maturity not heard before. [Apr 2015, p.63]

Its feel is psychedelic but strong. [Apr 2015, p.60]

The album exhibits two players of formidable range and ability. [Apr 2015, p.60]

Fantasy Empire stands out from run of the mill noise rock because it captures not only the ferocity of the playing, but also the fecundity of sharp and serious ideas that lesser acts cannot match. [Apr 2015, p.58]

While the high energy interplay between the players remains solid, their proto-punk edginess is less pronounced. [Apr 2015, p.54]

With its warm timbres and cushioning delays, sonically Captain Of None is Colleen's most approachable record yet. [Apr 2015, p.52]

Complex puzzles for nimble feet to crack, custom-built for dancing. [Apr 2015, p.52]

IDLSIDGO is monumental in its willingness to just be a great rap album. [May 2015, p.59]

A series of hermetic, drifting analogue tracks sprawling over eight sides of vinyl. The occasional bizarre touches of the more conventional numbers show his techniques best. [May 2015, p.59]

The transitions are typically brusque, though a few feel unsatisfying, creating drops in tension. [May 2015, p.58]

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

The second CD is noisier at times, and more surprising overall, introducing new instruments to powerful effect. [May 2015, p.53]

Lamar offers a commitment to effect change through the work itself. Whether or not that's realistic ideal the delivery is so powerful it's hard not to get caught up in the rapture. [May 2015, p.50]

The ten laptop compositions of Platform are brilliant, thrilling articulations of many of her ideas. [May 2015, p.50]

Perhaps their most forceful to date. [May 2015, p.49]

Fay aficionados may be unsettled that our man seems to have been kidnapped by aliens and reprogrammed as a frail new age gospel singer. Eccentricity is kept to a minimum, as thin songwriting is padded out by repetitive chanting of a chorus's final line. [May 2015, p.49]

At times it takes an effort to differentiate Hive1 from many other of the gentle experimental works involving modular synthesizers across the decades, despite its unique origins. But there are subtle--and again, intensive--surprises scattered throughout, both in sounds and forms. [May 2015, p.47]

The clunkier, funkier patterns mapped out here have something proufound to say about the relationship between us and our technological world, about where our dancing and moving bodies fit in among the conurbations and databanks of our lives. [Apr 2015, p.57]

It's a series of blows that fail to connect.... Taken on its own terms, divorced from the genre to which it owes its existence The Ark Work's dogged pursuit of incongruous juxtaposition can be hugely entertaining. [Apr 2015, p.53]

Somehow unconvincing, it's like beach bar escapism spliced with an incidental tune from the TV comedy show The Mighty Boosh. [Mar 2015, p.60]

With Primrose Green, Walker is in a larger collective setting and it works in his favour. A mixed bag of Chicago musicians concoct a pleasant, hazy feel to the proceedings. [Mar 2015, p.54]

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]

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

It's a fair reminder that innovation in hiphop shouldn't be judged by the standards of less journalistic musical forms. [Mar 2015, p.59]

The tempo is seldom above a crawl, and Toure's guitar weaves a crackling bed of thorns that even the typically crystalline over-production can't completely smooth out. [Mar 2015, p.59]

Prekop's approach to synth composition is refreshingly free from pomposity and self-regard, his ego dissolving amid cascades of fizzing electronic sounds and beatific melody.[Mar 2015, p.56]

Nice enough, and the climax of the title track is truly transportive, but no real departure from previous form. [Mar 2015, p.56]

A self-consciously serious, elaborate, capital R Romantic dramatic statement that pulls no punches, more Greek tragedy than break-up album. [Mar 2015, p.55]

From The Very Depths reinforces the group's reputation as well as showing they are still a force to be reckoned with. [Mar 2015, p.53]

Its stark, frosty textures recall the Metalheadz-influenced feel of Pinch's recent solo work, an aesthetic that occasionally, especially on "Precinct Of Sound," threatens to tip over into sluggish moodiness. At best it's just as deft and cosmically heavy as you'd hope. [Mar 2015, p.52]

In C Mali has a delightfully loose and relaxed feel. [Mar 2015, p.51]

Almond just made one of his best records, completely out of the blue. [Mar 2015, p.49]

With its introversion and focus upon the everyday in both subject matter and imagery, the appeal of Shedding Skin depends partly on your appetite for people watching. [Mar 2015, p.48]

The veneer slides aside to reveal more palpable excitement with the arrival of MCs from the UK grime contingent. [Mar 2015, p.48]

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]

The moody bits are surrounded by so much that is abstract that their affective properties seem a matter of happenstance rather than expression. [Mar 2015, p.46]

It refuses any stylistic centre that might tie together its genre signifiers. [Mar 2015, p.58]

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

While as bracing as ever, this sound is less striking now, and the album sees Psutka creating solid but less remarkable grooves. [Feb 2015, p.56]

So here they are in 2015 with Apex Predator sounding as powerful and uncompromising as their debut. [Feb 2015, p.55]

Lennox is an innovator and a stylist, impossible to accurately imitate or easily dismiss. [Feb 2015, p.50]

Citizen Zombie is not a refusal. Rather, it's a fully plugged in reckoning with the eternal power of now. [Feb 2015, p.49]

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

Lost Themes satisfies more than it irks, and it's unambiguously the most enjoyable creation Carpenter has put his name on in probably 27 years. [Feb 2015, p.44]

With Carter Tutti's canny use of space, it's slick as heck--mainstream, almost. [Feb 2015, p.44]

Wow, does it reward your attention. [Feb 2015, p.54]

Hexadic blurs limes between melodic theory and personal spiritual working, presenting an alchemy of number as a system of creative liberation. [Feb 2015, p.52]

Although the rest of the songs vary in sugar content and heart rate, the most potent dose of hyper-colour twee may be "Learning To Relax," which sounds like Yacht remixing The Polyphonic Spree for an iPhone advertisement aimed at Junior High students. [Feb 2015, p.44]

Perhaps this recording isn't the best way to experience it, then, but, it whets the appetite for an UK performance scheduled for early 2015. [Jan 2015, p.75]

A hushed treasure. [Jan 2015, p.71]