These themes of anguish are not so much bleak as moving, for he always finds a way to inject his wry observations into the mix. [Feb 2008, p.54]

The tracklisting is divided between acknowledged classics and ephemera. There are extended remixes, demos and live tracks, but only a couple of genuinely illuminating items, and more often in theory than practice. [Nov 2018, p.72]

Nothing has afforded him unlimited space to recalibrate after a period of upheaval and loss. [Nov 2015, p.45]

It’s all well played and lusciously presented, and if you’re meditating to the album, little here will disrupt your vibe. [Jan/Feb 2024, p.77]

Even when he's calling all the shots and playing most of the instruments himself, Turner seems to stay in the background. For the most part, his strategy works. [Nov 2013, p.62]

These are elements that need time to present themselves, on an album that requires a retreat inward. It’s the kind of mindquietening escape. [Oct 2018, p.55]

It's impressive on the first few listens, it grows irritating with repeat play. [Apr 2011, p.57]

The new, mature De La means traditional pop over brash artistry, religion over irony, and conformity over the extraordinary. [#215, p.59]

Continues along lines that Stereolab have been laying down since the late 1990s: motorik drumming and a swish of keyboards tarversing a linear landscape, with the emphasis on Sadier's laconic, dewy vocals. [#239, p.65]

There's a sparse but fluid lyricism to Chasny's tumbling, post-Takoma guitar style. [Feb 2011, p.56]

Where the album works best is in the loose, mesmerising fluency of tracks where such odd structures loses its slight air of gimmickry. [Sep 2014, p.64]

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

His unfocused ire dominates every inch of space. It's frustrating because the best tracks here deftly whirl together seemingly disparate styles. [Dec 2012, p.61]

As with all Venetian Snares records, it can feel a bit of an endurance test, every possible permutation of kick, snare and hat cycled through in a breakneck half-hour until the listener is battered into submission. But Lanois and Funk elevate each other’s sound, bringing a certain unlikely prettiness to the album’s general mood of freneticism. [Jun 2018, p.64]

Songs are short with a pop-punk punchiness. “Defendants” could be a relationship song encoded in the to and fro language of a courtroom and features a breezy guitar solo, as do several tracks that follow. [Dec 2024, p.47]

Where French multi-instrumentalist Cécile Schott gained attention with her reinvention of the viola da gamba as a rhythmic instrument on 2015’s enchanting Captain Of None, this album is more ambient and interior. [Jun 2021, p.63]

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]

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]

I miss the grit and grain of Skelton’s unique string sounds, but he still gets a brightness in his melancholy, often via a bristling major chord. [Oct 2020, p.61 ]

While 2016’s Painting With was a jumble of interesting ideas lacking direction, Time Skiffs is the opposite: a paint by numbers indie pop affair completed using a quirky palette. While paring down to a more focused format is welcome, the music is suffocated by anachronisms, both within AC’s own and wider pop contexts. [Feb 2022, p.46]

His maniacal energy is infectious. [Nov 2008, p.77]

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

The inconsistency here might grate but if you focus on Freddie’s spellbinding raps the story is cohesive and fearless. [Jun 2017, p.77]

That this is Spiritualized's most vital and compelling set for a decade suggests that his muse has been galvinised by his near death experience. [May 2008, 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]

Deprived of fuzzy riffs, Domenic Palermo’s voice floats naked in a woolly, gentle sound, simultaneously confessing and recollecting. But from there on, they shift into higher gear, injecting doses of anxiety into colourful progressive dream pop and shoegaze bites. [Dec 2020, p.62]

It's only when that rhythm programming is either stripped right back or broken apart that you get a sense of overabundant glee in playing with the blurts and splurts of the synth timbres, and this feels like more than the generic, albeit impeccably executed IDM record that the title rightly suggests. [Mar 2016, p.53]

Combining live ensemble performances by an 11-piece instrumental group, string quartet and four vocalists, with brief AutoTuned solo interludes, this is above all, a collective music. [Sep 2023, p.60]

Loose Talk is an engaging listen. [May 2025, p.52]

A cheeky and addictive listen. [Oct 2025, p.64]

The First Family isn't for Sly & The Family Stone beginners, but it gives aficionados a fascinating glimpse of their origin story. [Oct 2025, p.72]

The project ultimately feels a little vague and indulgent. Though the sounds of plastic on offer are eclectic and the compositions joyous, Matmos seem to acknowledge climate change as a throwaway aside in favour of an avant garde remaking of physical theatre. [Mar 2019, p.55]

Challenge Me Foolish reveals just how influential he was and continues to be. [May 2018, p.62]

Kudos to both director and music supervisor for thinking outside the source music box. [Jun 2011, p.47]

A surprisingly engrossing side project. [Feb 2013, p.58]

While Ekoplekz's Brit-hauntoscopy might easily have started to wear thin by now, Unfidelity's precision and diversity has plenty to offer. [Mar 2014, p.65]

The Earth Is Blue has a glorious, spacey innocence that inspires affection. [#253, p.57]

Vol 1 collects the same tracks as the bonus disc from 2002's Luxe Reduxe reissue.... It's a little bizarre. [Aug 2015, p.67]

Nostalgialator is exhilarating, eschewing rhetorical rap fury in favour of a satirical masqued ball of capitalist obsessions. [#246, p.52]

Much of it is subtly melancholic, like a Broadway medley received in a dream. [#218, p.71]

It's hardly an essential record; more a reminder of past possibilities, really, than something that points toward the future. [Jul 2012, p.60]

[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]

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]

The sounds can seem a bit insubstantial when compared to his earlier work, like 2018’s Soil, where serpent angled to suffocate the listener in raw emotion. But he eventually finds a nice groove that yields rewards. [Mar 2024, p.59]

Come Around sees Carla dal Forno’s songwriting taking new shapes and routes, allowing her to pour her cratedigging folk knowledge (showcased monthly in her NTS show) into these open and confident songs. [Dec 2022, p.54]

Pared back and abrasive, the music is somewhat diffuse compared to Schofield’s earlier records. The hard edges of its rhythms are scattered, the sound so foggy it’s hard to hear. [Jul 2018, p.46]

Ripatti employs a panoply of dynamic breaks and styles without sticking to anything for too long. The results are both claustrophobic and entertaining. [Aug 2022, p.48]

Micachu & the Shapes have yet to blunt their edge. [Jul 2012, p.60]

M:FANS sounds way too much of its moment: it sounds just how you expect right now to sound. Worse, maybe: it actually sounds like a few years back. [Jan 2016, p.84]

With the Jicks now sharing the spotlight, sees Malkmus's familiar tangled lyricism and meandering tendencies offset by some tremendous group performances. [Mar 2008, p.57]

Moore runs the risk of seeming absorbed in some kind of midlife episode, but he gets away with it by deploying punk spunk as just one of an arsenal of countercultural referents rather than as a means to regain or revisit his youth. [Mar 2013, p.50]

Down there, his most accessible work outside the confines of Animal Collective, revels in that upside-down gravity. [Nov 2010, p.61]

Those expecting further dubwize excursions from this duo may be disappointed by their venture into the lounge rather than the yard. Unfair, really, as Thievery Corporation have embodied eclecticism from their beginnings, and the bass booms as sweetly as on any of their previous efforts. [#200, p.83]

It may lack subtlety but it sounds incredibly vital. [#229, p.68]

Though it’s no concept album, eight of the 12 tracks address either social issues or spiritual solutions. There’s the odd Prince bit of obscure esoterica but mostly it’s direct and effective. ... Welcome 2 America is vital enough to render such matters moot. it’s the sound of Prince truly not giving a damn and that should be edge enough for anybody. [Sep 2021, p.70]

Byrne's Who Is The Sky? has a similar foundation of strong songwriting, but with bigger production and instrumentation. [Oct 2025, p.50]

The mainstreaming of yoga, mindfulness and other pursuits of spiritual enrichment in our digitally distracted, permanently anxious modern reality might have tipped the balance, as Laraaji pulls in listeners who aren’t necessarily collectors of forgotten, strange or otherwise outsider music. [Nov 2017, p.58]

Exactly how delicately balanced their chemistry together is becomes apparent on the two solo albums that round out this three disc set. Both are decent in their own right but pale in comparison to the group disc. [Jul 2018, p.62]

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

There is a distinct lack of filler (as usual) but the best of the 11 songs is “Dead Weight”, which adopts a sideways crawl like a hermit crab in hobnail boots as our anti-hero tears herself to pieces and hurls them at the feet of an admirer. [Jul 2021, p.67]

The expanded bag of references and methods that he draws from on The Rarity Of Experience indicates that Forsyth and company aren't settling for what they know they can do, but using it as a starting point to figure out where to go next. [Feb 2016, p.50]

It sometimes seems too restrained, too polite. [Dec 2011, p.62]

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]

Bonnie Prince Billy shows no sign of slowing down his slowness, despite, or perhaps because of, the misery. [Nov 2011, p.56]

Think of Young Prayer as the demos deemed too spectral, too elusive, to be revisited for [Brian] Wilson's new take on Smile. [#249, p.61]

Even without Gobert's cinematographic backdrop Simon Werner A Disparu stands as a solid instrumental album in its own right. [Apr 2011, p.63]

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]

Craft and primitivism are often presented as opposites, but here they complement each other so completely that you couldn’t have one without the other. [Mar 2018, p.55]

When it works, it’s pretty thrilling--as on their version of Joe Henderson’s “Earth”. Whether bassist Domenico Angarano will ever forgive himself for fluffing the galaxy-unlocking riff at the start of Alice Coltrane’s “Journey In Satchidananda”, however, is between him and the Creator. [Dec 2018, p.63]

What makes Transmission Suite work beyond its sounds is the belief Massey and Barker still have in the 808 project, the push all their music has of maintaining the future both as ultimate aim and ultimate source of anxiety. 808 State’s music has lost none of its foreboding, finesse and power. Sit deep within and enjoy. [Dec 2019, p.44]

It would be very hard to see Y In Dub as completing the project of taking dub into white punk, but taken on their own, separate terms these tracks are deep and engrossing explorations of a set of possibilities few others have dabbled with. [Nov 2021, p.57]

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]

It's so sweet and monotonous they should try [naming the album] something instead like Strawberry Ice Cream. [Jul 2012, p.62]

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]

At her best she lives up to the statement of intent on “This Sound” where her style is pitched as physical, literal but metaphysical, mystical and medicinal. ... But by the time she implores us to “do yourself a favour and eat some shrooms”, she sounds dangerously like just another hippy with too much faith in her medicine. [Jun 2021, p.

A few tracks don’t work, like “Murdergram Deux” where he fast raps alongside Eminem in a staccato bore. While LL can still flow, he doesn’t find pockets of rhythm with the same ease he once did. But there is magic. [Nov 2024, p.56]

Dance album of this level of consistent quality are rare. Yet ultimately, no groove in this album particularly reach out and little new, different or memorable is offered for the imagination. [Oct 2011, p.65]

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]

The fact that Thug's voice can express plaintive, mournful sorrow is perhaps the most surprising aspect of this tape, even among all the astonishing vocal pirouettes and cries. [Apr 2016, p.64]

Callahan is a true original. [#255, p.65]

Quite aside from the technical brilliance of its execution, Doubled Exposure is a weird boogie album of immense humanity and warmth, driven to a great extent by Shuford's irrepressible charisma. [Mar 2014, p.63]

There's more here than nostalgia, with a range of styles and influences incorporated into Cabic's deceptively direct arrangements, and an afterglow that's testament to his talents. [#269, p.53]

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]

This is the sort of shtick that the band have been pulling for over two decades, and it's as earnest and laudable as ever. ... Though, the band could also do with a sonic rehaul. [Oct 2017, p.53]

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

There's a handful of new material, all displaying superb arranger's skill. His unusual voice has improved too, broadening and mellowing from that nervous tenor of old. [May 2013, p.58]

The five tracks penned and played on by PJ Harvey... reverberate with all the dark, elastic abrasion of PJ's best work. [#248, p.66]

There are arrangements within this album that compel due to the precision and control exerted over the sound design. Lopatin creates earworm upon earworm that seem to spiral into each other. As always, however, it seems as though he is holding back – I wish he would give in more to the stupidity teased at the beginning of “Plastic Antique”, where he uses a delayed, plodding synth to introduce the track. This reticence permeates the release, adding a layer of alienation. [Oct 2023, p.50]

An engaging, unpredictable album of Tortoise-like vibraphones, guitars, minimalist repetitions, wry syncopations, occasional duff notes and subtly daubed electronics. [#228, p.69]

A feast of buried treasure, a flickerframe parade which continually offers up magical fragments of sound, revelatory and transitory in equal measure. [#230, p.46]

It's fair to say that not much new ground is broken here, but it's remarkable how endearing their blend of chugging underground pop and frail ragas still sounds. [#210, p.66]

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

It’s tempting to call these outtakes but their vision is sharp and purposeful, sustained by a consistently monolithic interplay and helped by Steve Albini’s signature traits. It all makes Pyroclasts one of Sunn O)))’s heaviest and most penetrating albums. [Dec 2019, p.55]

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]

The group's debut for Thurston Moore's imprint witnesses the coagulation of the four-piece into something more identifiable as an honest-to-badness rock group. [Nov 2008, p.68]

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]

The first few listens don’t disclose the full complexities of Simon’s work – it remains semi-horizontal and distant, like a tired shrug. But after several repeats, the circular motifs begin to, if not get under the skin, then at least claw at it a bit. [Mar 2018, p.44]

At 31 minutes it’s a perfectly timed drift towards increasingly heatsick, woozy instrumental hiphop. [Jun 2018, p.67]