The mirth on offer here is thin fare, for the most part. [May 2014, p.63]

Becs is something of a return, then, but equally it demonstrates that the guitarist's approach to pop composition has developed considerably over the past 13 years. [May 2014, p.83]

Frost's most fully realised work to date. [May 2014, p.62]

Aside from the odd flurry of inconsequential Afrobeat-inflected guitar, the style of Someday World is middlebrow session fare. [May 2014, p.61]

Would their punk model work for a Stravinsky cover, with its unique challenges? The answer given by this recording is a resounding yes. [May 2014, p.58]

Da Mind of Traxman Vol 2's density feels cryptic, a series of questions posed to listeners and the floor. [Jun 2014, p.57]

Without a doubt these are good songs, and Osborne's vocal is always ear grabbing. But I'd love to hear the full band versions they deserve. [Jun 2014, p.55]

What is most striking about Why Do The Heathen Rage?, Which reworks Black metal songs as electro, house and techno, is how intelligently respectful it is. [Jun 2014, p.55]

This album is not afraid of discord or rhythmic slippage, but it's delivered with an assurance that his experience and discography allows. [Jun 2014, p.51]

A sense of cluelessness pervades these songs, as though constructed without considering why or for whom they were intended. [Jun 2014, p.51]

Somehow the music manages to be deeply exotic and familiar at the same time. [Jun 2014, p.50]

What unites them is the boldness of the material and their treatment of it. [Jun 2014, p.48]

Electric Brick Wall isn't as groove based as the previous album, but it's an even more complex, discomfiting listen in many respects. [Jun 2014, p.48]

[The album] is so blatantly, almost self-consciously pleasurable it should come, like an insalubrious takeaway, with heavy duty napkins. [Apr 2014, p.65]

It isn't always the role of political music to come up with solutions. But nothing could be more urgent than the questions SLeaford Mods pose. [Apr 2014, p.58]

This one hits the mark more confidently, with all the earthiness she once brought as foil to John Martyn's aerier levitations. [Apr 2014, p.57]

I Shall Die Here's meeting of stark electronic textures and rhythms with monstrous guitars evokes Godflesh's Pure. [Apr 2014, p.63]

Minimal Rock N Roll is at its best when hinting at former glories. [Apr 2014, p.63]

The compositions recorded by Matt Carlson and Jonathan Sielaff's synth and reeds duo have a sense a purpose often lacking in the hit and miss output of today's numerous modular operators. [Apr 2014, p.63]

Instead of disappearing amid the back stories and deep cuts, the hefty additional content and context only acts as so many glittering foils for the enduring, singular force of their crowning achievement, the album itself. [Apr 2014, p.70]

Z-Machines' output is lifted above the realm of gimmick by music producer Kenjiro Matsuo gathering a selection of artists to compose for them. [Apr 2014, p.62]

The music tends to come up short of its lofty goals, a fact made more frustrating in the moments that prove that they are capable. [Apr 2014, p.60]

There's a generous, sloppy fistful of day-glo power-pop in these songs. [Apr 2014, p.52]

As jazz-inflected triphop goes, it's not even anywhere near as inventive or risky as DJ Spooky's Optometry sounded back in 2002. [Mar 2014, p.60]

A sparkling set that traces a number of lines through Haiti's musical patrimony. [Mar 2014, p.66]

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]

Hunn achieves an impressive balance between stylistic coherency and jazzy beat maximalism--it's never really as light or as heavy as it first seems--that other producers of his ilk struggle to pull off. [Mar 2014, p.65]

This EP essays six bitter flavours of magic and loss, with sentiments which might be unbearable were it not for their unalloyed beauty. [Mar 2014, p.63]

This new collaboration with Christian Beaulieu isn't quite as flamboyant as previous projects, but its an energising jolt all the same. [Mar 2014, p.63]

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]

Mess is more immediate than the past couple of albums, and in context, more baffling. [Mar 2014, p.63]

Occasionally the album misfires. [Mar 2014, p.59]

The music here is beautiful and involving enough to stand up just fine by itself. [Mar 2014, p.59]

The song structures have clearly absorbed a fair amount from EDM, but the formula of walloping percussion and synthesizers purloined from Depeche Mode's and New Order's darker moments, juxtaposed with lyrics that have the rung of obscure slogans, remains in place. [Mar 2014, p.58]

If Boy falters, it's toward the end, where out of three softer focused tracks, only "Danceland" charms its way into the memory. [Mar 2014, p.53]

This album certainly achieves a kind of elaborated decorative wonkiness, but one wonders, as with Creed's paintings, what there is to return to after the novelty's worn off. [Mar 2014, p.52]

Satisfying proof that pop remain pop however thoroughly digested. [Feb 2014, p.54]

It is a record suited to headphone listening, but demands too much visceral engagement to be truly ambient. [Feb 2014, p.51]

Blank Project sounds like an empowered foundation stone for her next steps. [Feb 2014, p.44]

If there's one negative to this compilation m it's that Ghetto house is best heard in a fast and furious mix where the one trick pony tracks don't wear out their welcome and the salty language loses all meaning and becomes nothing by pure sound at high speed. Here, however, the focus is on individual tracks with no mixing. [Jan 2014, p.75]

The astounding pressure of emotional ambivalence in Herndon's 2012 debut Movement--what belonged where? with whose porous body should the listener identify?--is half lost on this EP, which feels too sketchy to develop their immanent tension. [Feb 2014, p.56]

It seems an easy listen at first, but the scale is daunting. [Feb 2014, p.53]

McGuire creates a journey that will absorb and transport any listener willing to let its sincere warmth and good wishes into their hearts. [Feb 2014, p.54]

It not so much that her talent has blossomed, more that it has thawed a little, releasing music that edges tantalizingly close to greatness. [Feb 2014, p.50]

For Ulver's three-part collaboration with Sunn))), the mood is equally holy, reverential and mysterious. [Feb 2014, p.52]

Playing it, you're reminded anew of the restlessness and emotional range at the heart of Young's art. [Feb 2014, p.64]

Though there's something inevitably ghoulish about the reception afforded these piano and vocal pieces--released for the first time on vinyl in 2013--it would be perverse to deny that they serve as a curious prologue to Drake the younger's brief but brilliant career. [Feb 2014, p.61]

The P-funk derived style of Dam-Funk us about as perfect a fit for Snoop's supine cool as can be imagined. [Feb 2014, p.57]

The bookending tracks from Ulf Lohmann, "Sicht" and "PCC," play seductively with auras of overloaded guitar and synth, cyclical patterns accruing intensity, but an unfortunate saccharine edge remains. [Feb 2014, p.57]

Guardian Alien's music, which, driven by Greg Fox's questing, cyclical drumming, creates wide and wondrous vistas. [Feb 2014, p.54]

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]

Rival Dealer constitutes Burial's boldest statement to date. [Feb 2014, p.44]

As it is, Have Fun With God is never less than listenable but seldom more than vaguely pleasant. [Feb 2014, p.44]

Ghettoville feels dead, finished, hopeless. If this is, as the publicity hints, an end to the Actress project, then it is a dramatic one. [Feb 2014, p.44]

If music is ever really going to change the world, it's going to need more vigour and vitality than this. [Jan 2014, p.66]

Grassed Inn is both beautifully stupid, and much, much smarter than you think. [Jan 2014, p.63]

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]

Music for Shut-Ins is valuable for the manner in which it acknowledges the true masters while still allowing room for non-canonical influences, expanding rather than replacing or limiting possibilities. [Jan 2014, p.64]

The first part of this milary-concrete triptych is mostly vague interference and Radiophonic Workshop-style wibbling about that towards the end, has developed into discomforting BBC Ceefax music. The middle section is sonically richer... Part three is illbient comedown. [Jun 2013, p.51]

Much of the music here is a return to past form, and a move away from the more polished recent albums. [Dec 2013, p.58]

The thrill of Fetch is in its precision, its Bachian joy in maths. [Dec 2013, p.54]

DeGraw's skill for mixing and matching swatches of sound is unparalleled, but without context it becomes much like choosing colours for your living room. [Dec 2013, p.48]

At nearly two hours long, it can get claustrophobic and anti-exuberant out of these tunes' native club element.... Nonetheless, there's an undeniable freshness.

It's one earthquake/windstorm after another for an hour, possibly the group's best release since 2009's Bag It! [Nov 2013, p.55]

When the beats are sparse he shines, but the album bloats in its middle with too many R&B assisted dramatic gestures and not enough dead eyed and cracked crack music. [Nov 2013, p.66]

Drake has certainly mastered the art of making Drake records. [Nov 2013, p.66]

Meek is doing the one thing he does well and nothing else. [Nov 2013, p.66]

This strained affair makes the party rocking simplicity of 2 Chainz or even LMFAO look absolutely artful. Brown's too smart to make music this dumb effectively. [Nov 2013, p.66]

[He] sticks to the basic formula: modernizations of the sort of proto-trap Memphis riot music that defined his early career... but never transcendent. [Nov 2013, p.66]

2 Chainz moves around the sort of eclectic brat selection that Lil Wayne was devouring in the mid-2000s. [Nov 2013, p.66]

Effervescent retro fun with a core of righteousness. [Nov 2013, p.66]

One can absorb the enthusiasm while feeling somewhat repulsed by the taste. On occasion, it works. [Nov 2013, p.65]

The Pyrrhic pleasures of their Confield-era tracks00all those advanced-topology rhythmic angles--remain in the first half of "tac Lacora," sharpened by being somewhat tamed, pushed into the pulsing exhilaration of the second half. [Nov 2013, p.65]

Although there are still psych-rock moments that recall the strident moves of Quicksilver Messenger Service or Spirit, it's a darker and more straightforward album than 2012's Between The Times And The Tides. [Nov 2013, p.63]

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]

Even more than on past outings, Kirby seems drawn to a sense of disconnect, refusing to let the elements of each track interact with one another. Yet Dead Empires is also rich with experiments and surprises. [Nov 2013, p.60]

Surrender To The Fantasy showcases the latest stage yet of their oddly trad transformation, the unkempt electric savagery of their past domesticated to the point of extinction. [Nov 2013, p.56]

While I'm A Dreamer looks back the best part of a century, sepia cover photo and all, it never simply lapses into pastiche. [Nov 2013, p.54]

Shorn of much crowd noise or banter, it operates more as an alternative greatest hits set.... [It] allows them to take their rightful place as a warm, distinct and proudly independent voice in the rock pantheon. [Nov 2013, p.52]

Oozing Wound frontman Zack Weil has an unhinged screech reminiscent of Destruction's Schmier, symbolising the group's mastery of a kind of primitive thrash with no goal greater than the release of energy. [Nov 2013, p.52]

Colonial patterns makes your ears feel like magnetised tape heads, the music dulled, pockmarked, riven with fissures of noise and age. [Oct 2013, p.58]

Robert Hood's first album as Floorplan is if anything more functional than Marcel Dettmann's offering. [Oct 2013, p.58]

Something about the music's rhythmic flexibility, the paradoxical slippage between half-speed, double-speed and triplet grooves, allows almost anything to be folded in to its matrix without altering its essential character. [Oct 2013, p.57]

In truth, every twist and turn, every tempo change on Siberia is evidence of the group's unabated thirst for adventure. [Oct 2013, p.55]

Though heavier than ever, Jesu shares a bittersweet longing with the best of Mould's oeuvre, a sense of innocence on the cusp of corruption. [Oct 2013, p.55]

The payoff comes about a third of the way in, when the spirit of Foghat makes an unexpected appearance and everything goes boogie. [Oct 2013, p.55]

Guitarists John and Michael Gibbons tar into riffs which, for all their power, articulate a cosmic loneliness, while Isobel Sollenberger intones troubled mantras with the benighted insistence of an unquiet spirit. [Oct 2013, p.55]

What we get is Youngs in troubadour mode, singing over sine waves or accompanying himself on acoustic guitar, [Oct 2013, p.54]

Hardly the stuff of revolution, Still Smiling nevertheless feels comfortable in all of its swollen riches. [Oct 2013, p.54]

This is a spellbinding album by a singular guitarist who combines the dexterity of Paco De Lucia with the hypnotic death-drawl of Bukka White. [Oct 2013, p.51]

The album repeats and reiterates her major concerns--artistic, political--and renders them witty and endearing. [Oct 2013, p.51]

Climactic yet precisely controlled, it's a reminder of The Necks strengths, all of which are on display at different points throughout Open: their astute handling of pacing and momentum, finely honed collective sense of timing, and their shared ability to balance at length a group equilibrium, be it delicate or clamorous in register. [Oct 2013, p.50]

It's simply clean, so the outstanding performances come over strongly. [Oct 2013, p.49]

The R&B tropes are part of a reassuring past, and the half-there vocals don't add enigma so much as leave the music unchallenged and stick in its old ways. [Oct 2013, p.47]

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

[The] precisely arranged layers of keyboards and guitars have as many behind-the-door delights as an advent calendar. [Oct 2013, p.46]

It's Ferraro's best since Far Side Virtual. [Oct 2013, p.46]

Another nuance of Virgins is the pacing. With the exception of a few slightly predictable orchestral driftscapes, Hecker's editing instincts have rarely sounded this restless and razor-sharp. [Oct 2013, p.45]