This is one of the best garage pop sides sine The Chills' own "Brave Words." [Dec 2008, p.70]

It's a rich and layered work that refuses to be easily summed up. [Jan 2013, p.69]

Tobacco’s beats sound like a mescaline trip through a haunted theme park from Scooby Doo, while the Def Jux legend in a different lifetime raps about an eagle snacking on a cat like a churro. Pretty standard stuff really. [Mar 2019, p.65]

Easily Hud-Mo's best work yet. [Aug 2011, p.67]

The fact that Ultimate Care II is also, in its flexible extremes of danceability and post GRM meditation, one of the most purely enjoyable albums I've heard recently. [Feb 2016, p.55]

The entire affair has a bewitching ease, an effortlessness absent from Malkmus’s artistry since the days when he wanted to name his solo debut Swedish Reggae. [Apr 2019, p.58]

These collaborations have been performed live over the past few years and for all its pristine yet textured presentation Gensho succeeds in capturing the dynamics of those live actions. [Apr 2016, p.46]

Most of the pieces suggest parallels with Barnett Newman's paintings--fields of pure, striking colour, impressive in their own way, but requiring a particular angle of looking and mode of thought in order not to be boring. [Jul 2012, p.56]

A collection of slow, moody pieces whose unexceptional nature is made more frustrating by the occasional flashes of inspiration. [#206, p.77]

Overall you sense that the full potential of the encounter is not being realised. [#230, p.61]

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]

The conceptual core of Vessel’s third album is rather ambiguous. Queen Of Golden Dogs follows a loose narrative of self-discovery and transformation and a couple of queer literary and surreal visual art references. ... Musically, Queen Of Golden Dogs is similarly vague and amorphous. [Dec 2018, p.58]

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]

True to her reputation as an uncompromising force, at no point during Edge Of Everything does Temple show any mercy. [May 2019, p.66]

The results are sketches, in the best sense: unplanned, absorbing accidents as new pathways, concerned with mood rather than architectural precision. [Oct 2012, p.60]

There's a feeling of disconnect between idea and result, with Construction Sounds tending towards solid but unremarkable investigation of texture. [Nov 2012, p.72]

It's seven tracks whip by in a 35 minute blur, with only a dew isolated moments sticking out. [Aug 2013, p.57]

This is warped, tactile and certainly druggy music. However, it's the duo's use of breathless double time flows that vividly replicate the mesmeric metal hum of psychedelics. [Oct 2014, p.64]

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

No 4 is the culmination of a pull towards music that’s more space horror soundtrack than contemplative melancholia, and Vantzou’s darkest release yet. [Jun 2018, p.64]

For all its bounce, this is a claustrophobic, airless LP, and you have to wait until the last track to hear a human voice free from distortion. [Aug 2022, p.52]

The result is a tougher but spacier sound. The original vocals are mixed in more prominently, and interplay with the deejay interjections relates to the lyrical content. [Nov 2022, p.71]

Wynn’s solo album Make It Right is a more comfortable listen than much made by The Dream Syndicate since their 2012 reformation. [Nov 2024, p.62]

The Fateful Symmetry is a fittingly freewheeling and bold final work from a singular artist and performer. As the songs swoop from industrial disco to piano balladry, Stewart is a steadfast, dramatic and charming grand dame – as commanding and provocative as he ever was as frontman of The Pop Group, and as sentimentally wounded as a torch singer. [Jul 2025, p.60]

On The Orb's 18th album, Paterson and current sideman Michael Rendall continue wandering these new (old) avenues. [Nov 2025, p.56]

There's being reflective and then there's navel-gazing, and unfortunately Alopecia is too frequently guilty of the latter to really engage either the mind or heart. [Apr 2008, p.66]

Swoops and swirls of tape chaff and manipulated sound effects alternate with the kind of beguilingly wistful, haunted folk we've come to expect from Tucker, brilliantly complementing the album's moments of abstraction. [Mar 2012, p.65]

The raps are often unaccompanied by beats, and this decision, combined with Diggs's deliberately rigid flow, results in a poetry slam aesthetic with only the faintest of links to the generic conventions and pleasures of hiphop. [Sep 2016, p.47]

This is a record that doesn’t sound like it emerges from hermetic isolation, rather it feels as extrovert and joyous and intriguing and intrigued as the city that inspires it. New York City made sound flesh.

This music's shoreline is made up of instrumental delicacy and subtle arrangements, which burble, froth and foam washing over the listener with an insistent but gentle force. [#257, p.61]

There's an appealing openness and lack of guile to much of Sign. [#215, p.66]

Although he wrangles these troublesome rhythms with aplomb, at times they bring out a cartoonish tendency that undermines his usual deadly poise. [Nov 2011, p.66]

Like every track on this EP, it's an incredibly precise and convincing reconstruction of mid-80s electro-pop that is nostalgic with out the obfuscating murk of H-Pop. [Nov 2011, p.70]

Patton’s signature style is overpowering, transforming an opportunity to create something unique into another of his side-projects.

Antwood hops between an arcade’s worth of genres, twiddling microprocessors to their squiffy, pixel-helicopter max later in that track, or embracing flute and some approximation of a banjo on “Castalian Fountain” before the Street Fighter beats hit. [Sep 2019, p.65]

The nine tracks here compact his characteristic baroque late jungle excesses into compact, juddering frames. While they still rarely swing, their frenetic motion carries bent and warping keys, rolling breakbeats and maddened blarps of synth towards a clear endpoint. [Feb 2020, p.58]

Not every release in the heaving Boris discography is essential; this one most definitely is. [Oct 2022, p.52]

An album that for the most part is ebulliently nasty pop, the monumental “Big Steppa” and the gleefully foul “No Face” in particular will be irresistible to anyone raised on Trina and Missy Elliott, daring us to switch off as the party spirals out of control. [Nov 2022, p.73]

This is not a purely inert record, in the sense that it is still essentially rhythmic, its tracks built from an interplay of beats and circling melodic motifs. Instead, Statik more often brings to mind the approach Aphex Twin took circa the material on his first Selected Ambient Works collection – loops as unbroken circles, movement employed as a means of remaining in one place. [Jul 2024, p

A mixed bag. [Oct 2012, p.62]

With all this pent-up anger channelled into a nicely weird record, faUSt call their thrown-together team effort of improv and agitation “enlightened dilletantism”. As a jumbled response to unfolding chaos on Planet Earth, Fresh Air delivers a welcome jolt of energy. [Jun 2017, p.64]

It begins as quite a thrilling ride. But at this level of concentration, ten minutes feels like an hour; it soon becomes enervating. [#255, p.55]

When he’s not waxing heroic, Chasny gets in touch with his most spaceward impulses. [Jul 2021, p.64]

For Bjork, this release marks a development in her craft.... SelmaSongs is a little big brave collection of songs that makes me feel better whenever I listen to it. [#201, p.58]

Glynnaestra feels like the project has moved beyond causal collaboration into something fully formed. [Jul 2013, p.56]

Wolves In The Throne Room return at full throttle. [Oct 2017, p.64]

For this project, Bakorta’s vocals are left at the studio door, which initially struck me as a shame, but a few listens reveal how much stronger the album is for being entirely instrumental. .... It’s clear enough what the remixes set out to achieve and, on their own merits they sound good. But in the context of the album as a whole they feel slightly tacked on; worth listening to, but maybe in a separate sitting. [Jan/Feb 2025, p.92]

Back In Black actually manages to sound vibrant and resonant without sounding dated – thanks in no small measure to the immaculate production throughout from Black Milk. [Aug 2022, p.64]

It's another cautious portion of well-made, moderately experimental not-quite-rock. [Feb 2013, p.49]

Finland's anti-band continue their primal journey along intergalactic motorik highways, shifting toward more popular dimensions but without losing any intensity, energy or theatrics. [Mar 2016, p.55]

It's easy to imagine more time and effort infusing these tracks with more colour and variety. [Apr 2016, p.55]

["LDN Shuffle" is] the most obviously exciting track of the set, but the more representative things are slower and more measured. [Jun 2018, p.64]

The London based producer integrates his maternal Polish roots in the spotty, fragmented and incidental way that only a truly intercultural artist can. [Sep 2018, p.49]

Wiggs’s music works best when it sets out its melodic ideas, then takes its time subtracting elements until you’re left with a filament of what you started with, as on the stunning penultimate track “The Soft Stars That Shine”. [Jul 2019, p.58]

With moderately different production, a lot of this would probably sound significantly tougher, but one gets the sense that studio slickness has rendered it a little toothless, blunting what could be a much sharper edge. [Apr 2019, p.68]

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]

Where Lopatin’s earlier work often evoked the sense of a simultaneous need and impossibility of love--most notably in his Chris de Burgh sampling “Nobody Here”--the music here seems to strive for immediacy. [Jan 2019, p.70]

At their worst, Ui thrash like run of the mill math-rockers, basses turned to 11 and meandering loudly.... What rescues them is a burgeoning melodic sensibility. [#233, p.71]

Leaving Meaning has all of the reassuring turgidity and tortured self-importance devotees have come to expect plus a cast of name contributors (The Necks, Ben Frost, Baby Dee, Anna von Hausswolff among others) for that vital essence of “Well, if they’re working with him, he’s probably OK, right?” [Dec 2019, p.57]

The album opener “Electron Central” sets a blissful, meandering pace, winding around in a shimmering drone like a drop of ink diffusing in a glass of water. ... The album closer “Empty Hold” takes a more unsettled turn, swooning and rattling into a resonant void. [Feb 2020, p.61]

Its ten tracks are heady, contemplative, spacious with a sense of impending loss. [Mar 2024, p.56]

Here, the 70s simulations, artful enough in their own way, are presented straight. The result, sadly, doesn't evoke 70s Italian Horror; it merely makes one think of already-over-familiar period and genre signifiers. [Jan 2013, p.62]

It’s all extraordinarily listenable thanks to Woolford’s clear vision in tracing various threads of connection between these forms of electronic funk. However, sometimes the direct, hyperspecific references, which can have such impact in club contexts, distract from the flow in the context of an album, and the moments where he navigates the spaces between those specifics become the most enduringly impressive. [Nov 2017, p.62]

Every now and again a ray of sun shines through, a warmth and homeliness that Buena Vista Social Club and its ilk condition you to expect, but more often they're glazed with a chill. [Sep 2012, p.62]

The blithe ease with which it slips from unruly quasi-techno to Tony Conrad-like violin drone (“Pumpkin Attack On Mommy And Daddy”; “The Wrong Thing”) keeps this consistently diverting. [Mar 2019, p.62]

Born Horses feels like a logical progression, the band’s luscious drift and bittersweet arrangements blossoming into widescreen vignettes of love, loss and revelation, but delivered with a poise and scale previously unseen. [oct 2024, p.58]

The musicians' sensibilities combine to create a bliss pop which doesn't simply evoke the spirit of summer, but allow it to bleed into every chord. [Oct 2012, p.64]

In small doses this perpetual explosion is often magnificent. [Sep 2013, p.66]

Intoxicating oddness permeates some of these slow, shimmying jams. [Aug 2020, p.59]

The material on the album is a constellation of soft and fragile connections between intangible forms of rock. ... Juana Molina moves “Al Sur” with propulsive singing and electronic rhythms, making the song her own before “Into Love Again” brings this lovely album full circle with a Yann Tiersenlike folk ballad. [Apr 2021, p.60]

The tracks are subject to strategies of sampling, distortion, cut-up and back masking, to a troubling point of excess, impurity, queasiness, and corrosion, unheard of in earlier releases. [Feb 2012, p.60]

A comfortable listen, occassionally diverting, but by no means a groundbreaking album. [May 2008, p.51]

Despite their pop savvy, it's a surprisingly difficult listen. [Sep 2012, p.57]

It's surely his finest recorded hour to date. [#230, p.61]

It might sound unbearably contrived, but the combination of crystalline guitar, sly time signatures and Kinsella's stream of consciousness lyrical musings makes for an unexpectedly coherent whole. [#229, p.68]

Oui may lack songs as vivid as those found on the [Sam] Prekop and [Archer] Prewitt records, but it has enough charm of its own to recommend it. [#201, p.63]

Clams is one rap's most distinctive producers, pushing his vocal collaborators to new emotional depths; but as an instrumental electronic producer, that choice is muddled by a sea of similarly charged chillwave types. [Jun 2011, p.60]

Lux is OK, while it's on. But that's all. And that's a shame. [Jan 2013, p.64]

Where the vocals are murky, the synthesizers have a queasy over-clarity, poised somewhere between the repellent and the sublime. [Aug 2011, p.58]

Plaid are back with another album of music that twists geometric runs through nostalgic synth textures into minor key shifts like dimension folds gone wrong. [Jan 2023, p.77]

This EP, the first in a projected triptych, shows the group in their best light. [Nov 2008, p.74]

Digital Garbage is an honest and oddly selfless document of the time, impressively free from bravado. [Oct 2018, p.59]

Their third post-reunion effort is less immediately engaging than its predecessor--perhaps due to a slightly uneven mix--but it remains true to the Dinosaur spirit while asserting a textual adventurousness that's often overlooked. [Nov 2012, p.70]

The Light In You is palpably charged with love of music and gratitude for its redemptive powers. [Sep 2015, p.48]

While there's no doubting that Subtle can create, populate and soundtrack a world of their own, it's not always clear whether it was worth it. [May 2008, p.65]

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

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]

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]

Mind Bokeh feels driven by the way recording music allows its maker to home in and hear clearly hazy, unformed ideas as material for the next piece. This at least would account for its restless churn of styles. [Apr 2011, p.69]

Dead Ringers lack the singular vision needed to hold so many digressions and disparate references together. [Aug 2016, p.61]

On the third album by Bishop's trio with drummer Chris Corsano and guitarist Ben Chasny, the [Middle Eastern] influence is more explicit than ever.... "Spiro Agnew" brings the intercultural connection full circle, with an extravagant strut that calls to mind the grand drama that Turkish guitar hero and pioneer of saz rock Erkin Koray brought to his fuzzed out interpretations of lachrymose Arabesque ballads. [Feb 2016, p.58]

There is no fake authenticity in this musical exploration, and Herren's musical palette is impressively wide ranging. [#241, p.63]

Sandoval's overly stylised vocals really start to grate over the distance of a whole LP. [#213, p.65]

Pleasant, yes, but not much more.... Too many of these 'songs' snap off at around the three or four minute mark, just as they start to get interesting.... It sounds consistently half-there. [#208, p.52]

There probably isn't a track here you won't be hearing in some club, park or block party throughout the summer, so you might as well start now. [#245, p.51]

Pablo grips your attention through an attraction-repulsion effect: the attraction largely pertaining to the sonics, the repulsion manifesting almost entirely in the lyrics. [Apr 2016, p.52]

The remixes feel fresh and tight. ... 30 Something is a fitting way to celebrate their impressive body of work. [Aug 2022, p.54]

Susanna's lucid singing shines through the thematic murk, and her instrumental settings are well-defined and ingenious. [Apr 2016, p.58]