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

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

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

This is folk music for the post-industrial era, which aspires to the condition of a true world music, not as a postcard from some Club Med of the mind, but as a dispatch from the front lines of both climate change and the extinction of animal species (real and imagined). Essential listening, and a real adventure in the undergrowth of the underground. Sit a spell in the shade of the Borametz. [Aug 2019, p.56]

This is a dark night of the soul record, a distant country cousin of Young's Tonight's The Night, but it feels flooded with light and air and space. [#232, p.73]

He hits every track as if he’s smashing an Idaho potato. [Apr 2022, p.59]

Animals is a riotous, communal affair that doesn’t so much straddle the line between hiphop and jazz as wrestle with both traditions and emerge with something grand. [Sep 2023, p.60]

Drift Code may not be as bold an artistic statement as Spirit Of Eden, nor as interesting a sideline as .O.Rang, nor in all likelihood be as celebrated 17 years hence as Out Of Season. But Webb proves himself just as skilled as his former collaborator Gibbons in his ability to build worlds whose orbits brush against the heart while always staying at arm’s length. [Feb 2019, p.49]

Like Stanley’s film, Stetson’s score fully realises the terrible, wondrous majesty hinted at in the 1927 text. [Apr 2020, p.62]

It’s something like Noname if she had a backstory closer to The Game. And just when it almost veers too close into Soulquarian-lite territory, Boogie drops “Self Destruction”, a vocally agile self-examination that reminds you why his contract was picked up by Eminem. [Mar 2019, p.65]

Infinite Love itself feels like the sonic equivalent of the iTunes Visualizer: pulsing forms, growing in complexity, before turning in on themselves and shooting off in another direction. [Nov 2010, p.62]

Benin stalwarts including Black Santiago, The Picoby Band and El Rego Et Ses Commandos all deliver, while Poly-Rythmo De Cotonou get an outing on the atmospheric, if understated “Idavi” and the boogie funk of “Moulon Devla”. Les Sympathetics De Porto Novo’s set opener “A Min We Vo Nou We” is all ragged fuzz guitar and lifted JB licks, lit from within by the incendiary urgency of the Benin sound. [Jun 2018, p.69]

A record that urges you to lean closer to the speakers in order to fully hear everything that is being played and sung. [#216, p.63]

Funeral For Justice comes a step closer to channelling an authentic Mdou Moctar live experience. The title track wastes no time to demonstrate the unfettered power on tap, bursting from silence into a series of electrifying riffs and fervent claps, never letting up. [Jun 2024, p.53]

While PTSD is sometimes a slog, it's always substantial. [Jun 2014, p.63]

It's a well-worn concept, but one which Gorgun works through with curiosity and clarity of purpose. [Oct 2018, p.61]

From the trancelike undercurrent moving through “Bird On A Wire” and “Ghosts Of People” to the solid punk attack of “2020 Vision” and “Tout Est Meilleur”, the album is testament to Bush Tetras’ resilience. [Sep 2023, p.64]

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]

I Was Real isn’t going to disappoint 75 Dollar Bill’s old fans. ... Augmentations and roots moves do nothing to dilute 75 Dollar Bill’s essence. If anything, I Was Real is ultra-real. [Jul 2019, p.44]

The album deftly balances expansive environments with a singular vocal intimacy. [Nov 2018, p.51]

Earl Sweatshirt and billy woods, who kick off the proceedings with the intoxicatingly smooth “RIP Tracy”. MIKE and Sideshow offer up my personal favourite with “Bless”, and Boldy James teams up with TF on the moody “Trouble Man”. [Sep 2023, p.67]

It’s not uncommon for DIY punk, hardcore and noise artists to veer towards the more contemplative, electronic ends of musical experimentation. ... Croatian Amor’s exercise in post-apocalyptic world building is another effective example of this transition. [Feb 2019, p.53]

The band’s template has barely changed over those years but that isn’t to suggest a lack of artistic growth. “How Deep It Goes”, the opening track from their tenth album Let It All In, is a prime example of their peculiar progression as it exudes the reassuring warmth of California songsmiths of yesteryear yet still somehow manages to wedge a wash of icy interplay between Huemann’s guitar and Matthew Pierce’s synths smack dab in the middle of the track. [May 2020, p.48]

More than the spiritual feel of Impulse! releases by Sanders or Coltrane, this music recalls the groove oriented work of Turrentine, Idris Muhammad and Grover Washington Jr for CTI and Kudu. It’s warm weather music, made to be played through speakers propped in open windows, facing the street. [Jul 2018, p.58]

Finlay Clark and David Kennedy ride a similar wave to improv duos like 75 Dollar Bill or Orcutt/Corsano, recalling their own thrilling work on 2020’s Fast Edit. The sliced mayhem of that set is missing here: instead, the group seem to have spent the years working on stitching themselves ever more tightly together. [Jun 2024, p.58]

It's elegant and pristine, a febrile flutter of rhythms, glinting sequences and pale, shimmering backdrops. [Jul 2014, p.51]

This recording attests to their powerful rock credentials. [#201, p.63]

The various elements at work on these five finely etched pieces rarely settle into any single pattern or vibe, but they also never feel like pastiche. It’s all music for the trumpeter – whose playing has never sounded more mature and exploratory – and every component of the music is as rigorous and evolved as his own vision. [Mar 2025, p.44]

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

This Soul Jazz set is the biggest jungle splash for a long time, featuring the booming basslines, the fiercest of Amen breaks and heavyweight ragga vocals on essential cuts from Krome & Time, Cutty Ranks, M-Beat, Bizzy B, Lemon D, Top Cat, and more all dating from the prime years of 1993-95. [Jan/Feb 2026, p.97]

Those arrangements, many drawn from Ra’s own vintage charts but others assembled by Allen, have an urbane lushness, the 24-piece ensemble swinging hard in tight formation, only occasionally letting their freak flags fly. [Mar 2025, p.44]

Cross’s ability to get the job done with his stripped down trio is the real achievement here. [Mar 2019, p.65]

A slippery, shape-shifting quality is one of the great strengths of Amon Tobin's sixth album. Plainly put, Out From Out Where is impossible to pin down. [#226, p.67]

A few guest vocalists pop up in vivid cameos. .... But the guests are mere added attractions. Some of the most compelling tracks, like "No Death No Danger", "Mala Sangre" and the closing "Covenstead Blues", are all her. .... She creates her own world of sound, and her own context, and we must enter cautiously, never sure what we'll find but ready for anything. [Sep 2025, p.50]

May be the year's most surprising pure pop pleasure--precisely because it's nothing like you'd expect a pop album to be. [#224, p.61]

Indebted to various traditions of US rock, from resonant folk and blues to elegant indie pop, its understated songs are looser and more varied here than in her music with bands like Helium and Ex Hex, as if serving a different, affirming purpose. [Jun 2024, p.61]

Where NO was extreme in its attack, W opts to let the group dream, as a more acoustic angle is explored – with Wata’s ephemeral vocal being an ever present guiding spirit force that trails like incense smoke through the songs. Things eventually kick off, however, with “The Fallen”, a time-tested metal guitar dirge with an electronic sting in its tail that effortlessly reverts back to Boris at their amplifier worshipping best. [Feb 2022, p.58]

Every song on Fungus II aspires to soundtrack a twisted comic book or Hanna-Barbera cartoon about itself. Segall’s guitar and bass playing is wailing and distended while Chippendale lays down tight bursts of percussive fire. For the beetle-browed half hour this album lasts, these guys are here to party. [Apr 2020, p.63]

Closing track “Alone Together” is the exception, with its laidback 70s groove. Otherwise there is a rich sense of eerie detachment, more Eno than disco. Not a desolate one but a widescreen richness of field recordings, sweetly echoing synth tones, spoken word interludes, plaintive wheepling of birds and clarinets, ghostly acousmatic sounds and layered vocal harmonies. [Mar 2025, p.46]

This is darkly delicious pop--with no smiling. [Mar 2019, p.64]

A return to form. ... If anything this album is neither nervous nor holding its nerve, but powerful, solid, the work of a group who know what it is they do and how best to play to their strengths. [Apr 2018, p.64]

Though still harbouring a sense of fun, there’s a maturity felt throughout Dennis. [Jun 2024, p.61]

On Return – as on all of their albums – Fu Manchu evidently strive to maximise the impact of each riff, hook and rhythm, resulting in some decidedly funkadelic noise. [Aug 2024, p.62]

An album both generous and balanced in its patient give and take, upbeat and open, full of enthusiasm and joy. [Nov 2017, p.67]

Almond – who recorded his vocals while recovering from Covid – sounds audibly frail at times. But this works in the album’s favour, working humanity into the glossiness. The most effective tracks are those with sparse backing, such as “Polaroid” and the drolly misanthropic “I’m Not A Friend Of God”. [May 2022, p.53]

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]

The album has almost Wagnerian scope and immersive power, and at just over 50 minutes it's well organised as a start-to-finish listen. [Mar 2011, p.50]

“Casino High” has all the makings of a future garage summer banger. It’s skippy and infectiously danceable, employing vocal samples in a thoughtful way. The first of three collaborations on the album, “Real Hot N Naughty” (featuring actor and performer Felix Mufti) is a love letter to queer dancefloors. Flirting between trance and less chaotic hard house, it injects a tongue in cheek dose of fun into proceedings. [Jun 2024, p.61]

This intelligently compiled collection brings together the best (and sometime worst) of these mostly forgotten groups. [Aug 2016, p.66]

Celestite cannot simply be characterised as pastiche, however, as the Weaver brothers and Dunn have constructed dramatic instrumentals using the material of previous compositions, ensuring a thematic and sonic continuity with their own past. [Jul 2014, p.61]

Denzel’s flows are as hungry as ever, at times managing to channel the untamed spirit of DMX (see “Diet”) while Kenny’s production is the ideal mix of weighty drums and potent bass. It’s an energetic listen and one that can hopefully act as some sort of cure for Old Heads Syndrome – the belief that no one is making real hiphop anymore. [Apr 2020, p.68]

Surprisingly, it works and doesn’t come apart, punctuating a conceptually striking, musically flawed, but altogether enjoyable record. [May 2020, p.53]

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

Green commandeers her forces, keeps things simple, and makes irresistibly confident and sharp guitar pop. Addictive. [Aug 2021, p.65]

The Moths Are Real is a crisp and atmospheric set of idiosyncratic and finely crafted pop songs. [Mar 2013, p.60]

A minor pleasure of the album is the beautiful way it's edited together, a gently manipulated impression of random accidents. [Sep 2015, p.47]

[An] overstuffed sound hurricane. [#255, p.58]

Barry Walker’s softly rising and falling pedal steel melodies calcify the skeleton of “Memory Of Lunch”, while Patrick McDermott’s distorted guitar lines provide the flesh, shaping a harsher drone as a symbolic border between reality and dream. And while Roped In never renounces its cheerful perspective, the approaching darkness of his guitar overtones dispels childlike innocence. [Dec 2020, p.53]

On four extended tracks, Fennelly’s various keyboards (synthesizer, harmonium, piano) function as kind of bedrock that deftly accommodates a variety of tacks and textures from his partners. [Oct 2023, p.53]

There’s no stridency, special pleading or chewing of scenery, just gentle enactments. This is what folk music used to do before Volk became toxic. Malkmus represents his characters via traditional techniques. [May 2020, p.54]

A warm and thoughtful record. Sometimes the production is a bit light--the first half in particular suffers from a rather MOR unobtrusiveness. But Laveaux’s voice is a treasure, her guitar playing is fresh and prickly, and things get more tangled and interesting the further along we go. [Apr 2018, p.67]

With their reverent, celebratory tone, tracks like “Naked (You Enter & Leave This World With Nothing)”, “I Will Follow You For Life, Everywhere” and “We Must Grieve Together” speak to the music’s function as an integral part of a community’s healing process. Sung together in deep harmony and pulling their inspiration from a source too powerful and mysterious for words, fra fra’s funeral songs offer a glimpse into how the people of this particular corner of West Africa deal with the pain, uncertainty and finality of death. [Jun 2020, p.49]

Blue Songs nevertheless presents a level of poetic inventiveness that isn't easy to trace in the dance pantheon.

Thankfully, her second solo album Blueprint is not a punk revival record, but a great grab bag of tracks showing that Armendariz still has not only her patented hair-raising and blood-curdling shriek from the 70s, but a voice that can reference the evocative beauty found in the pipes of both Patti Smith and Judee Sill. [Jul 2018, p.59]

Rampen feels more expansive than much recent output – it’s certainly longer, but its panoramic character is neither purely durational nor new for the band. Their affinity for a kind of psych folk balladry has been clear since at least as early as their covers of Lee Hazlewood’s “Sand” (1985) and Bonnie Dobson’s “Morning Dew” (1987). Rampen calls both to mind, but the work it’s most consistent with is 1996’s Ende Neu, an album of latent possibilities in the pit of a creative block. [Jun 2024, p.48]

Still Brazy is thoroughly and unapologetically regional, but its thematic engines are universal. [Aug 2016, p.63]

As a superior melodic rapper, Open Mike Eagle seems to communicate with a kind of preternatural whimsy. Even when he sifts through his trauma, his voice serves as a velvet glove, keeping this 30 minute album from descending into painful self-pity. [Dec 2020, p.54]

Musically it’s a joyous triumph: vocally Estelle is utterly assured but naturally ebullient, the sound of someone totally at ease. [Nov 2018, p.68]

Heavy, expressive and uncompromising, both Wrecked and Analog Fluids Of Black Holes gesture at fresh, purposeful possibilities for noise and experimental music. [Nov 2019, p.49]

Glenn's rich, wordless vocal melody becomes a trellis for the winding vine of Elizabeth's vibrato as she sings the arc of a blooming romance. The mood is joyfully bittersweet, basking in the glow of a shared life which, like all living things, must end. [Mar 2026, p.49]

As the work progresses, the architectural aspects of English’s music become apparent and alive, with the aural suggestion of fluid movement within rigid structures, frames that can hold and refract spatial mysteries. By “V” and “VI” the movement of amorphous sonic forms becomes magisterial, the air, increasingly heavenly. [Mar 2025, p.48]

At times flush with the meditative air of Alice Coltrane, elsewhere like some whispered about 80s new age obscurity, this album both requires and justifies extensive attention. [Mar 2019, p.62]

It’s hard to believe this is the same band who bowed out with Ghost Stories. There they sounded uptight and reticent; here they are restless and free. The creative rebirth continues. Where to next? [May 2020, p.55]

Lala Belu is his first new recording for decades, and it lives up to the expectation generated by their live appearances. [Apr 2018, p.67]

Rather than concocting rich strata from the guitar of Reine Fiske or Johan Holmegard’s percussion, these pieces are mainly stripped back and sprightly, propelled by the dazzling vocals of Ejstes. ... Where previously these atonal chords and odd tempos would have been subsumed into the heavy mixture, they appear here open and light, forming something that’s less earthy and far more fantastical. [Nov 2022, p.60]

But if the technology has moved on, he’s moved with it, and the results are significantly more interesting than what he was up to in the 90s. It feels rural, but modern; rustic, but hardly an idyll; a feat of true uneasy listening. [May 2019, p.51]

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

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

Raymond has learned the most important lesson of American primitive guitar: whatever your influences, they need to project a bit of your emotional life. This, as much as her robust tone and nimble picking, is what makes Raymond sound like a guitarist with staying power. [Dec 2020, p.56]

Heavy, expressive and uncompromising, both Wrecked and Analog Fluids Of Black Holes gesture at fresh, purposeful possibilities for noise and experimental music. [Nov 2019, p.49]

Science Fiction Dancehall Classics is a more than serviceable as an On-U sound primer, yet may throw even those who think they know the label. [Oct 2015, p.70]

The result is a dreamy potion of cascading stringwork and ethereal song, a soothing, otherworldly balm, grounded in ancient tradition but partly inspired by modern tragedy, as the album title suggests. [Mar 2026, p.53]

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

He tears apart square wave synths into sharp, staccato blocks and spreads them across Insula, twisting alien 8-bit into different melodies and frequencies. [Jul 2018, p.60]

This is swirling, volatile music, awash with synths and scorched to a turn by Mulholland's guitar. [Aug 2016, p.62]

It's a much quieter album than its predecessor, more interested in fingering the tears and rips in its luxurious, ambient textures than Black Up's intergalactic boom-bap. It pulses and shimmers like light bouncing off gold, burnishing Palaceer's radiant visions. [Aug 2014, p.51]

Personal and political themes gestate within this gloss. They surface in full power on the giddy “Space Golf”, showering with sarcasm the absurd space escapism of xenophobic, misanthropic billionaires. [Dec 2020, p.62]

As a cranky comeback album, it's as welcome as the amped-up reprise of Dr Jacobi as podcast prophet on Twin Peaks: The return. [Nov 2017, p.67]

Some might find the shit-fi recording (albeit aided by a keen producer’s ear), the relentless bleakness, or Del Rio’s blackened vocals to be dealbreakers. But it’s undeniable that Raspberry Bulbs are not only unencumbered by constraints of genre, they’ve forged a sound unique to themselves. [Mar 2020, p.54]

This album eclipses their previous output and hits a consistent note of righteous force. [Jan 2008, p.69]

Tutti is a journey to the centre of the soul, but it is a kindly one, and Cosey is a most excellent guide. [Mar 2019, p.61]

But where Konoyo was a more visceral invocation of the electronic sublime, Anoyo stretches out and creates space for the reeds to be heard amid the splices, obstructions and reversals of the Los Angeles based producer’s typically stratified sonic design. [May 2019, p.67]

Their third album Horizon is mellifluous and pretty, with a rolling, tumbling quality that feels like a downhill race. [Jul 2019, p.57]

One moment she comes on like a pure music box turnaround MC, the next like a spitting cat, her delivery sits perfectly on the fucked up thud and South London hissing spherics conjured up in the mix. [Jul 2018, p.61]

Grush treats us to another set of strange and beautiful bangers. [Jul 2024, p.64]

There's some seriously accomplished musicianship here. [Aug 2014, p.55]

Translated lyrics illuminate and mystify in equal measure. [Oct 2017, p.67]