It belongs on the shelf alongside Pestilence’s Testimony Of The Ancients and Spheres, The Orb’s UFOrb and Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. It’s a goddamn masterpiece. [Nov 2024, p.49]

The title of “Raindrops Cast In Lead” offers a brutal, evocative image, but any horror it tries to convey seems to get waylaid somewhere down the line by a cheery motorik chug. NO TITLE’s music matches the blunt force of its name when it makes room for discomfort. On “Broken Spires At Dead Kapital” strings play the broken fragments of a melody over guttural bass drones and the effect is genuinely unsettling. [Nov 2024, p.52]

The opening track and first single “Hide & Seek” is built around a hard charging, hooky punk riff that sounds more like The Offspring than the Lizard of old. Yow’s vocals, higher in the mix than they used to be, have a nasal, sneering quality that’s more actorly than unhinged. [Sep 2024, p.50]

White Roses, My God picks up where Low’s 2018 album Double Negative left off with “Disarray” – but the feel here is markedly different. The music is lighter, faster and more urgent, simultaneously terrified and joyous. [Oct 2024, p.60]

Orchestra Hits is the truest iteration of Rice and Schrader’s aesthetic to date. By polishing these songs, buffing them to relative shininess and adding serrated electronics, their emotive impact and melodic drama are greatly magnified. [Oct 2024, p.60]

Viewfinder may end on a questioning note, but its music is warm and expansive, the sound of an inspired composer coming into the light. [Oct 2024, p.49]

This follow-up feels thought-out and ambitious. She knows where she wants to be. [Oct 2024, p.66]

At times, as on “For Stars Of The Air”, they sound like an electronic post-punk project a la The Soft Moon. At others, they become the band in a spaghetti western saloon, soundtracking impending demise on “Last Resort Of The Gambling Man” with sun-drenched rock moves. [Oct 2024, p.52]

Listening to Sarah Davachi's newest album in the scorching heat wave outdoors, the world slows to an ominous crawl. As the sombre organ notes take hold, a bird with a worm wiggling in its beak becomes a dark omen. Branches move ominously with the slight breeze, filtering brief flashes of sunlight. Every little detail gathers unbearable weight, falling deeper into a hypnotic abyss. [Oct 2024, p.50]

Ultimately, pulling apart Everything Squared to discover its workings is like trying to dissect a cobweb: nothing is the central focus yet every gossamer-light part is spun with perfect precision and tension. [Sep 2024, p.53]

Drawn from a live show Anderson first staged in 2000, Amelia is a narrative of Earhart’s final adventure, split for the album’s sake into 22 short parts, but flowing together, with Anderson’s voice and violin floating above the deep swells of music made by a band including guitarist Marc Ribot; Sexmob’s drummer Kenny Wollesen and bassist Tony Scherr; a string quartet; and the Filharmonie Brno, under Dennis Russell Davies. [Sep 2024, p.45]

The fluttering modulations within the wordless, thrumming “AM/PM” and the panning wafts of fuzz in “Crucial Years” offer welcome variety, but much of Realistic IX feels like a diversion into territory ill-suited to the duo’s strengths. [Sep 2024, p.53]

The accompanying booklet is richly illustrated with pulpy paperbacks and other artefacts of the shadow side of hippie spirituality. In his quirky accompanying essay, curator Martin Callomon assures the listener that there’s much more where this came from, in the form of a playlist on the accursed music streaming platform Spotify – undoubtedly the most unholy thing about this entire affair. [Sep 2024, p.65]

The percussive result is a monster truck rally of low end synths stomping the shit out of some scuzzy Gun Club/X/Flesh Eaters-style Los Angeles punk trash, while a cheering section of saxophones blast and honk away on the sidelines. [Sep 2024, p.58]

As its title implies, Dark Times is a total bummer, but it’s a sumptuous bummer – warm, bluesy, funky. [Aug 2024, p.58]

Pastel and Thomson don’t attempt to (re)create the actual music made by Memorial Device; instead they piece together a suggestive collage of sounds evocative of the post-punk era and representative of wistful remembrance. The Pastels’ dreamy tendencies are well suited to this brief. [Sep 2024, p.54]

He still lacks emotional commitment as a rapper, offering weakly swaggy bars like “I’m gonna make a billie like I’m Eilish” on “Talk My Shit”. Honeyed melodic shadings like “Dadvocate” and the emo rock oriented “Lithonia” are more compelling. [Sep 2024, p.60]

This mixtape sounds more coherent than its 2012 predecessor, the shroomed-out Tumblr rap artefact King Of The Mischievous South Volume One Underground Tape 1996 . The features are bigger. [Sep 2024, p.60]

Mostly, however, these tracks stand as pure punk or pure roots, invoking the rebellious spirit of the time in a way that, remarkably, still comes across as fresh and exciting, even nowadays when everybody tends to know just about everything. [Sep 2024, p.59]

“The Seal” is busy in a different mode – it sounds like it would fit in with the jazzy shugs of Cobra And Phases era Stereolab, until Barrow’s wobbly vocal comes in, like the perpetually lachrymose Peter Jefferies given a bit of a speedy kick. [Sep 2024, p.58]

It’s the genuine connection of Bowles, Toll and McMurry that makes it all bounce, which is hardly what one might expect from a banjo fronted group. [Aug 2024, p.48]

The tracks swim in their devotional depths and become new platforms for meditation and transmission. The compositions are exquisitely suited to convey the confusion and wonder of life’s early years. [Jun 2024, p.48]

Their current music has that wobbly centre of gravity that makes it sound both proto and post-punk at once, something between the garage fog of the Nuggets era and the more art-damaged end of the 1980s hardcore spectrum. Imagine Hüsker Dü or Saccharine Trust after they had too much to dream last night. [Aug 2024, p.84]

On Jinxed By Being, both Chasny and Shackleton find a collaborative meeting point where sound complements their respective aesthetics and bodies of work, while moving them towards something thrillingly new. [Aug 2024, p.59]

Landless’s four singers Méabh Meir, Lily Power, Ruth Clinton and Sinéad Lynch spin tightly woven harmonies with crystalline precision over beds of drones. However the album is less doomy than might be expected from a Murphy-produced album – or maybe it’s just that these voices sparkle with light and life, even as they sing about encounters with death. [Aug 2024, p.52]

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]

This is a complex, affecting work by Ishibashi, but listeners are advised to seek out the film to experience it in context. [Jun 2024, p.50]

Across 13 brief sketches – some only a minute or two long – the groove is paramount. A hint of Afrobeat pops up a few times, here as a sludgy crawl, there as if Tonto’s Expanding Head Band had lugged their gear down to Fela’s shrine. [Jul 2024, p.66]

It can feel as though one must push through multiple layers of cultural detritus – Linda Blair, David Cassidy, Kiss, The Brady Bunch, etc – to get to the music itself. In truth, these resonances add flavour and colour to Jeff and Steve McDonald’s exuberant power pop, assisted on this self-titled double album by drummer and producer Josh Klinghoffer.

Each track is a mini drama of yearning and patience. These are studies in building momentum, meditations on how to temporarily tap into a shared singular spirit. [Jul 2024, p.50]

Sometimes the music lingers too long in the in-between places, as though it’s not sure where it’s going. It probably doesn’t make sense for music that deals in ambivalence to be settled in itself, but some listeners may require a tiny bit more to believe in. [Jul 2024, p.50]

The power of Sumac’s work has always been in the intersection between power and precision, raw crunch driven and inch perfect percussive pummel. The same precision exists here, the same balance between onslaught and lull, the murky ambiguities surrounded by crystal clear volleys of sculpted noise. [Jul 2024, p.60]

Martin’s productions, equal parts frosted dub techno and eerie minimalism akin to the pre-orchestral Stars Of The Lid records, match Kamaru’s patient inquisitiveness. While there’s diversity here – compare the beatless slow build of opener “Differences” versus the scuffed kick and snare of “Ark” – Kamaru and Martin are resourceful with limited palettes, unearthing poignancy in subtle shifts of permutation and iteration. Music and voice forming a perfect alloy. [Jun 2024, p.52]

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

This has to be the sunniest winter record ever. .... Stuffed with sunflowers and tiny xylophones, this is sweet, joyful stuff. And then, just as you start to worry that it could all congeal into a Zach Braff score, Saunier hits you right in the weird.

We Have Dozens Of Titles is a view into a fascinating kind of processing, digesting and inventing. The results exist outside of even microgenre, flummoxing the desire to categorise at every turn. [Jun 2024, p.68]

There’s less noise here than on Not A Dream. Nueen’s production layers thick, soft synth pads with fluttering percussive elements, smudging swung tempos back into breathing soundscapes of vocal samples and sticky rolling saturation. [Jul 2024, p.54]

Though clearly labelled as demos, it’s hard not to think of this as a completed work. Cargill’s sequencing is impeccable and the material is compelling throughout. This is no mere collection of odds and sods, but a substantial release from the band that enriches their legacy. .... A reminder of what was lost. But it also feels like a gift. [Jul 2024, p.68]

This time round the likes of Lancey Foux, Unknown T, Skrapz and Tiggs Da Author inspire and complement rather than distract from an artist settling into the elder statesman role he’s been primed for since day dot. In their company the righteous gospel sermonising of “Double Standards” shines, and “Blessings” reveals itself as the most potent earworm I’ve had the pleasure of contracting this year. [Jul 2024, p.65]

It’s Shellac as usual, so lean, mean experimental rock music which sounds like you are right there in the room with the band. There’s a hint of mature craftsmanship in the classic descending chord sequence of “WSOD” and the waltz time of “Girl From Outside”. [Jul 2024, p.60]

Jain finds an inviting languidity via the shimmering vocals and fluttering flute of “Infinite Delight” and “You Are Irresistible”, which rise together in warm and expectant plateaus. [Jul 2024, p.56]

The second half of the album is centred on aqueous loverman grooves, albeit funnelled through his hard yet tender persona. “Plan B” is a decent R&B track. .... Too bad, then, that Ghost prefaces his lusty adventures with too many knuckleheaded cuts. [Jul 2024, p.54]

Propelled along by Berthling’s beefy basslines and Werliin’s clockwork precise percussive taps and beats, the fine details of the group’s sound emerge from Ambarchi’s dextrous and chameleonic guitar flourishes. [Jul 2024, p.46]

While admiring the album for its subtle intricacies, I keep coming back to its two most straightforward songs: the extremely fun chamber punk piece “Shark-Shark” and lead single “How We See The Light”, which manages to be both wise and wide-eyed with curiosity. [Jul 2024, p.46]

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

Their stew of disparate aesthetics may be lumpy, but it’s never mushy, and the quartet’s stylistic mix-ups are consistently engaging. [Jun 2024, p.57]

Gendron’s penchant for vintage phrasing gives the record a mid-20th century folk revival vibe that even the guest squalls of guitarist Bill Nace and saxophonist Zoh Amba cannot dispel. Gendron’s singing alternates between French and English; the pitch of her voice is low, but its place in the mix is high, held aloft by her unhurried guitar picking. [Jun 2024, p.57]

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]

Orchestras must be the greatest album from a jazz composer since the glory days of Gil Evans. [Jun 2024, p.64]

“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]

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

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]

Despite their brevity, each track articulates a complete piece; they’re eventful miniatures, not sketches. But while they are sufficiently eventful to engage, the lack of someone to play off of deprives this music of the sense of an emotional stake that arises from White’s decisions to challenge or facilitate someone else. [Jun 2024, p.57]

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]

Timeless and considered, Lives Outgrown is a complete, but still complicated, portrait of the intersection of grief and life. [Jun 2024, p.50]

Though some of the genre mixing does feel abrupt rather than fully integrated – for all its charms, “Asha The First” is a bit overstuffed – the album largely works, unified by Washington’s unwavering vision and exploratory spirit. [May 2024, p.58]

“Working The Ditch” and “Smiler” sound like they could come from the same sessions as Melvins’ 1993 major label debut Houdini. But there are atypical twists in “She’s Got Weird Arms”, whose new wave-ish verses are broken up by cascades of bug-eyed dissonance and “Allergic To Food”, which reminds this listener of “Forkboy” by Al Jourgensen and Jello Biafra’s side-project Lard with the tempo lowered to mid. [May 2024, p.50]

The acoustic guitar led instrumental “Underwater City” being an exemplary diversion into acid folk. Elsewhere “Re-generate” and “The Black Sea” are a couple of highly enjoyable (albeit slight) space jams, and exit track “Stargazers” regrettably bails out just when it starts to take off. [May 2024, p.60]

Something In The Room She Moves feels impossible to completely pin down. [May 2024, p.52]

Lines like “History repeating itself” and “She never lost hope/When life was so hard” feel a bit generalised – the sentiment might have benefitted from a more nuanced or poetic approach. Overall however the decision to give the heroic and celebratory a wide berth is a sound one, making way for something much darker and more unsettling – a reminder that doing the right thing in times of widespread fear and conflict is seldom easy. [May 2024, p.49]

Akoma is unpredictable without any recourse to smartarsedness, Jlin keeping everything sounding fresh and spontaneous, as though both she and the listener are on a journey of innovation and discovery. [Mar 2024, p.48]

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

Walls Have Ears is a postcard from Sonic Youth in their salad days, with newly recruited drummer Steve Shelley cementing a core line-up that would endure until disbandment 26 years later. [Apr 2024, p.75]

“Dreamfear” sticks to the artist’s more conventional penchant for collage-style dance music. .... “Boy Sent From Above” is less convincing, clumsily layering Auto-Tuned vocals over the kind of schmaltzy synth one might hear in pop outfits like Yazoo. [Mar 2024, p.54]

Despite the sonic shifts – from grinding electronic roars to manipulated vocal samples and field recordings to shimmering harp to desolate piano – it remains unified, because of Ayewa. [Mar 2024, p.50]

Hard edged synths and massive, crunchy beats lend righteous swagger to Gordon’s bleary guitar squalls and jetlagged sprechstimme. [Mar 2024, p.46]

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]

It’s gorgeous stuff, but whether the future she imagines is entropic or hopeful, it’s hard to say. [Mar 2024, p.57]

I dig a conceptual framework but to be honest my enjoyment of Rooting For Love has little to do with earthbound concerns and everything to do with sheer escapist pleasure in form and grain. [Mar 2024, p.52]

All the ingredients required are present: sonic invention, surprise, risk taking, fun and adventure. [Mar 2024, p.56]

The music is gentle but ominous, and it’s hard to be sure which impression they want to linger. “Read The Room” and “Teleharmonic” are more conventional rock songs; the former in particular could have come off any 21st century Radiohead album. [Mar 2024, p.52]

Although this record is Rhys’s most polished to date, he does squeeze in moments of strangeness – subtle and paired down, bubbling beneath lush production and melodic arrangements. [Mar 2024, p.52]

An air of devotion does indeed hover over this music, filtering through the stately intonation of Anima Brass and the a cappella singing of The Macadam Ensemble, as well as the quiet concentration of Malone’s own playing. Yet it emanates not from the rarefied air of religious sentiment, but from the composer’s passionate dedication to sound itself, and her respect for its potential capacity to realise, as the title of the concluding piece puts it, “The Unification Of Inner & Outer Life”. [Mar 2024, p.50]

This is an overgrown jungle of music; ideas bury one another, making it all the more striking when a pure, clean line manages to weave its way through the tangle and rise, like a flower turning to face the sun. [Mar 2024., p.46]

[“Vapours”] is brilliantly executed and, in places, genuinely frightening. Yawning drones and hissing percussive swells open the gates to chaos in “Of Shadow And Substance”, an epic 21 minute churn of layered tape loops, cello and bass strings, harp and percussion. .... The piece is more haunted and atmospherically dense than its predecessor, however both pieces share a remarkable sense of immediacy.

It’s one of the most vibrant, purposeful rock records of the year, as Ambro balances the sickly weariness of this day and age with a triumphant jubilation of simply being alive. [Dec 2023, p.54]

With unobtrusive, yet telling contributions from friends including Meg Baird, The Cure’s Lol Tolhurst and Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell, she conjures up a bittersweet sense of location and changing times through six pieces that are subtly complementary, in their character and impact, meriting comparison to the finely nuanced ambient soundtracks of Angelo Badalamenti. [Jan/Feb 2024, p.96]

It’s a startling new sound she has here, featuring voices of an unplaceable vintage, piano, bells and chains that carry centuries’ worth of dust and shadow, the songs a distorted and twisted take on gospel that’s sometimes slurred like a warped record, sometimes scarifyingly stark and always tightroping between redemptive faith and avant garde oddity. [Jan/Feb 2024, p.92]

Gabriel’s not trying to be clever here, he’s being sincere. And because I favour savoury over sweet, I can strongly recommend the Dark-Side Mix which has more room to breathe, a fatter bottom end and weirder edges all round. [Jan/Feb 2024, p.84]

This worthy sequel to XXX is the first release since 2011 to offer a convincing portrait of Brown as a wholly realistic character. [Jan/Feb 2024, p.81]

Where Vernon’s album [For Emma, Forever Ago] registers like a melancholic exorcism of listless youth and failed relationships, Bachman does not engage in that kind of soul searching, though he elicits a similarly potent emotional response. [Jan/Feb 2024, p.77]

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]

Aesop’s penchant for storytelling – particularly on “100 Feet Tall” and “Aggressive Steven” – is still incredibly engaging, delivering a fraught narrative that touches on mental health, exploitation of the vulnerable and human responses to corporate stimuli. [Jan/Feb 2024, p.77]

Most tracks feature piano and vocals in a mix of essentialised South African stylings. A highlight is the simple, lilting hymn “Nomayoyo”, with Ntuli’s gentle, breathy vocals. “Lihlanzekile” is a quietly rolling piece of melancholia. [Dec 2023, p.58]

Each piece might be filled with personal meaning to the artist, but they all leave enough space for listeners to reflect on their own worries. The transition between the noisy, illusory interlude “[ A Backlit Door]” and the understated beauty of “Haruspex” is an especially poignant moment on an album rich with them. [Dec 2023, p.54]

The About Group, which included Hayward and Alexis Taylor from Hot Chip, tried with some degree of success to square the circle of song and free improvisation, but Abstract Concrete’s embellished structures feel more natural and no less imaginative. [Dec 2023, p.43]

“Airavata” falls into kitsch, with Atwood-Ferguson on electric guitar and violin/viola. The album’s often better than that, however. .... In all, a mixed picture. [Dec 2023, p.42]

A combination of versatility (Lucas is both singer and multiinstrumentalist) and judicious use of the recording studio makes Vanishing Twin’s fourth artist album devoid of voids. It’s perhaps their best release to date. [Dec 2023, p.52]

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]

Butler offers seven tracks whose energy swings between chaotic and cool. [Nov 2023, p.62]

A striking collection of shadowy electronic soul. [Nov 2023, p.62]

With Return To Archive, the balance is just right – this gets nearer to sound art. [Nov 2023, p.52]

On The Comeback Kid Marnie Stern has returned bolder, brighter and stranger than ever, an artist in complete command of her idiom. [Nov 2023, p.51]

A band aware of where they’ve been but also reconnected and plotting a future. [Nov 2023, p.46]

In terms of idiosyncratic yet thoroughly danceable electronic music, Cunningham remains nearly peerless. [Nov 2023, p.46]

The Pyramids may not be breaking new ground here, but Afro Futuristic Dreams is arguably the best thing the reunited group have created. [Nov 2023, p.46]

The grooves, textures, feel and playing here are immaculately realised but the unique way this band put together what they can do makes it, as ever, way more than just retro-psyche. Perhaps their best, most fully realised record yet. [Oct 2023, p.56]