Although they stop the gap between higher profile releases, they also stand capably on their own. [Jul 2012, p.54]

RAP Music is a self conscious throwback sonically, lyrically and even visually.

Ab-Soul music fuses street-level concerns with the sort of erudite, rhyme scheme-fixated wordplay more commonly associated with rapper who value beats and rhymes over life. [Jul 2012, p.71]

Their second album feels more palatable. [Jul 2012, p.68]

It always feels uncomfortably like being trapped in someone's else's headspace. [Jul 2012, p.68]

The novelty of hearing synths act like drums definitely helps, but the record also contains just what you might look for in any solo improvisation. [Jul 2012, p.65]

A great part of the pleasure of Banga is revelling in the medium conveying the message. For the most part, the album is a smooth listen, its revelation couch within relaxed AOR-ish arrangements. [Jul 2012, p.64]

A striking document of Swans' current live form. [Jul 2012, p.64]

This part of the past is not so much a source of rare metals to be strip-mined, but a seed bank of rare or lost varieties. [Jul 2012, p.63]

Ultimately, these elements mostly serve to contextualize some beautifully conceived programmed music within an edgier club culture. [Jul 2012, p.62]

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

Sadier's faith in the replenishing properties of silence has reactivated her production line of perfect pop miniatures. [Jul 2012, p.62]

Despite the lack of actual bass frequencies on Advaitic Songs, Om frequently sound weighed down which isn't the same thing as sounding heavy. [Jul 2012, p.61]

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

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

The gift that this record has offered him is the gift of being who he is once again. [Jul 2012, p.59]

More often than not the group sound like they're going through the motions. [Jul 2012, p.57]

The music on Freak Puke isn't exactly unheavy, but its heaviness is of a different vintage. [Jun 2012, p.60]

The album comes over as a political parable as much as an investigation into the spirit of place. [Jun 2012, p.56]

[The Lost Tapes is] a welcome re-opening of the gates. [Jun 2012, p.53]

It's pervaded by numbness, claustrophobia, pain intensified to the point of dissociation. [Jun 2012, p.49]

It works enough to be a strangely enjoyable and admirable record. [Jun 2012, p.48]

It's as arch, infuriating and entertaining as the duo's name would lead you to expect. [Jun 2012, p.46]

It's as timeless in its own small way as the Chicago canon that inspired it. [Jun 2012, p.46]

There's something enchantingly nostalgic about Awe Natural. [May 2012, p.74]

The energy is impressive and it's hard to find technical fault but the stagnation is undeniable. [May 2012, p.73]

The first half is far more intriguing. [May 2012, p.72]

Civilization's simplicity is deceptive: not every producer can take such basic elements and fashion somethings so thrillingly menacing. [May 2012, p.72]

Porras here maps a liminal space with a fine balance of spontaneity and judgement, building towards a revelation which occurs--so as to preserve the mystery--just out of view. [May 2012, p.70]

The Footwork moves might be hard to master, nut there's every chance your brain will o a jig to this. [May 2012, p.66]

The unit sound tight and integrated. [May 2012, p.62]

The second set might not be as powerful as its predecessor, but the milieu it conjures is still engrossingly evocative. [May 2012, p.61]

Perlas is debonair, contemporary and redolent of that old seductive charge. [Mya 2012, p.58]

Their debut album is even more extreme. [May 2012, p.57]

It's doubtful that the official soundtrack for Dredd will be anything as satisfying as this atmospheric homage to the mean streets of the future. [May 2012, p.56]

An interesting example of a performer getting more experimental and simultaneously more studio-savvy, Chenaux has produced his best work yet. [Mar 2012, p.51]

His work manages to square Cecil Taylor with Ralph Vaughan Williams. [Feb 2012, p.72]

Wong knows that to build up this depth of texture he has to restrict the harmonic content, but endless repetition of pentatonic scales played very fast by 100 Fender Tele-wielding Wong doppelgangers loses it lustre as a listening experience some considerable time before the 16th track reaches its conclusion. [Feb 2012, p.68]

It is an utterly twisted delight. [Feb 2012, p.68]

Iradelphic often feels lost in a borrowed soundworld. [Apr 2012, p.68]

Some handle the group's distorted guitars with a squeamishly light touch in the pursuit of sleek House and Techno. [Apr 2012, p.68]

Transistor Rhythm is functional and stylistically up to date yet modestly unique. [Apr 2012, p.68]

It evokes so many emotions in a single track, and wrestling with its bittersweetness affects you in the gut. [Apr 2012, p.67]

They actually have something fresh to express. [Apr 2012, p.62]

Urstan can be seen as a remedial effort. [Apr 2012, p.58]

It all adds up to a queasy--but pleasurable--kind of time-travel sickness. [Mar 2012, p.67]

Sweet Heart Sweet Light isn't the best thing to bear the Spiritualized name but when Pierce aims for epic emotion as on "Get What You Want," his affectingly plaintive vocal sandwiched between Visconti strings and buzzing organ, the continued potency of his vision is evident. [Mar 2012, p.65]

Disappears present an album that sounds pretty confident in its pursuit of forward motion yet distractingly familiar. [Mar 2012, p.65]

Yes, it's disappointing that Stewart fails to stretch the musical imagination at the same tome, but to roll you eyes at the lack if sophistication or concussive originality is to shun the bigger picture. [Mar 2012, p.60]

It's a surprisingly luxuriant record. [Mar 2012, p.58]

With an outfit like Napalm, one looks for the subtle touches, and they're present: clean vocals on "Analysis Paralysis" and "The Wolf I Feed," a psychedelic burst of guitar noise on "Leper Colony." [Mar 2012, p.58]

Mouse on Mars's melodic power has been greater across the years, but the textural richness of Parastrophics is unmatched. [Mar 2012, p.57]

Ghosts continues the work of previous albums, but nonetheless manages to be a blast of fresh air. [Mar 2012, p.57]

Foreign Body evokes alienation from a bottomless chasm of introspection. [Mar 2012, p.57]

They're wise enough to leave breathing space, such as the final minute of "The Hurt That Finds You First," which codas into a swishing corridor of guitar licks, or "The Last vigil," which brings the album wordlessly to rest on a pall of interleaved, echoing guitar chimes. [Mar 2012, p.56]

The trio are in classic 1970s rock mode throughout. [Mar 2012, p.53]

More than half of Pretty Ugly combines vocals prominently into the mix after a style that sometimes flounders in its own ambition. [Mar 2012, p.52]

The recipe still works. [Mar 2012, p.52]

The five pieces do indeed feel like direct transmissions from Batoh's withered soul. [Mar 2012, p.50]

Like O'Rouke, Ambarchi skips light-footed across vast terrain in under an hour, and comes out with something that resonates perfectly. [Mar 2012, p.50]

He's certainly dextrous enough as a rapper to accommodate this musical schizophrenia, bobbing and weaving with a raw aggression that also serves to mask that he has little to say. [Mar 2012, p.69]

Back On Time does reek of that era (1990s) rather than more recent productions trying belatedly to push the same buttons. [Mar 2012, p.68]

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]

There is a resounding thinness to Purple Naked Ladies and its finest moments sound like a collection of scratch tracks from a lost Erykah Badu/Neptunes session circa 1998. [Mar 2012, p.54]

Like most blockbusters, TM103 lacks some subtlety and depth, but is nevertheless preposterously entertaining, almost unerring anthemic stuff. [Feb 2012, p.71]

The lyrical intricacy and rhythmic playfulness of old are still there, but an arthritic creakiness creeps in, especially when he indulges in hackneyed poetism and dodgy wordplay. [Feb 2012, p.71]

As empty experiences go, New album is one of the best. [Feb 2012, p.68]

I Love You is rich enough with textural ambiguities and seething digital soups to easily warrant repeat visitations. [Feb 2012, p.65]

This recently unearth gem from Delmore is a fascinating insight into the creative mind of one of the brightest lights of the Greenwich Village breadbasket circuit, Karen Dalton. [Feb 2012, p.63]

You can practically hear Lindstrom reaching for his wizard hat and robes at times, but equally Six Hats is right on time, digging into similar disposable digitalisms to James Ferraro's Far Side Virtual, all without bursting that disco bubble. [Feb 2012, p.61]

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]

The Caretaker's music works best as a static pattern amidst digital flux. [Feb 2012, p.56]

They stick to their strengths--menacing songs about breaking peoples noses and such. [Jan 2012, p.70]

Just like the great dub albums of the past, this is one that will provoke revisits to the original. [Jan 2012, p.67]

Much of the album is soothingly entrancing. [Jan 2012, p.64]

He's tightened his flow ever so slightly, but the brutal artlessness of his writing and character remains. [Jan 2012, p.69]

Their music is an exercise in reductionism: how little does a tune need to be tune? Yet, somehow these non-tunes niggle away till they lodge firmly in the memory tissue. [Jan. 2012, p.66]

Wiley is one of those rare double-threats, blessed with both production and MCing abilities. [Jan. 2012, p.64]

A powerful and evocative sound journey. [Jan. 2012, p.64]

Putting it plainly, this stuff sounds really old. The beats are dull, flat and 'blunted' in the least appealing sense. [Jan 2012, p.56]

As with most of these tracks, the effect is cumulative, and if Co La's modus operandi at first appeared to be almost flippant, the resulting music is inescapably hypnotic. [Jan 2012, p. 52]

Sound stretches and stretches without ever threatening to crack, and you start to long for some crude and rude collisions; a belch, a digression, a protest, an accident... [Machine guns blasts in the second half come] too late, and too orderly. [Dec 2011, p. 63]

The framework is so decentered there's barely a frame. That, it turns out, leaves room for the work. [Dec 2011, p.52]

It's more letdown than meltdown, as veteran drummer Steve Reid runs out steam about halfway through disc two. [Dec 2011, p.70]

There's no bullshit and no nonsense here, but listening to this album,, you might end up wishing that there was. [Dec 2011, p.68]

Metallica's unrelenting sledgehammer style works as the perfect complement to Reed's vision of compassionless love, with monolithic chords deployed with almost surgical precision wile he dissects relationships w of masochism and power. [Dec 2011, p.63]

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

Work (work, work) is a sophisticated response to a reality paralyzed by consumerism. [dec 2011, p.56]

It's a beguilingly well-delivered statement in a dialect that was sidelined in favor of the cult of bass or the florescent synths. [Dec 2011, p.53]

The mood is subdued, the backing spare, meditative, but--as we've become used to with Bush--lacking in any adventurousness of spirit, at points, you could even describe it as late night jazz club tasteful. [Dec 2011, p.52]

Transcending its function as a score, this music works as a collection of instrumental vignettes, individual yet circular in structure. [Nov 2011, p.64]

It's the generous flow of rapt, wistful melody that makes Severant such an appealing prospect. [Nov 2011, p.72]

Sadly it feels like the gestation period has robbed Joker's music of some of its immediacy. [Nov 2011, p.72]

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]

After four decades, the album's concentrated blend of brutalism and intricacy, fluidity and fracture, sound as uncompromising as ever. [Nov 2011, p.69]

At this moment, Bad As Me might be his best ever. [Nov 2011, p.68]

This pairing actually works almost as well as the one that produced that incredible LP [1964's Folk Roots, New Routes]. [Nov 2011, p.67]

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]