The overall effect is that of a mutated being, inexplicably functional but undeniably alive, slowly making sense of the alien world in which it finds itself. [Dec 2021, p.44]

The update here is that the music is from Glasgow, a city apart from the more cosmopolitan hubs of the global dance network, and one that’s increasingly recognised for its ‘scenius’. It’s perhaps these dislocated elements that make Golden Teacher a solid though ultimately unspectacular British curiosity. [Dec 2017, p.52]

Snow Bound adheres to the template he has been carefully fine tuning over the years, a series of thoughtful, occasionally joyful, barbed pop rockers with masked sociopolitical references attached, all artfully designed to hook themselves into your memory and hold fast. [Oct 2018, p.64]

The freshness and spontaneity of a new collaboration shines throughout The Quickening – it ensures a fresh, unmannered feel in its tangled explorations of American landscapes and is all the more compelling for not being too perfectly polished. [Sep 2020, p.46]

Effective, perhaps, as background music for adverts or TV vignettes... The second CD, Heim, is better. [Dec 2007, p.65]

The six loose, expansive tracks on this collection offer a glimpse into the more convivial domestic recording scenario the band were enmeshed in at that time. Free from the need to shape these ideas into conventional structures you hear the band at their most Can-like. [Mar 2022, p.52]

The execution is elegantly minimal and yet alive with textures and warmth, despite the album's melancholy and often morbid content. [Mar 2018, p.55]

Another slapdash cash-in from masked rap's last bastion. [Sep 2012, p.60]

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

7G doesn’t feel so much like an album as an extensive portfolio of a very exciting producer. [Oct 2020, p.52]

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

It's a tribute to Dilla's imagination that every track here has at least a spark of some interest, but ultimately Dillatronic is, like so many exhaustive archival box sets, a dry reminder that brilliance is usually the result of a drafting process. [Dec 2015, p.66]

The quartet sound vital here, powered by a passion that is infectious and thrilling. [Dec 2017, p.52]

Let It Come Down suffers just a little from Pierce's presumably healthier outlook. [#211, p.66]

This is an album, and a genre, to ponder--one that remains musically rich, deep and mysterious. [Aug 2017, p.50]

Encore is Hall’s first record under the moniker since the 1981 single “Ghost Town”, and with guitarist Lynval Golding and bassist Horace Panter in the fold, it feels more like The Specials than anything has in a long time. [Mar 2019, p.59]

Admirable in its candour, if at times hard to swallow. [Dec 2018, p.56]

He’s grown up, but he’s done so better than most, and crucially Mellow Waves hits you not just with ravishing sonics, but with a plangent heart, a sense of emotional growth that fulfils the promise Cornelius’s music has always had. [Aug 2017, p.57]

Where as The Notwist traffic in mellow tempos and beautifully seamless surfaces, Dose and Jel conjure all manner of conniption ta[s and noise. [Jul 2011, p.62]

With its introversion and focus upon the everyday in both subject matter and imagery, the appeal of Shedding Skin depends partly on your appetite for people watching. [Mar 2015, p.48]

Although the hard-hearted and selfconsciously cool may dismiss them as the avant folk scene's answer to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, that's no reason to deny one's self the joyous singalong harmonies of 'Don't Be Afraid, You're Already Dead." [Oct 2007, p.71]

It radiates with a confidence fuelled by acolytes and its fun is infectious. But... the angry cynicism coursing through the album creates a distance between its maker and the listener. [#237, p.53]

Kesto could have been improved with some judicious edits; but when they are at the top of their game, these Finns are undeniably great. [#244, p.59]

It is a difficult task to understand just what the fuss is about. [#236, p.72]

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

Rat Farm has only the occasional flash of brilliance. [Apr 2013, p.53]

Singer's Grave feels like an exercise, something which never be said for the work released under the Palace banner in the 1990s. [Nov 2014, p.72]

A compelling tribute from one iconic vocalist to another. [Sep 2016, p.59]

The sonic centre of gravity is Ranaldo’s instantly identifiable guitar sound, and if you can’t get enough of that, this disc is for you. ... Pàndi’s work with Merzbow and Keiji Haino attests to his ability to hold his own in heavy company, but he restricts himself to sparse, black light coloration throughout this session. Urselli is a bassist and electronic musician as well as an engineer, and while he didn’t do any post hoc editing or overdubbing it’s likely that he is responsible for the recording’s rather amorphous final shape. [Jun 2019, p.63]

As a whole, Goons Be Gone feels strangely anachronistic, but not nostalgic. Retrieved from the heyday of punk rock, but with a lot of its own to say. [Jun 2020, p.59]

A seductive and persuasive look at the lives and human struggles those in power would rather you ignored and disdained. Get connected. [Apr 2021, p.62]

The themes may change, but draped around catchy and crisp melodic motifs, the textures remain as gorgeous as ever. [Jan/Feb 2025, p.95]

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

Shaolin is a pleasingly unpredictable record. [May 2011, p.64]

This is the adult Metallica at last, monolithic, grandiose and grizzled. Maturity suits the band, makes them a weightier proposition than the pursuit of former glories ever could. [Dec 2016, p.62]

Ladd's eclectic and downbeat montage of samples creates a rootless soundscape, seemingly geographically transient, restless, impatient and unsettling. It is the perfect backdrop for Ladd's soul-searching reflexes and rants. [#251, p.54]

These are what protest songs can sound like, feel like and taste like in the 21st century. [#257, p.52]

Wooden Wand's contemporary contributions to songwriting tradition have produced some great work, but on Death Seat he has excelled himself. [Nov 2010, p.64]

Let’s Start Here has a middlebrow sensibility, with plenty of grooves Calvin Harris would approve of. Its best moments come when he unleashes his oddball trill, an evocative sound that bland sentiments like “So surreal, the vibes I feel” can’t quite diminish. [Apr 2023, p.68]

He raps in a stereotypically ‘white’ voice shorn of regional inflections, and the contrast between his deadpan vocals and the beats ranges from startlingly imaginative (the hammering blapper “Fundrazors”) to anodyne (“Indifferent”). [Sep 2022, p.57]

Darkness At Noon works because it doggedly pursues its convictions through to a satisfying conclusion and in doing so creates its own kind of offbeat logic. [#254, p.53]

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

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

he 22a label founder flexes his expansive musical influences across ten new creations. One of the most exciting tracks here is “Buffalo Gurl”. Dividing its time between earlier R&B and sultry jazz chords, it’s the pick me up you didn’t know you needed. [Aug 2019, p.65]

It’s off to a shaky start – for this writer at least – with the lugubrious dirge of Procol Harum's “A Whiter Shade Of Pale” – and I wouldn’t mind never hearing The Small Faces’ “Itchycoo Park”, which follows, again – but The Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset", Pink Floyd’s “See Emily Play” and Tomorrow’s “My White Bicycle” all receive tasteful, stripped back renditions. [Dec 2024, p.54]

Brooks builds eight neat instrumentals from gradually layer guitar, playing in a closed circle with himself, a dialogue that is sometimes affecting but more often banal. [Aug 2014, p.59]

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]

[Co-producer Rick Rubin] is a reductionist, an essentialist, which suits ZZ Top just fine. [Nov 2012, p.67]

The new songs continue to hold the line narrative of the last few Yo La Tengo records without adding much new. But at moments when the performance is so assured, the hairs stand up and you're reminded anew of how the group got you to care. [Aug 2015, p.56]

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]

St. Catherine departs from the lo-fi meditations of earlier releases to explore a fuller bodied sound environment where structures are tighter and colours less smeared. [Sep 2015, p.54]

Glasper is undoubtedly a class act, but the lacks the wildness a Madlib or a Flying Lotus might have brought to this project. [Jun 2016, p.54]

Closer works best instrumentally, as a sonic depiction of the mind, as a dark voyage into inner space. [#236, p.64]

At the heart of Rain On Lens, [Callahan] comes clean for the first time: Smog is subjective, not omnipotent. Hardly a psyche stripped bare, but at least it's a start. [#211, p.65]

Displays more intellectual rigour, subtle discipline and attention to detail than many of their younger contemporaries can ever dream of attaining. [#235, p.56]

Though primarily centered around Sweet's songcraft, Burnt Up on Re-Entry benefits from the judicious incorporation of primitive electronics. [Feb 2013, p.58]

This is digital music with great big jammy thumbprints smeared all over it. The little glitches that patter through any one of UNIEQAV’s 12 instrumentals present the human at the heart of the machine.

Closer Apart is a dazzling bilingual synth pop album that blends the wavy bass and beats of kwaito and gqom with postgrime and UK funky. [Aug 2018, p.58]

There’s a lot to unpack, endless fun to be had cataloguing his references from Three 6 Mafia to Octavia Butler, his consummate brilliance as a wordsmith and architect of flow. ... But it gets monotonous quickly. [Nov 2019, p.52]

The feeling of opiated depressive inertia that weighs it down is compounded by the sugary viscosity of Danger Mouse;s production. Yet it's these slower songs, shaped by Linkous's Country-inflected enervation and Danger Mouse's attention to sonic detail, that work best, while the more up tempo, rockier tracks come off as perfunctory. [Jul 2010, p.53]

As awkwardly beautiful as much of dark Comedy is, it's such a tricky album that it is a difficult to warm to. [Aug 2014, p.62]

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

Only one track matches the flaming cannonball energy of their single, "Politicians In My Eyes"; the herky-jerky "North Street," which is as much funk as punk. [May 2014, p.77]

There Is No Year is a mixed bag of disparate musical styles, played out as an intelligently composed accompaniment for Fisher’s complex political rhetoric. [Mar 2020, p.58]

Valentine has gotten undeniably skilled at being slick; even at its weirdest, this record is quite easy on the ears. ... A welcome tonic. [Apr 2022, p.51]

Perhaps this recording isn't the best way to experience it, then, but, it whets the appetite for an UK performance scheduled for early 2015. [Jan 2015, p.75]

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

Here Before picks up as though they'd never left. [May 2011, p.50]

It works best when blended with his more adventurous tendencies. [Nov 2011, p.64]

The album doesn't wear so well over time. [Mar 2013, p.50]

On some of the songs Langford’s slightly rough and ready approach is the grit that helps produce the pearl; on others it’s made to sound out of place by the very musicians who play his songs so well.

A fascinatingly fractured yet whole album, it is the sound of a man not only investigating but celebrating the full cultural spectrum of his existence. [Apr 2017, p.51]

Laced with a shot of self-doubt that has it coming on almost like an electroclash Exile On Main Street. [#244, p.69]

It has a few surprises and sharp edges, but the structures are unstable. Like the post-rock improv of Aethenor, occasional bolts of energy strike and convulse the players. In its second half, however, 13 finally picks up momentum. [Oct 2016, p.60]

The mood of the album is always upbeat, ending with the forward looking “Vorfreude 2”--the German word meaning an anticipation for future pleasures--and doesn’t venture into any of the weirder, harder, filthier, squelchier corners of electronic music.[Nov 2017, p.66]

What makes Knuckleball Express slightly different from previous Hex albums is that the songs seem slightly straighter, though it’s a matter of moments before the apple cart is upset and a whole packet of noodles is scattered over the mix. [May 2020, p.52]

On occasion, stupidly fun. [Sep 2015, p.44]

As stylistic cross-fertilising vanity projects by rock stars of pensionable age go, this one has bags of charm at least and is eminently listenable. [Jan 2013, p.65]

Pop itself is not a problem, it's just that in Tarwater's take on it nagging tunes and interesting textures are in short supply. [#253, p.65]

There are moments of serene beauty, like "Oubliette" and the seductive gondola romance of "Fragmentation," but the album's action scenes feel glossy and detached, picturesque rather than visceral. [Mar 2016, p.42]

Kingdom's debut album is all pop. Not in the formulaic sense, but in its sophisticated amalgam of everything that is skilled and aesthetic from both mainstream club production and underground dance subgenre. [Mar 2017, p.49]

Lateral is far less remarkable than Luminal. .... It’s hard to discern Wolfe’s impact on what sounds like a typical Eno record. [Jul 2025, p.52]

Fall To Pieces exists in this oxymoronic hinterland of nihilism and resilience, evocative of the contradictions of grief. [Oct 2020, p.64]

On TFCF (short for Theme From Crying Fountain) Andrews comes into his own. The tracks might be loosely structured, ideas, samples, field recordings and styles scattered by the dozen across the album’s 33 minutes, but it’s a sense of a distinctive songwriter exploring fracturedness across a broad spectrum from the dancefloor to the introspective. [Oct 2017, p.64]

While the album is pleasant, it takes a long time to open up. And once opened, it's nice, but hardly revolutionary. [#236, p.61]

Car Alarm strips away the exotic and the curious. [Nov 2008, p.70]

The result is surprisingly seamless and the producer rarely puts a foot wrong. [Nov 2008, p.79]

His first Ninja Tune album Providence showcases an altogether darker side. [Apr 2017, p.62]

Two nostalgia trips for the price of one. [Sep 2011, p.62]

It's clear that Bell retains a sure grasp of form and dynamics. Hard to shake off, however, is the nagging feeling that you've heard all this before. [#236, p.62]

Sadly much of Music Is A Hungry Ghost is marred by a pebbledash of clicks and glitches -- that already overused signifier of au courant production. [#207, p.87]

Season Of Earth is music rooted deep in the black, black earth and whose only limit is the blue, blue sky. [Oct 2011, p.50]

Sifting through these hermetic songs is like coming across a cobwebby box of photographs in an empty home. Tiny fragments of narrative emerge, only to be drowned by ambiguity and absence. [Oct 2018, p.58]

The tracks are curiously undramatic, punching elements in and out like a demonstration reel. [Mar 2013, p.54].

This record has its moments, for instance the squarewave basslines and breakbeats of “Edelweiss” and the outro to “Climb Ev’ry Mountain”. However, as is often the case with Laibach, the pervasive air of calculated irony prevents the album from passing from the ridiculous to the sublime, even when it all gets so silly that on paper it sounds like it should. [Dec 2018, p.52]

Cale is producing involving, forward-moving music that still capable of catching you unawares. [Oct 2012, p.58]

There's no point chasing diminishing returns on a four-track, and the buffed-up West is a kick worth revisiting. [Aug 2011, p.63]

Voyeurs of the disintegration of the human condition will be able to gorge on vicarious thrills to their black heart's content. [#246, p.62]