The album's seven winding tracks, inspired by 1980s country, fit squarely within the impressionistic ambient country movement. But while its influences loom large, the album finds its strongest footing when familiar structures dissolve. [Oct 2025, p.53]

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

Musically, the songs favor stripped-down and straight ahead garage rock production values, often driven by organ chords. [Jul 2013, p.65]

A high-level concept album that never wastes a note. [#266, p.59]

These heavily layered, smoothly produced compositions emit occasional warmth, but coolness is the prevailing order; the intricacies of arrangement demand admiration but fall short of engendering a more heartfelt response. [#204, p.68]

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

[JR Robinson] edited them later into a musical Frankenstein breathing life into the stories of monsters. [Sep 2016, p.59]

The set concentrates on one style and tends to accentuate the crossover aspects of its kinship with house and techno. [Aug 2015, p.55]

The album primarily features solo guitar, harmonica and lap steel, all cloaked in gauzy atmospheres, and often conjuring mental images of a sprawling, rural America. The most compelling moments on the album make a hazy blend of guitar twang and swirling electronics, as on “Outskirts, Dreamlit” whose nostalgic melody tumbles almost without a sense of time. [May 2022, p.52]

There’s no real sense of ebb and flow in concession to the album format, but Active Agents & House Boys ruts away enthusiastically throughout its 58 minute running time without any hint of flag. [Jun 2024, p.48]

It feels rough and raw and sketchy. [#245, p.69]

At heart they're still most comfortable plying scruffy barstool romanticism woven from the same plaid as contemporaries The Replacements and Dinosaur Jr. [Aug 2015, p.58]

Bleed feels more constructed than played, a diorama of dissolving shapes spread out in time. But the piece’s patient evolution and implied but ever-present rhythm all confirm that this is Necks music. [Nov 2024, p.55]

The whole album has a distinct and mothball-smelling late 90s vibe, the parts gelling with a certain clunkiness that characterised their last album Low Impact, as if the two were taking a vacation in their own pasts. Like other people’s holidays, it isn’t always as fun for the onlookers as it may have been for them. Nevertheless, Analogue Creatures features some genuinely lovely work. [Dec 2016, p.60]

Names of North End Women is marginally the more engaging of the two albums, possibly due to the previous creative relationship between Ranaldo and Refree. But All Hands Around The Moment actually illustrates most compellingly the contributions of each collaborator. [Feb 2020, p.55]

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

Much of their output since has been consolatory rather than essential, and ultimately Clone Of The Universe can’t quite escape that tag, but Fu Manchu remain justly loyal to old production values--absurd amounts of bottom end and tube fuzz, basically. [Mar 2018, p.58]

Jeezy may have the most charismatic voice in rap now--a fierce but fine-gravel shout that hits your ears soft like a whisper--and his beat selection remains pitch perfect--but Jeezy still doesn't realise that selling drugs was good only for Jeezy. He's a cartoon, a proforma thug, and when he tries to relate he fails miserably. [Dec 2008, p.74]

The album then settles into a solid groove of high end electro pop with just enough dust to keep it grounded. [Apr 2017, p.62]

The swelling, churchy ambient post-rock of Juliana Barwick’s latest could spill over into pomposity in heavier hands, but the freshly Los Angeles based artist exudes a modest air. [Aug 2020, p.64]

It’s a satisfying--if rather safe--album. [Jul 2018, p.44]

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]

The album is strong in the style, but offers no real surprises, with the familiar mixture of clacking Tuareg rhythm and scorched Sahelian riffing best illustrated here by the fiercely motorik “War Toyed”. [Apr 2017, p.63]

Davachi’s early love of Bach pervades the initial section of “Perfumes I-III”. [Aug 2019, p.54]

There’s a strongly conceived sense of contrast and drama to “Sorcerer” and "Copter," the latter transforming from overwrought mid-80s action show theme to a slick and drugged R&B jam. [Oct 2016, p.63]

Rather than confessional catharsis, Highway Songs has the diaristic, sketchbook feel of the compulsively creative. [Dec 2016, p.64]

Pared back and abrasive, the music is somewhat diffuse compared to Schofield’s earlier records. The hard edges of its rhythms are scattered, the sound so foggy it’s hard to hear. [Jul 2018, p.46]

What's distinctive about Son is that it is more layered and inventive than Segundo and Tres Cosas. [#268, p.58]

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]

Not everything is great--in particular “Lifting You” with Ed Sheeran is about as limp as you’d expect--but even the clumsier moments feel relevant and contemporary. [Feb 2018, p.51]

Modern Cosmology, which pairs Sadier with Brazilian band Mombojó, go some way to sating that desire on debut album What Will You Grow Now?, their second release following an EP released in 2016. Some way is the operative term, it should be said, with album opener “Making Something” as prime an example as anything. Stereolab acolytes will peg that bubbling bass tone in a trice, while the keys of Chiquinho Moreira are something more akin to jazz funk with tropicalia dusting. [Jun 2023, p.55]

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]

Negotiate Steve Osborne's rather dated stadium Techno-rock production, and there's plenty to stimulate here... [#211, p.70]

This is liminal pop music for sure, with Pioulard’s bedroom-recorded mixture of field recordings, dubbing tape experiments, ringing acoustic guitars, glockenspiel and murmuring vocals creating cloudlike, ephemeral textures. [Dec 2016, p.67]

It's the wealth of unexpected production touches crammed into its 25 minutes that really bring Maryland Mansions to life. [#240, p.72]

It's ruling mood of detachment might appeal more to listeners who never went out in the first place and who prefer to experience physical release and emotional engagement through the filer of files, screens and headphones instead. [Jul 2011, p.50]

The resulting heady musical cocktail that Portner serves up will be eagerly drained by his fan base, but the cloying bubble gum aftertaste may leave any newcomers feeling somewhat queasy. [May 2023, p.60]

It's an engaging excursion and a good aesthetic fit for the Blackest Ever Black label, but not really a definitive Prurient release, and ultimately Through The Window leaves the impression of the closing of a chapter, a passage to someplace new. [Feb 2013, p.54]

This is perhaps the group's most straightforward release outside of their intermittent collaboration with late vocalist Ronnie James Dio. [Jul 2013, p.52]

The music--hums, clangs and muffled booms--wields an ominous, oppressive power, especially on headphones, that can create a feeling of queasy horror even for those unaware of the record's backstory. [Nov 2014, p.68]

Earth Junk won't top any end of the year polls, but as another clue in decoding exactly where Hagerty is heading, a scrap with which to re-assemble a much bigger picture, it's essential. [Sep 2008, p. 51]

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]

Monument Builders itself could do with some of that malfunction, some warped colour and cathode ray snow. [Dec 2016, p.69]

It fizzles out in places – there's none of the languor of previous work nor the melancholy that collaborator Jeremy Greenspan perfected in Junior Boys – but at its best this is aural champagne, chill, crisp and delectable. [Aug 2020, p.66]

The album becomes more experimental and confident as it progresses. [#236, p.59]

Combining tight dynamics with the blurred intent of an impressionistic backwsh, some tracks rush by like vast landscapes, with individual features suddenly highlighted in freeze-frames. [#228, p.59]

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

There is a mellowness to the album, underscored by Albini's older, deeper voice, that suggests their edge has been lost. [Nov 2014, p.68]

Pastoral serves to expose the casual but forceful villainy of Robinson and his ilk while emphasising one of folk horror’s core themes: that people are the scariest monsters of all. [Oct 2018, p.53]

The results are tougher and less poised, less prone to pastiche or ironic self-identification. But in the process he’s become a bit workmanlike: you feel he could knock these tunes out to order and they’d all be creditable, but not much more. [Oct 2016, p.63]

This collection, and its atmosphere of sharing a bench with the 20th century’s Mozart as he explores still nascent songs, is an appropriately seductive tease to what will doubtless be a decades-long unearthing of the vault’s untold treasures. The songs themselves, as they’re presented here, really are secondary to this feeling, something like finding a just unearthed message from a departed loved one. [Dec 2018, p.69]

The results may not be especially unpredictable but they sure are fun, the trio milking the testosterone-fueled power-trio/supergroup set-up for all it's worth. [Nov 2014, p.72]

The closer “World” is the culmination of these trials, in which fragments of sound--runs of keys with the uncanny quality of speech, shadowy static, heavily abstract synthesized choirs--drift in a deeply organic and warm silence. [Feb 2018, p.58]

These are elements that need time to present themselves, on an album that requires a retreat inward. It’s the kind of mindquietening escape. [Oct 2018, p.55]

The hi-hats and furiously brushed cymbals of Badalamenti’s pseudo-jazz cues outline these tracks, along with heavy but oddly affectless arco bass. He performs Lynch’s lines, describing scenes of unearthly violence, banality and menace, as if growling the menu of a New York Brooklyn trattoria. What guides the album away from this rather dated aesthetic, apart from the glaring crispness and pitch-black texture of the mixing, is the quality of the noise. [Dec 2018, p.69]

This is no simplistic exercise in cross-cultural groove making--Dyrdahl has responded more to gamelan's harmonic stasis than to its rhythmic insistence. [Jul 2011, p.60]

The slippery polyrhythmic music is a difficult terrain for MCs to conquer. [#253, p.57]

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]

The music is sungura, an upbeat modern pop relative of chimurenga, but the Gonora Sounds take on the style is somewhat more rugged that most. Isaac’s drumming is a downpour of rolls and patters, while his father’s guitar drips cascades of fireflies. [Feb 2022, p.60]

Souleyman’s most recent excursion is seriously upfront music. The Syrian singer’s electro-hype dabke burnouts seem to have been ratchetted up to a degree that makes his own past efforts seem quite mellow. [Feb 2018, p.59]

Ripatti employs a panoply of dynamic breaks and styles without sticking to anything for too long. The results are both claustrophobic and entertaining. [Aug 2022, p.48]

The Invisible Way has Wilco's Jeff Tweedy behind the faders, and he superbly captures the concentrated simplicity of Low's aesthetic. But sometimes the restricted palettes can be a little cloying,[Mar 2013, p.56]

It's far from perfect record--the guests are phoned in, the beats sometime out-cheese pre-breakdown Kanye at his cheesiest--but it has more than a few perfect moments. [Jul 2013, p.68]

Donaldson’s lyrics tend towards the observational, and are often delivered with a wry turn of phrase that can be laugh out loud funny. ... The Town That Cursed Your Name juggles pathos and bathos throughout. [Apr 2023, p.58]

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]

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]

Toure's tone is richly sonorous, his vocal strength such that he actually buttresses and strengthens the tracks... It's a great shame that the sound quality falters on the later tracks. [Jul 2015, p.58]

His voice is better suited to confiding, but it's slapped on top rather than properly featured, and this seems symptomatic of the muddy arranging, But the aim is to swagger and excite, and the group's ragged fervour is not in doubt. [Jun 2015, p.50]

The unlikely tonal blend makes Lux one of the least predictable collections of spiritual songs in pop history. [Jan/Feb 2026, p.90]

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

Belief is one of his more structurally conventional turns. [Mar 2018, p.58]

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

Sauna Youth are a tight unit, their constituent parts meshing into a formidable wall of sound, but it might be an idea to lose a member or two, subtract an element and make space for uncertainty. [Jun 2015, p.52]

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

The album is notable for featuring White's first vocal performance, both on "I Don't Do/ Grand Central", where he's joined in spirited conversation by Zoh Amba, and the title track, on which he narrates his inner life through word association and repetition. It's a taste of a new compositional element that will be interesting to hear develop. The album's other collaborator is White's regular producer Guy Picciotto, whose light touch encourages an egalitarian approach to sound, where everything is in the mix and everything matters. [Jan/Feb 2026, p.94].

The record slips easily into a catalogue that is consistent with the familiar John Maus aesthetic, which will no doubt satiate a voracious fan’s appetite for music that exists outside of time, always and at once. [Jun 2018, p.62]

The bold accessibility and nostalgic tone of Bermuda Drain is a surprise. [Jul 2011, p.60]

How literally Allen wants us to take his nod towards Herman Melville’s whale is left tantalisingly openended, although this tapestry of ghoulishly misremembered tales has an obvious parallel with Melville’s patchwork of story and allusion. [Apr 2020, p.49]

Rising Down's most immediate qualities are the raw aesthetic and the burning importance of its message. [July 2008, p.66]

It's fair to say that not much new ground is broken here, but it's remarkable how endearing their blend of chugging underground pop and frail ragas still sounds. [#210, p.66]

“Stir The Sea” coasts on a choice yowly blues metal riff, but teased out slow jams like “Arcurlarius – Burke” are equally their forte. The vocal resemblance of Brian Markham and Meat Puppets’ Curt Kirkwood helps crystallise a bubbling under comparison with the latter, although Dommengang aren’t in The Puppets’ league when it comes to ingenuity or, frankly, personality. [Aug 2019, p.64]

All told, there are some beautiful moments on this record, as well as a sense that the gap between what Fennelly wants his music to be and what he is able to accomplish is gradually narrowing. [Jun 2018, p.62]

Will depend on how indulgent you personally feel towards the Parliamentary legacy. The smart thing to do would be to purchase tracks selectively and sequence your own version of Medicaid Fraud Dogg. In other words: be wise and sample before you buy. [Jul 2018, p.55]

Bachman probably spent more of Almanac Behind’s production time processing sounds than strumming strings. [Jan 2023, p.61]

Grave Of A Dog presents a challenges to the listener because although it succeeds as a well-executed project, there is a disjunction between form and content. Hayter in particular seems to gesture at a narrative, but its precise nature is left unclear. [Apr 2020, p.60]

These are worn vintage sounds, but the songs here lack the choruses and hooks to invest them with fresh life, and Buttery's voice is forgettable. [Dec 2010, p.46]

Byrne has done a tidy, if not terribly exciting job on the soundtrack. [#235, p.57]

The nine songs her give a reason for detractors to raise their voices and for devotees to hope for something a little more evolved. [Sep. 2007, p.49]

Lacking the eldritch weirdness of Actress's music, their faded grandeur somehow feels strangely mundane, despite their inherent beauty. [Oct 2012, p.62]

It's certainly big, but it's less clear if it's clever. [Jun 2014, p.60]

As it is, Have Fun With God is never less than listenable but seldom more than vaguely pleasant. [Feb 2014, p.44]

A decent film soundtrack. [#219, p.74]

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]

It feels crudely stitched together. [Mar 2011, p.49]

The emphasis this time around is on poppier melodies, but for all its attention to song form, Sonic Nurse feels more like a collection of exercises than a cohesive album. [#244, p.63]

The five tracks penned and played on by PJ Harvey... reverberate with all the dark, elastic abrasion of PJ's best work. [#248, p.66]

They're still worth rooting for just about but mileage -may vary. [Mar 2026, p.54]

Drumming that starts off in a motoric groove warps into something way more minimal and amateurish, something undanceable, yet difficult to resist at least shrugging along to. [Aug 2016, p.59]