The barbershop harmonies are, as always, impeccable, while the blend of acoustic and electronic textures is subtle and unforced. [Mar 2011, p.58]

The songwriting is strong.

There's a great danger in finding beauty in suffering, but this album takes that risk and reaps great dividends. [Mar 2011, p.54]

Listening with a heart opened with affection kindled by Mascis's warm and defeated drawl, there's much to engage the latent Dinosaur fan looking for a still moment. [Mar 2011, p.52]

Better, Perhaps, to hear How To Dress Well as the latest in a lineage of lo-fi bedroom songwriting dating back to Sebadoh and Smog in the early 1990s, via Alexis Taylor, Antony Hegarty, Jamie Lidell even, and perhaps as far back as Green Gartside, and his would be soul diva falsetto. [Mar 2011, p.50]

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

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]

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

In the end, it's the aural equivalent of skyscrapers built out of wattle and daub. [Mar 2011, p.49]

It's clever stuff, but if it's sweat you want, you're probably better off going for a run. [Mar 2011, p.48]

The music is so devoid of anything to grab onto, listening to it is rather like plummeting at speed through the artificial landscape constructed for the film. [Mar 2011, p.48]

Like Portishead, this album may very well achieve background ubiquity, but that should not be allowed to obscure the strangeness and currency of this record. [Mar 2011, p.46]

The whole album feels like a coda, a soundtrack to the closing credits of a career that has taken them far beyond the exploratory punk of their roots. [Nov 2010, p.53]

The warm campfire feel to much of Bardo Pond indicates just how much the likes of MV&EE owes this outfit, but MV&EE seldom sound this convincingly elsewhere. [Dec 2010, p.58]

There's an ineffable quality to No Joy's music that truly works. [Dec 2010, p.51]

It's tempting to consider The Ex as Holland's The Fall, but that wouldn't be quite right--de Boer's pronouncements lack the gnomic bite of Mark E Smith. But these free thinkers are still taking more risks than Salford's finest have considered in years. [Dec 2010, p.46]

This may be the first solo Eno work that is entirely without interest. It is bafflingly below par. [Dec 2010, p.45]

The reason it all works is because with repetition and familiarity comes discipline and rigour--and Wire still have a lively and open relationship with both of them. [Feb 2011, p.57]

There's a sparse but fluid lyricism to Chasny's tumbling, post-Takoma guitar style. [Feb 2011, p.56]

There are many beautiful instants here, but their relentless abstraction also harbours a lingering sense of decorative indulgence. [Feb 2011, p.54]

Thankfully, Underneath The Pine burns brightly at both ends. [Feb 2011, p.51]

Earth may no longer startle, but against the odds Carlson survives, and this engaging dignified music is both testament and soundtrack to that survival. [Feb 2011, p.50]

There are several memorable songs here, but the offhand, one-take atmosphere makes the project slighter than it might have been. [Feb 2011, p.50]

This is crystalline and intoxicating: an album to return to repeatedly for inspiration. [Feb 2011, p.48]

[Wyatt's voice} is not the most technically 'correct' voice, but in the setting of Ros Stephen's arrangements for string quartet, with Gilad Atzmon adding alto saxophone, it is as though that uncertain crack, that flaw floating in the clear quaver of his voice is a precise match for the happysad ambiguities that haunt so many jazz standards. [Oct 2010, p.62]

Though he's lacking some in terms of identity and he'll probably never be a technical monster, he benefits from the same instinctive ability to ride a beat's pocket that rapping producer predecessors like Large Professor and, yes, Dilla himself possessed. [Nov. 2010, p. 66]

This extended incubation period has paid dividends. [Nov 2010, p.65]

The result is an improbably appealing melange of hyperslick R&B and musoid avant-Metal, where mid-1080s Radio Top Shop melodies nestle in the artful embrace of surgically enhanced riffola and soaring, pitchwheel punishing minimoog solos. [Nov 2010, p.65]

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]

Ancestral Star occasionally sounds so close to that group's 2005 Hex; Or Printing In The Infernal Method that it sometimes feels like a magnificently constructed reworking. [Nov 2010, p.64]

The songwriting is at times patchy....But the noise of Le Noise sets it above Young's last few albums. [Nov 2010, p.62]

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]

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

The polished arrangements, alien harmonies and attention to detail that have characterised Stereolab output over the years are all present and to the usual high standard. [Nov 2010, p.60]

Fans are unlikely to be disappointed, but if you're expecting a new direction, look somewhere else. [Nov 2010, p.52]

Their debut album King Night defies genre tagging and, for once, lives up to the drooling media accolades already smeared on it. [Dec 2010, p.54]

The sound is persistently visceral even as the succession of surfaces and interventions belies a planned set of juxtapositions. [Dec 2010, p.52]

As a prank or a statement, Expekoration is a particularly lazy one. [Dec 2010, p.50]

Lil B's slower, more ruminative delivery here feels far braver for being more exposed and vulnerable. [Dec 2010, p.50]

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]

The duo fashion a collection of bright funny and often extremely beautiful songs that bristle with invention. [Aug 2010, p.58]

'Corporate Cannibal' is the exception, and Jones, a miracle of nature at Meltdown, proves more fallible on Hurricane. [Nov 2008, p.64]

Her voice remains a beguiling instrument, but there's a sense that the attempt to ditch the kitsch and connect more directly is compromising the originality of her vision. [Oct 2010, p.60]

This EP chases Cosmogramma into the same territory, but seems to favor consistent, looping palettes and original electronics over the latter's ad hoc sampling. [Oct 2010, p.66]

Swans are alive, utterly. A terrible beauty is reborn. [Sep 2010, p.51]

One of his purely enjoyable recordings. [Sep 2010, p.68]

The music veers between between a kind of funk slop with trippy organ squelches and good ol' fashioned rawk with biblical overtones, It feels a little like drowning in a bath of Jack Daniels, but not in a good way. [Sep 2010, p.53]

There's nothing on their fourth album that couldn't have been recorded in the early to mid-1980s. [Sep 2010, p.50]

Together, these two collections add up to a desolate statement that is naked enough to make listening feel like a act of voyeurism. [Sep 2010, p.62]

Ultimately, though, one crucial element is missing: El-P's voice. His desperate, throbbing-forehead-vein rapping is as vital as his sound as the synths or the beats, and this disc would have been vastly improved by even one bilious verse. [Aug 2010, p.61]

He telegraphs all too simplistic rhymes schemes and rarely offers subject matter beyond deeply cliched braggadocio. He's rapping like he doesn't want to be there. [Oct 2010, p.67]

There is aimlessness on occasion--the mainly instrumental "OVNI" frankly just sounds like messing around--but for the most part the sense of glee in vigorous sound making for cranky and rebellious ends is infectious. [Aug 2010, p.86]

If Richter was attempting to instill some of the haunted bleakness of Winterreise into his own music, he has certainly succeeded. [Jul 2010, p.60]

It all slides down very easily--but there's isn't much of an aftertaste. [Aug 2010, p.66]

He frequently seems bored with his own raps, rarely breaking his monotone and indifferently fluctuating between bragging about the quality of his weed and bragging about nothing. The record's saving grace comes with reemergence of producer Ski Beatz. [Sep 2010, p.68]

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]

The album is the product of a consistent vision, synthesizing hip-hop's beat architecture and sound manipulation with bespoke funk playing. [Sep 2010, p.50]

The results are mixed. The album never fully escapes the feeling of rootless hipster genre-rifling. But the skill of Mast and Stroud at engineering riffs cannot be denied. [Jul 2010, p.60]

It seems likely Buzz and company have also been listening to a fair bit of Magma and Aphrodite's child, given the interludes of unaccompanied percussion, brooding Gothic keyboards and tightly complex arrangements which result in the most consistently impressive album this line-up has released to date. [Jul 2010, p.64]

There are signs of eclectism creeping in, but these are balanced by the group's tendency to consolidate its progression with a rearguard action of sheer brute force. [Jul 2010, p.56]

This mood of rocking-chair wistfulness becomes soporific, and there are times when, frankly, the mind, unjabbed by the sort of stimulus that was once Byrne & Eno's stock in trade, begins to wander. [Oct 2008, p.54]

His maniacal energy is infectious. [Nov 2008, p.77]

Hebden is clearly striving for dancefloor impact--but Reid's drumming is so untethered and, frankly, messy, that it sucks the explosions out of whatever bombs Hebden's trying to drop. [Dec 2008, p.60]

The elegantly bruised production is so captivating that I'm left longing for Ripatti to once again sink the vocals intot he subliminal and the sublime, as he did on "Vocalcity." [Nov 2008, p.66]

This 21st century Berlin sounds more muscular and dangerous, but not without a certain delicacy either. [Nov 2008, p.68]

It all makes for an album which is strangely boring; the baroque detailing becomes an inaudiable blur. [Dec 2008, p.65]

This is one of the best garage pop sides sine The Chills' own "Brave Words." [Dec 2008, p.70]

Once you make the adjustment and accept these songs for what they are, ther are moments of loveliness. But for the most part, one can onlyy wonder what attracted Russell to indulge in this sort of stuff given his more renowned output. [Nov 2008, p.68]

There's Me And There's You, it turns out, a perfectly logical oddity. [Nov 2008, p.62]

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

It all sounds wonderful, sparkling and glistening. Yet it doesn't make a dent that one might expect. [Oct 2008, p.56]

If the crackling electronic chaff of previous efforts seems less dominant this time around, it most likely because the group have learned to skillfully incorporate it into their increasingly accomplished and accessible songcraft. [Nov 2008, p.74]

Just as David Tibet uses English folk to create his own apocalyptic mythos, so Wood takes the bare bones of Americana and makes something personal and timeless. [Oct 2008, p.58]

There's little in the way of structural reinvention, but then Oldham has never really been a sonics man, and the success of this album rests on one's appreciation of his songwriting alone. [Oct 2008, p.52]

Pioulard's work is a remarkably effortless cohabitation between bedroom electronics and wistful songwriting. [Dec 2008, p.64]

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]

Nomad is well-name--but what's most striking is not its diversity, but its coherence. [Dec 2008, p.73]

Offend Maggie is the sound of a group mind at work, deep in spontaneous collective play--but a kind of play taken very very seriously. As it should be. [Dec 2008, p.58]

It's a rich mix, and though parts of this album consists of pumped-up club anthems, plus the notorious, raw, 'Club Action,' from thier debut "Yo EP," there is enough grit in the polish to keep it interesting. [Oct 2008, p.66]

With none of the barking dogs found on "Son," Un Dia generally limits itself to guitars, synths, voice and percussion, a more intimate, insular palette of sounds that is sometimes too subdued to really egage. [Oct 2008, p.60]

It could all, of course, be unbearably mannered, but the duo's constant striving for layered perfection, contrasted with the very human qualities of the vocals, keep it grounded in some sort of feeling. [Sep 2008, p.61]

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

With more emphasis on achieving that elusive breakout moment than its predecessor and infinitely less grit, here Sway shows little of the infectious individuality he used to bring to less commercial work. [Oct 2008, p.72]

This is a magical and bafflingly arresting album. [Sep 2008, p.53]

Though you'd be justified in hanging this writer for conflating person and persona, you're asked to contemplate the uneasy positivity that chacterizes Paper Trail's three mot popular songs. [Dec 2008, p.74]

A usually sharp MC, Murs sounds conflicted throughout, a little too anxious to be loved by everyone. [Dec 2008, p.74]

For every track that delivers the expected, another does something quite extraordinary. [Oct 2008, p.72]

There's not much variety over these nine tracks, but to hell with variety when you sound this good. [Dec 2008, p.56]

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]

They were the first on the block with this particular subgenre and are still in front of a massive paxk following in their wake. [Dec 2008, p.72]

While bound by established conventions, [it] is nonetheless rich and dazzling enough to soundtrack a saga that exists outside the bounds of normal human capabilities. [Oct 2008, p.60]

Keith's industry gripes are implicit from his two decade career as the Absurd Outside Rapper--so it's a shame he feels the need to come so blunt. [Dec 2008, p.74]

There are many memorable tracks here, but you still can't help missing the scratchy textures and humid atmosphereics of "Maxinquaye" and "Pre-millennium Tension." [July 2008, p.60]

The overall effect may be part shamanic dance to the thrum of the universe part 1980s arcade game, but All The Way exploits the transcendent powers of both. [Sep 2008, p.50]

Good, clean fun. [Oct 2008, p.71]

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]

I can attest that despite initial misgivings, this does grow on you. [Sep 2008, p.64]

This EP, the first in a projected triptych, shows the group in their best light. [Nov 2008, p.74]