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

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]

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]

How you feel about the LP will reflect how far you’re into its comic meets splatter trick. It feels sketchy and underdeveloped to me. [Apr 2019, p.68]

“Sky Burial” gives us a melodic refrain of “I’ve been looking for you” bouncing over phantasmal electronic, squelching synths and a bass that almost clangs with detuning; “Dyma Fy Robot” revels in Metal Mickey vocals and a tumble of discombobulated percussion and trilling birdsong; “Tiny Witch Hunter” tangles helium-fuelled vocals with wailing sax and African rhythms. [Dec 2018, p.59]

After long, lean years of straight edge piety and arthouse restraint, guitar solos that don't hold anything back are as refreshing as they are liberating. [#224, p.56]

For all the homemade, quirky charm on show here -- and the album has plenty of wide open, lyrical moments -- Ether Teeth leaves behind a lingering, moody, melancholy aftertaste. [#231, p.60]

Pleasantly ear friendly and leaves no unpleasant odour or lingering aftertaste. [#243, p.74]

Infinity Ultra keeps going with the introspective synth symphonies, but there are a couple of spots where it’s also up for a party, although maybe one where the dancefloor is full of blissed out narcoleptics. [Aug 2017, p.63]

An excellent showcase of their different approaches. [Oct 2007, p.55]

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

I can’t recommend this as a great hiphop record or remotely the state of the art right now. But for fans it’s an essential, harrowing work – Gang Starr’s equivalent of Big Star’s Third. [Jan 2020, p.60]

His songs are still gauzy and intangible, the breathy vocals offering lyrical wisps that only hint at turbulent emotions. [Aug 2015, p.58]

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]

Who Do You Love? may be a tacit admission by Norway’s Årabrot that they can push that sound no further. There’s an unlikely, boisterously garage rock vibe to much of this record, albeit larded with gothic drama by Kjetil Nernes’s vocal approach. [Nov 2018, p.65]

Unfortunately, for all the insight, this willingness to play victim often overshadows the incisiveness of the MC's observations when it come to the beats he has chosen to rail over. [Sep 2008, p.66]

If Magic 2 reveals that Nas can definitely still rap, it also continues his unfortunate run of uninspiring production choices. There are enjoyable moments, like the 50 Cent assisted “Office Hours”, the ominous string driven force of “Motion”, and the mesmerizing penmanship on “Slow It Down”, but overall the album falls short for an artist of Nas’s stature. [Sep 2023, p.68]

Sounds at times as much like an audio documentary of Cameron's Britain as a collection of electronic songs. [Oct 2015, p.62]

Likeable but fairly forgettable listen. [Feb 2016, p.57]

His arch over-emoting robs his songs of any sense of genuine feeling. [Feb 2013, p.60]

Melvins' evolution from potential stoner rock dinosaurs to 21st century sound shifters is complete. [Jul 2008, p.52]

Sic Alp's latest might make for acceptable audio wallpaper--nice tunes and all, just ragged enough to contrive an illusion of edginess--but it crumbles under closer scrutiny. [Mar 2011, p.58]

The record inevitably calls to mind such seminal sci-fi soundtracks as The Terminator and Blade Runner. ...The album is nonetheless imbued with an intrinsic purposiveness which emphatically renders its sounds meaningful in excess or independent of conceptual determination. [Dec 2017, p.49]

At times this soundtrack feels like a library music album with umpteen variations of the same cue, at different speeds and edit times – but the piano-led “Strodes At The Hospital”, the guitar solos and growling synth bass of “Hallway Madness” and the many moods of “It Needs To Die” are moments of fresh interest. [Dec 2021, p.61]

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]

A richly nuanced album, and eloquent in its restraint. [#257, p.57]

Is it fun? Well, yes, even if it does end up sounding like 15 different musical assemblages from an equal number of historical periods playing at once. [Feb 2016, p.59]

It's a startlingly consistent album--dazzling, baffling and sprawling in the same way that Russell and his work was. [Dec 2014, p.50]

In truth most of it is middling stuff. [Oct 2011, p.62]

Parts of Dark Crawler are thrilling. But it sounds less like a confident stride forward than a cautious toe dipped into an unpromising future, one eyeball trained wistfully on the past. [Nov 2012, p.66]

The results are pleasing and anticlimactic at once. [#240, p.57]

Nothing Is Quick In The Desert shows them in fantastic form, sidestepping those laboured moments of musical correctness that made 2015’s Man Plans, God Laughs so patchy, and focusing on the kind of ear-popping chaos that made so much of 1994’s Muse Sick-N-Hour Mess Age so uniquely addictive. [Sep 2017, p.55]

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

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

Beautifully performed, but otherwise unadventurous. [#243, p.69]

Musically the project is weighed down by Haigh’s hugely uninteresting and one-dimensional piano playing. ... Haigh’s ear for electronic texture does do some of the heavy lifting for which his piano playing is not equipped. [Feb 2020, p.47]

The production has remained faithfully jagged and abrasive, where a trebly and bass-starved sonic narrative enforces a fresh take on what continues to be intense and difficult listening. [Apr 2019, p.50]

They're indubitably human this time around. [Jun 2015, p.54]

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

["f=(2.5)"] has a nice queasy seasick vibe, but feels over-egged, with too many ideas thrown at it too quickly. Other tracks repeat this formula with diminishing returns and cut 'n' paste fatigue sets in.... "f=(2.6)" is a lot more fun. [Oct 2015, p.48]

What could have ended up sounding like sketches, are now completed pieces,m full of suspense flashback, refrains ad other temporal tricks. [Oct 2011, p.61]

A resplendent albeit slightly cloying selection of meticulously arranged songs, bloated with instrumental detail and performed in a way that makes the sound like a revived soundtrack for some old, forgotten art house movie. [Oct 2014, p.61]

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

He doesn’t sound quite engaged anywhere on Lady, Give Me Your Key – more like a talented but wayward kid trying out for the school show. [Nov 2016, p.75]

Rather than fetishing these sound sources, Neubaten vacuum-pack the lot inside a hermetic and constricting production that is immensely disturbing. [#241, p.57]

There's everything to like about this release, but nothing to grip or to enage the senses... Stereolab have now defined and refined themselves to a point where they are almost invisible. [#211, p.53]

May be the year's most surprising pure pop pleasure--precisely because it's nothing like you'd expect a pop album to be. [#224, p.61]

To counter the straightforward songs there's a raucous stoop-start freakout on the likes of "Beat" and "Separate." [Sep 2013, p.63]

The Redeemer, despite its pinpoint sonics, doesn't take the logical next step of offering a moment of reflection or clarity. [May 2013, p.50]

The songs that Kramer left behind, however, turn out to be wholly life affirming and full of energy – and what seems at first like a tagged solo project reveals itself to be informed by an intimate understanding of the values that MC5 stood for, with Kramer fanning the embers of the group to keep the Motor City spirit burning. [Nov 2024, p.53]

Each song on Universe Room offers up a unique aural sensation that becomes more acute with repeated hearings. While some of the material takes several playbacks to fully tune into, other songs such as the opening “Driving Time” (with its crackling night-time cricket chorus intro), the mysterious “I Will Be A Monk”, the Pixies sounding “Elfin Flower With Knees” and hit single (surely!) “Fly Religion” become instant ear worms burrowing their way into your brain. [Mar 2025, p.59]

The problem is that this music, heard purely as a piece of product rather than as part of a wider performance with site-specific logic, leaves the listener with too much time in which to speculate what wider agenda the group may be spinning. [May 2018, p.54]

In flashes it could be a parallel universe in which Mahavishnu Orchestra ended up inventing Japanese city pop: a luxuriously hi-tech vision of urban utopia. But just as often it has the futile atmosphere of those projects in which string quartets would perform Aphex Twin. [May 2017, p.61]

Niblett takes the old quiet-loud dynamic and stretches it to unexpected lengths. [#258, p.68]

The too brief, purely instrumental “Sensational” is the best track, with suggestions of Weather Report’s jazz rock expansiveness. But the general impression is gimmicky and lightweight – effects without causes. [May 2020, p.66]

[Tipsy] painstakingly process small episodes of manufactured excess and thoughtless musical effect into tracks evoking the giddy pleasures to be found in running your favourite party tapes at the wrong speed. [#206, p.81]

Buck's refusal to recognise musical boundaries and his instinctive ability to pick out elements that work together--sometimes surprisingly so--have given us a genre-bending album of high artistic vision, spit and grit. [#258, p.52]

Ununiform demonstrates that Tricky has retained his sense of adventure; even at its most opaque and cryptic lyrically, his music remains hypnotic. [Nov 2017, p.64]

This one hits the mark more confidently, with all the earthiness she once brought as foil to John Martyn's aerier levitations. [Apr 2014, p.57]

Forget about the backstory, though, and it's clear that h remains a truly innovative MC, and Ultimate Victory is stronger than its predecessor for one reason. [Nov 2007, p.70]

Unlike the alluring textural build-up that precedes it, this rocking culmination feels frustratingly empty, as if missing a voice. ... Eventually [on "8 Spring Street"] a groovy, almost accidental rock lick is dispersed by a radiant conclusion. ... [On "Galaxies (Sky)"] Picked and bowed strings sound pleasant like wind chimes, then painful like nails scraping across a blackboard. The guitarists’ incessant repetitions are reminiscent of Orthrelm’s OV until a lone guitar breaks the cycle by oscillating sharp chords, augmenting them to saturation. [Oct 2019, p.56]

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

Parallels frustrates as much as it entrances because it feels like a collection of separate tracks corralled together for expedience. [Sep 2017, p.53]

An agreeable mix of electro, retro-rave breaks and thumping party house. [Aug 2018, p.66]

It’s a shame the tracks are so short – after a while it all starts to feel frustratingly sketchy and cramped. [Sep 2022, p.56]

[New Facts Emerge] finds the group in passable but not especially inspiring form. [Sep 2017, p.59]

The Residents walk a precarious line between American underbelly creepiness and a more mannered absurdism. [#254, p.63]

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]

Each compositional element is perfectly judged, not a note wasted, and it's very beautiful indeed. [Jun 2013, p.61]

Lyrically Public Enemy's new album packs no surprises. [Oct 2007, p.75]

Given the unequaled brilliance of their SST era, it;s tempting to compare and contrast, but those who do so risk missing out on the often excellent music the Kirkwood brothes are making now. [May 2011, p.60]

We find reflective confessionals that are powerful and unexpectedly confrontational in their bareness. This is aloneness as selfcontainment rather than avoidance, honest emotions as seeking communion rather than victimhood. [Aug 2018, p.65]

Optical Delusion’s seven different guest vocalists yield wildly differing results, ranging from hits to misses. [Apr 2023, p.67]

This can be thrilling, unnerving and just occasionally tiresome. [#245, p.53]

Just as there's something inescapably seductive about fast cars in a nocturnal metropolis, there's something innately pleasurable about this Emeralds release. [Nov 2012, p.58]

Another big fat splat of technicolour vomit from Lightning Bolt drummer Brian Chippendale's solo project. [Apr 2013, p.51]

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]

It refuses any stylistic centre that might tie together its genre signifiers. [Mar 2015, p.58]

Sometimes he might repeat tricks, but his is a freedom few will ever know. [Feb 2016, p.60]

It’s a beautiful album, easy to play and dance to, but no less than Seun’s, tinged with enough bitterness, anger and sorrow to provoke deep thought about West Africa’s richest and most problematic musical legacy. [Apr 2018, p.51]

This album finds itself wandering far too into pop territory, without the accompanying substance and adventure that made his preceding releases so refreshing. [Oct 2019, p.67]

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]

Screen Time is comprised of ambient guitar music, more often than not disinterested in rhythm and more focused on creating a feel and vibe that’s both haunting and cinematic. [Mar 2022, p.52]

The beats are straighter and more polished, and a degree of shine has replaced bedroom-engineered grit. [Dec 2012, p.75]

At times the tracks become as texturally rich and contradictory as those of Actress on 2014's Ghettoville. [Sep 2016, p.58]

Jocular and enjoyable to flip through, but the nagging feeling that leaks through is that this collection is little more than a respite for Giant Sand until Gelb returns from the bunker with enough fresh material to record a real new album. [#216, p.63]

Lyrically it is all shamelessly hollow, but Ross's album is seductively swish, its production sophisticated and strings and saxophone abound. [Oct 2012, p.75]

Without bass or rhythmic anchor, the pair create a sense of immeasurable depth, as though listeners bob helplessly on the surface above an unfathomable abyss; a feeling heightened by how Gordon’s vocals often resemble abject cries into the void. [Dec 2016, p.55]

Clark [is] aiming for what he calls full mind distortion. The title track delivers. [Sep 2012, p.72]

The cumulative effect of these strange patchwork songs as in the end ambivalent. [Sep 2015, p.48]

A fastidiously crafted and appealingly damp hour of digital earthsong. [#229, p.57]

Guru is... pushing the same grim consistency that makes folks describe Gang Starr albums as 'solid', not budging, not boring, but not better than Moment of Truth. [#234, p.73]

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]

Things heat up a bit on “Misanthrope Gets Lunch” and “Oblivion Sigil”, when the shrill bursts from Kyp Malone’s synthesizer and Marcos Rodriguez’s guitar face off against one another like Irmin Schmidt and Michael Karoli of Can did on Delay 1968, but sadly, those are the only flashes of excitement to be found on the release. [Oct 2020, p.59]

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

This is a collection of songs that the group genuinely love and it shows. [Apr 2013, p.61]

While King may not be quite as adept a riff craftman as his late partner, the headbanging intensity and shout-along choruses that have always marked their best material are still present. [Sep 2015, p.51]