The Pyrrhic pleasures of their Confield-era tracks00all those advanced-topology rhythmic angles--remain in the first half of "tac Lacora," sharpened by being somewhat tamed, pushed into the pulsing exhilaration of the second half. [Nov 2013, p.65]

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

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]

Lighten up and wallow in aural filth as Siifu and Liv.e preach on keeping shit clean. Allow such a space for the exquisitely sloppy breaks and moans to work their magic and sudden bursts of clarity, urgent insights. [Jan 2021, p.87]

Minimal Rock N Roll is at its best when hinting at former glories. [Apr 2014, p.63]

A genuine sense of danger and trepidation stalks through these tracks. [#249, p.63]

Human Energy is a rainbow emerging on a clear summer's day. [Nov 2016, p.61]

The music here is beautiful and involving enough to stand up just fine by itself. [Mar 2014, p.59]

The moments of beauty caught fleetingly in the gaps between over-arranged blocks make for frustrated listening. [#218, p.64]

However hit and miss, though, all of these voices and genre grabs are made to sound stylistically coherent. [#236, p.71]

Soundtracking stellar deeps has become one of electronica's most overworked cliches, but in the easy intimacy audible in this encounter, these Ambienaut vets make it sound like a piece of cake. [#247, p.59]

anyone who buys this with the idea of getting significantly reworked material will be disappointed. [May 2015, p.63]

Her latest iteration that limited palette of vintage machines feels trapped in the past; evocative but ossified. [Sep 2015, p.45]

An album which largely plays assured and empty. Genesis is home to a few brilliant moments, however. [May 2016, p.49]

The Divine Feminine is well-intentioned and well-staffed, but ultimately lacks the sort of specificity in vision that would do its subject matter justice. [Nov 2016, p.61]

A modest effort of just over half an hour. [Mar 2019, p.62]

This is pleasant but forgettable music, dissolving the instant it hits the eardrum. [Jul 2023, p.52]

In spite of the album’s inconsistency, it ends on a high note with the sugary Eurotrance tropes and ear-popping lushness of “Love Me Off Earth”, where guest vocals from New York based vocalist Doss convey an otherworldly melancholic euphoria before being pitch-bent into the stratosphere. [Nov 2024, 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]

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]

The rest offer artful and discerning combinations of a number of genre hallmarks, making for a smooth and modern drive. [Oct 2012, p.74]

Over melodic, it sounds like it was made by a TV composer working to a brief for a rave episode. [Apr 2015, p.65]

That persistent footwork pulse holds the album together, preventing it from dispersing into a grey stew of genres. [May 2011, p.53]

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]

This is a visionary coming into his own. [Sep 2013, p.56]

Modern production simply won’t allow for the kind of warm frictive depth in the low end or biteable chunkiness of beats those albums revelled in--but as a dazzling showcase for Bootsy’s still-ill skills it’s great, always problematising what could be politesse with the sheer deranged drive behind Bootsy’s shades, always plumbing for excess as a watchword. [Nov 2017, p.54]

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]

It’s an abstract, often harsh, sometimes silly listening experience. [Apr 2025, p.56]

This particular experiment has left a formerly unpredictable group sounding as though they've been replaced by a bunch of tired retromaniacs. [Apr 2013, p.61]

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

Introduction serves both as a reminder of Thompson's often overlooked sense of humour and an exploration of certain cliches endemic to the pop song, but most importantly, it just rocks. [#266, p.63]

Another thunderous slab of delicious sub-Sabbath riffage with guttural-via-brattish vocal on top. [Apr 2016, p.60]

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]

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

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]

Widow City is endlessly enjoyable, yielding new detail every time you slip through its song mazes. [Oct 2007, p.59]

It's clear... that the quartet... are growing in confidence and ideas. [#256, p.54]

The track ["Power Circle"] and the entire album seems to lose its air after he [Gunplay] makes his exit. [Aug 2012, p.59]

What's striking is that he's less wacky than he's ever been, instead pursuing a rougher, more complex sound. [#208, p.66]

As a political manifesto, Rawar Style is somewhat vague, yet The Eternals' impulsive, improvising music has anger, zeal and humour in its very DNA. [#245, p.56]

This music is rebarbative glitch-puke, circuit-bent footwork with the joy scorched out, every now and then blitzed by what could be described as intelligent gabba. [Sep 2014, p.54]

Cave and Ellis have created a brave and fittingly incongruous score. As a standalone album, however, it doesn't walk so tall. [Jun 2015, p.45]

Hendrix’s collaboration with Stephen Stills on the Joni Mitchell penned anthem “Woodstock” is one of the album’s standouts, as they push the song further out than Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young could ever have imagined, while Johnny Winter on “The Things I Used To Do” sounds like the boy got moonshine on his fingers and pain in his heart. [Jun 2018, p.72]

Trap Or Die 3 is a uniformly strong effort. [Jan 2017, p.77]

There’s a food theme to this super light and easy but lushly layered 1970s and 80s themed reverie. [Aug 2019, p.66]

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 new Infamous is good enough, another in the sting of solid but unremarkable rehashes of the original formula that both members have been trickling out for years now. [May 2014, p.74]

The astonishing thing about Deap Lips is that it sounds nothing like either constituent band, though Troy’s nasal vocal sometimes gives it away. [Sep 2020, p.52]

One Nation's ability to alternate and combine insolence with detachment yields moments of inspired incongruity. [Jul 2011, p.49]

Very rewarding, although Blueberry Boat is perhaps too heavy a tome, lyrically, to be quite the right starting place for those new to the group. [#249, p.55]

He just keeps getting better at writhing around in this narrow space of homage and usually lands somewhere just between endearing and brilliant. [May 2013, p.67]

This is rain-choked pain music, inspirational negativity, hypnotic blood moon melodies over crack-slanging boasts. [Mar 2019, p.65]

The finished product proves too studied and reverent of its sources. [Jul 2014, p.64]

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]

When things do coalesce, and the absurd merges with the moving, Tonight You Look Like A Spider plays some mart, unpredictable tricks. [Aug 2013, p.60]

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].

It's not completely pants, but not great either. [Jul 2011, p.44]

“In The South” is a mash-up with Gucci Mane and Pimp C that could’ve snuck on the back end of a posthumous UGK set. [Sep 2017, p.62]

An exciting second album. ... Their otherworldly fetishisation of dystopian collapse is so exhilarating it’s almost tolerable. [May 2020, p.48]

All the sharp, cold ridges of the usual electronic sound palette are sheared off and smoothed down on this beguilingly gentle release. [#228, p.65]

It's not that the album is bad per se. Like Venom, it delivers for an appreciative fanbase. It's just that they could do this shit in their sleep. [May 2026, p.58]

Nice enough, and the climax of the title track is truly transportive, but no real departure from previous form. [Mar 2015, p.56]

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]

Caught somewhere between the big yucks and the thoughtful overview are moments of genuine strangeness that are both captivating and unsettling. [#255, p.59]

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

Tutti is a journey to the centre of the soul, but it is a kindly one, and Cosey is a most excellent guide. [Mar 2019, p.61]

Some awful lyrical lapses scupper otherwise promising pieces. [#223, p.51]

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

The epic slog of Culture II offers up more than 20 courses of candyfloss, toffee apple and burnt syrup in lieu of any real variety. [Apr 2018, p.68]

An album whose sustained brilliance reveals both an artist liberated from the need to try too hard, and finally armed with more to express than sarcastic teenage angst. [Jun 2015, p.55]

DJ Shadow’s latest is a hulking, 26 track beast that shifts from uptempo breakbeat and rubbery electropop to string-laden suites with relative ease. ... With synthesized tones ranging from lush to jarring, the instrumentals indicate the ear for texture that has characterised Shadow’s work since 1996’s Entroducing. [Jan 2020, p.69]

Most of Raw Solutions is a working-through of moves from Chicago House from Juke to footwork to Ghetto House, and while well done, doesn't leave its own stamp as an outside interpretation. [May 2013, p.66]

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

The mixes (on the second disc) reinforce the strength and weaknesses of Pyramids, not only showcasing their craftmanship in the surface of sound, but also insinuating that there might not be much beyond these sculped surfaces. [July 2008, p.55]

Ying & Yang, ultimately, just sounds a bit matey. [Nov 2012, p.61]

Half of the songs here are as good as the highs of the first two albums.... Much of the rest is the victim of Madlib's infuriating tendency to leave things in fragments. [Jun 2013, p.54]

The veneer slides aside to reveal more palpable excitement with the arrival of MCs from the UK grime contingent. [Mar 2015, p.48]

The emphasis now is on the delicate interplay between acousitc guitars, and vocals which sound somewhere between Jonathan Donahue and Syd Barrett. [#221, p.66]

Its balance of electronic, acoustic and vocal elements, while initially impressive, is soon revealed to be a product of the lack of any forceful musical or textual elements at all. [Feb 2013, p.60]

PSB celebrate an idea of fusty Britishness but lack the imagination, intelligence or inclination to interrogate it or in fact add anything at all to the discourse. [May 2013, p.59]

The four tracks on Occupied With the Unspoken, each lasting less then ten minutes, are edited in Carlson's basement studio from much longer live jams--but it's tempting to see them as single facets of the one true eternal synth jam. [Jul 2012, p.57]

There is a kind of exuberance you thought went out of fashion with The B-52s. [#211, p.66]

Meek is doing the one thing he does well and nothing else. [Nov 2013, p.66]

Volume X [is] their best album since 200's The Red Line. [May 2014, p.70]

Somewhere in Asphalt For Eden is buried beautiful music. [Jun 2016, p.62]

Woptober, his second album as a free man, returns to the knotty, impenetrable rabbit holes of his storied mixtape run. [Jan 2017, p.77]

A confused but compulsive listen. [Feb 2017, p.60]

The initial impression given by Death Valley Girls’ third album is of a hypertypical Los Angeles band: kinda punky, kinda raucous, but wholly beholden to the rock canon, in the style of past-decade LA outfits like The Icarus Line and The Warlocks. Multiple spins of Darkness Rains don’t refute this, but do reveal an undeniable spirit and likeable energy. [Nov 2018, p.65]

Only after wading through the swamp to the final three tracks do we get anything approaching sincerity, albeit of a cloying kind. [Oct 2007, p.55]

If anything, however, Autechre have pulled back the throttle on their excursions into the unknown. [#254, p.53]

He might be a slightly better rapper [than his father Will], he’s certainly a more adventurous artist and the fact that he’s a product of his generation shouldn’t detract from that. [Jan 2018, p.78]

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

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

While the high energy interplay between the players remains solid, their proto-punk edginess is less pronounced. [Apr 2015, p.54]

Tracks run the usual gamut, aggregating pop references and stylistic tropes from the entire history of hiphop, rock, punk, techno and their esoteric subgenres, and assembling them into a harrowing Frankenstein that’s more sardonic than revelatory. [Sep 2018, p.50]

For all of its constant activity, [the album] feels stale. It does next to nothing new to build on previous releases, and from song to song there's so little variation that its ultimate effect is numbing. [Feb 2016, p.50]

A certain bass jumpiness is evident throughout these six tracks, a post-grunge melodic murkiness that is at once reassuring but also puts paid to elevating the record into the realms of the ethereal. [Oct 2011, p.58]

The addition of Steven McDonald from Red Kross and Jeff Pinkus from The Butthole Surfers lends more low end weight to the band’s already bottom heavy sound, but otherwise Pinkus Abortion Technician is business as usual. [Jun 2018, p.65]