For Ulver's three-part collaboration with Sunn))), the mood is equally holy, reverential and mysterious. [Feb 2014, p.52]

Mouse on Mars's melodic power has been greater across the years, but the textural richness of Parastrophics is unmatched. [Mar 2012, p.57]

They've come back very strong. [Oct 2025, p.65]

Achieving a powerful balancing act between beauty and terror throughout. [Dec 2021, p.52]

No one, really, has taken their precise marriage of classic rock 'n' roll moves and steely cybernetic deformity further than themselves. [Aug 2014, p.53]

Limbs feels more emotionally erratic than its predecessor, and even more compelling for it, teetering between interiority and connection. [Apr 2022, p.45]

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]

With an outfit like Napalm, one looks for the subtle touches, and they're present: clean vocals on "Analysis Paralysis" and "The Wolf I Feed," a psychedelic burst of guitar noise on "Leper Colony." [Mar 2012, p.58]

Black Encyclopedia Of The Air is a new reckoning of all things, an upending of the status quo presenting us with a world of new possibilities. [Sep 2021, p.56]

If their forthcoming albums match the confidence and uniqueness of Bible eyes, Night Slugs may enjoy another year in the spotlight. [May 2011, p.49]

Mostly, however, these tracks stand as pure punk or pure roots, invoking the rebellious spirit of the time in a way that, remarkably, still comes across as fresh and exciting, even nowadays when everybody tends to know just about everything. [Sep 2024, p.59]

Wildest Dreams despite its unapologetic retro stance, is a wild wide. [Aug 2014, p.58]

Raum is the sound of a band who have figured out how to write their future while simultaneously holding meaningfully to their traditions. [Apr 2022, p.50]

If takes on his own catalogue feel lazy on paper, it’d need a heart of stone to resist something like 1977’s “Materialist” which in this version is probably the dubbiest and most typically Sherwood moment on here. Most importantly, perhaps, that voice has lost none of its storied opulence. [Apr 2022, p.42]

These aren’t stoical songs; nor are they blandly defiant. They speak a deep truth about ageing, and one that spikes several more humdrum cliches: age isn’t just how you feel, but an ineluctable fact; it isn’t just a matter of numbers, but very much a felt experience, and Chapman has delivered a beautiful continuum of musical experience since he emerged in 1969 with Rainmaker and Fully Qualified Survivor. [Mar 2019, p.48]

Along with the usual guitar/bass/drums/vocals, the group have added vibraphone, theremin and back-up singers, a move that has significantly enhanced their sound and bolstered the sci-fi boogie that rolls through the songs. [Nov 2022, p.70]

Dean McPhee's guitar sound is both richly textured and strikingly direct. [Apr 2015, p.63]

It was recorded the same year and it is a fierce final epistle. [Aug 2017, p.52]

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

Landless’s four singers Méabh Meir, Lily Power, Ruth Clinton and Sinéad Lynch spin tightly woven harmonies with crystalline precision over beds of drones. However the album is less doomy than might be expected from a Murphy-produced album – or maybe it’s just that these voices sparkle with light and life, even as they sing about encounters with death. [Aug 2024, p.52]

Producer Gary Odlum builds an atmospheric, sunset glow version of the Tuareg sound that rolls and chugs with every conventional element in place, but has a widescreen stadium swagger few other groups have mastered. [Apr 2020]

Three years ago Eyes On The Lines marked the emergence of an important songwriting talent, a rebirth midwifed by a dozen years on the road. The Unseen In Between delivers the same impact, but deeper and more lasting. If you wanted to pinch a Chapman reference, you might say it acknowledges that those growing pains never actually stop. [Mar 2019, p.48]

An album of big hooks of which “Golden Brown” is perhaps sharpest with its promise “The boys are back in town”. [Jun 2020, p.62]

Thanks undoubtedly to their established friendship and chemistry, With Trampled By Turtles sees Sparhawk and the band bring an effortlessness and consistency to material of varied origin, from old songs never recorded with Low, to newer compositions. [Jun 2025, p.59]

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

This intensity and force, despite the stillness, brings a new dimension to Low's sound and makes C'Mon an interesting addition to an already impressive body of work. [Apr 2011, p.60]

It is surprisingly polite and beautiful in places yet conjures up an air of real menace and myriad Nietzschean altitudes and climates. Fras’s voice and heavy, laden, deadpan German is perfect for Nietzsche’s portentous fragments and aphorisms. But there is a lightness here too. [Aug 2017, p.54]

It's a concise, tidy sounding album, with little of the noise leakage of old. [May 2011, p.51]

The intelligence and emotions of the lyrics also capture the accidental complexities of the pop of yesteryear when light entertainment could find itself the place for heavy themes. [Oct 2015, p.60]

Their pop is the sharpest it’s ever been. [Dec 2019, p.53]

Its 16 tracks are vignettes of memory and emotion, which see her thoughtful production informed by IDM, glitch and electronic emo. True to the album’s concept, there's a charming bedroom maximalism. .... Lovely, affecting record. [Oct 2023, p.48]

It’s as stunning and vibrant a set of agitpop brilliance as Conn has ever produced. If he’s ever moved you, move to this. [Apr 2020, p.64]

Wonder at the natural world has been an inspiration for musicians for as long as there has been music, but the mournful, realist shade to Park’s work makes that wonder all the more resonant and poignant now. [Mar 2025, p.52]

Shorn of much crowd noise or banter, it operates more as an alternative greatest hits set.... [It] allows them to take their rightful place as a warm, distinct and proudly independent voice in the rock pantheon. [Nov 2013, p.52]

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]

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

Although Lee Perry’s name will probably sell more copies of Guide To The Universe, New Age Doom are what makes this album worthwhile. ... With everyone involved recording their parts remotely, the result is impressively coherent and live-feeling. [Dec 2021, p.54]

The collaboration has had the effect of sharpening Oldham's focus and yielding one of the most gripping collections to bear one of his many pseudonyms. [#252, p.48]

It’s tempting to call these outtakes but their vision is sharp and purposeful, sustained by a consistently monolithic interplay and helped by Steve Albini’s signature traits. It all makes Pyroclasts one of Sunn O)))’s heaviest and most penetrating albums. [Dec 2019, p.55]

There Is A Place flirts with pastiche, but it’s hard not to be swept along by its uplifting grooves. [Dec 2018, p.52]

"Feral," "Codex" and "Giving Up The Ghost" finally win me over. [Apr 2011, p.62]

Out of a dangerous, pitfall-laden area of song, she makes a variety of riches. [Jun 2015, p.48]

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

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

The Sisypheans is a work of personal reinvention that succeeds in open-armed, accessible fashion. [Dec 2019, p.56]

Throughout there's a strangely prosaic lyricism at work making the mundane threatening. [Dec 2018, p.48]

[Tempest has] a sense of dues paid as a continual creative replenishment, rather than a swansong. [Nov 2012, p.63]

While I'm A Dreamer looks back the best part of a century, sepia cover photo and all, it never simply lapses into pastiche. [Nov 2013, p.54]

Frost's most fully realised work to date. [May 2014, p.62]

Their current incarnation has an almost puppyish energy and optimism which makes the album's 34-minutes seem even shorter and more repeatable. [Sep 2015, p.54]

Debut album Labyrinth is Kanda’s most sophisticated solo effort to date, swaying through 13 tracks of gorgeous melodies and electroacoustic layers that skip and skitter between beats and material states. [Dec 2019, p.48]

What works so well here is that all the elements are pursued with equal intensity. It is not that noise cedes to the electronics, or the guitars make way for the voice, or turns are taken. On the contrary, everything is plugged in, blindly ongoing without lessening. [Dec 2017, p.50]

Cope’s wit and poetic skills remain as sharp as his playing, all of which is further illuminated with swathes of nostalgic Mellotron and tenderly plucked acoustic guitar. [Mar 2025, p.59]

Becs is something of a return, then, but equally it demonstrates that the guitarist's approach to pop composition has developed considerably over the past 13 years. [May 2014, p.83]

What makes this set so compelling is its mapping of the rapid shifts in Davis's music within shorter periods. [Oct 2015, p.68]

In Cauda Venenum is a peculiarly convincing example of retro rock but that’s not to say the album is anchored to one particular scene or era. ... What’s also helpful is that frontman and bandleader Mikael Åkerfeldt has one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary rock, an impassioned croon whose soulfulness defuses any potential for pomposity. [Dec 2019, p.57]

Guerilla Toss’s music is now disarming in its earnest post-digital exuberance and cutesy directness, while a fragile thematic framework holds it all together. In the process of getting here, they traded their convulsive rock progressions for slowly decaying walls of texture and Kassie Carlson’s Auto-Tuned vocals. The effervescent bangers “Live Exponential” and “Mermaid Airplane” are especially awesome. [Apr 2022, p.56]

Even more than on past outings, Kirby seems drawn to a sense of disconnect, refusing to let the elements of each track interact with one another. Yet Dead Empires is also rich with experiments and surprises. [Nov 2013, p.60]

A lovely collection full of ethereal evocations of the past. [Feb 2016, p.60]

An album that for the most part is ebulliently nasty pop, the monumental “Big Steppa” and the gleefully foul “No Face” in particular will be irresistible to anyone raised on Trina and Missy Elliott, daring us to switch off as the party spirals out of control. [Nov 2022, p.73]

Objects scraped, rubbed, manipulated and plucked from their natural environments for the richness of their attack, decay and luxurious resonance here produce a superbly rich, tuneful and intricately rhythmic music. [Jul 2025, p.56]

The Clearing isn't a work of artfully suspended melancholy which leaves the listener wanting and wondering00it gestures ahead toward comfort and resolution. [Jun 2015, p.48]

The director has previously been namechecked by Lopatin as an early idol. Consciously or not, he applies a more vivid psychedelic impulse to a comparable tying together of sound and vision. [Aug 2017, p.56]

Springtime’s music feels free, but never carefree, full of spontaneity, acidity and momentum, sputtering in a thousand different, noisy directions at once. [Dec 2021, p.56]

A thrilling affair. [#252, p.63]

It's not so much a return to first principals as a 3D reboot of the homicidal stoner aesthetic established between 1991-1995 with Cypress Hill, Black Sunday and Temples Of Boom. [Nov 2018, p.52]

Even beyond this shared ending/beginning, the new material flows like a continuation of the previous album, but with a more progressive and tenser edge to it. [Apr 2022, p.56]

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

As Jackie Lynn, Fohr’s voice still occupies center stage, but it does so within synthesized set pieces crafted for her to inhabit. Like a hotel decked out with themed rooms, each song on Jacqueline has its own fine-tuned palette and nostalgia-tinged lighting scheme. [Apr 2020, p.49]

Deftly slice through seemingly disparate arenas--the fertile intersection of past and present, acknowledging both without succumbing to the whims of either. [Aug 2017, p.56]

Their newest struts and froths like the wild-eyed offspring of Deerhoof and Thundercat, raised in the swamps on little but No New York and toadstools. At turns, it’s impossibly upbeat--something like a Martian single parent’s go-to motivational album--and spasmodically funky, in the best tradition of Bernie Worrell-era Talking Heads, flipped on 45. [Nov 2018, p.54]

Despite the celebratory atmosphere, the group's air of menace remains intact. [Sep 2014, p.54]

Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! sees Cave at his wittiest and most relaxed, though perhaps also most detatched. [Apr 2008, p.53]

Strike a rich vein of form. ... This record lacks a stated motif, but finds the musician digging into the American primitive style (which has often been at least in the orbit of his playing) more keenly than before. “Celerity”, “Enville” and “Vellum”, deft instrumentals all, sit ably in Fahey/Basho territory. [Apr 2020, p.50]

Throughout In These Times McCraven displays a preternatural ability at composing outside of 4/4 time, his oddly metred pieces built upon ear-catching melodies and dynamic rhythmic interplay. ... In These Times encompasses the fire and natural eclecticism found in the best contemporary jazz.

It’s heavyweight stuff delivered with a beautiful lightness of touch. [Nov 2022, p.73]

It’s gorgeous stuff, but whether the future she imagines is entropic or hopeful, it’s hard to say. [Mar 2024, p.57]

Sweet Heart Sweet Light isn't the best thing to bear the Spiritualized name but when Pierce aims for epic emotion as on "Get What You Want," his affectingly plaintive vocal sandwiched between Visconti strings and buzzing organ, the continued potency of his vision is evident. [Mar 2012, p.65]

A warmer, more deeply hued record than previous productions. [Jun 2015, p.49]

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]

A rewarding new departure. [#242, p.72]

With the addition of these elegant bent strings, it is as though perfumed air has been allowed to seep into what was formerly a hermetically sealed canister. This (now non-) trio's music is that much better for the enhancement. [May 2011, p.58]

To Be Kind is even moodier and more desolate than 2012's The Seer.... The more structured, traditional tracks don't cut quite as deep, largely because they echo other groups, at times overtly. [May 2014, p.68]

If there’s fun in her music, it’s somewhere between the anaesthetising effect of especially her more electric noises and the ecstatic release in her vocal, both too honest to be anything else but awkward. Fundamentally sociopathic. [Nov 2018, p.55]

As you try to sift through the dense crosstalk of twittering beats, your ears are beguiled ever deeper into Konono's rhythmic threshing machine. [#253, p.52]

There are no radical leaps forward from the previous album, but that matters not a jot. The soil in this territory is rich, the flora is fragrant, and the echoes of the past harmonise together like happy memories. [Dec 2017, p.51]

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]

With this score, Greenwood might have set out in the footsteps of the masters, but he ends up forging his own path. [Jan 2015, p.64]

If you prefer your African music to be more dancefloor-friendly, Batida's Portuguese take on Konono has plenty going on. [Apr 2016, p.54]

Her ability to overdub against herself, creating the illusion of live interaction, is startling and thrilling to hear. Too often, one person music has a certain sterility and airlessness, but Thackray’s work is loose and groove-oriented, shuffling with an energy that brings to mind Erykah Badu’s New Amerykah albums while singing about opening one’s third eye. [Jul 2021, p.71]

The album's so-called simple songs might be ambiguous enough to leave you wondering what they're about, even as you're thinking that they were written just for you. [Jun 2015, p.49]

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]

Most intriguing are the hi-tech elements that flicker past, adding a hint of touch screen technology to the contemporary urban space. And the snatches of pirate radio speech--now Wen's signature--are engrossing. [May 2014, p.69]

Combining live ensemble performances by an 11-piece instrumental group, string quartet and four vocalists, with brief AutoTuned solo interludes, this is above all, a collective music. [Sep 2023, p.60]

The tracks likewise evoke the futuristic and the arcane, but the brute force with they are delivered makes them some of the unit’s most exhilarating work to date. [Oct 2022, p.40]

This is not the Wand record to spin while you do the chores, but it is, the one you might spin when you're looking for reasons to keep on living. [May 2014, p.69]

Continuance is one of the better examples of their prodigiousness, its delights ranging from the piano glissando of “Reese’s Cup” to the fuzzy jazz fusion keyboards of “Kool & The Gang”. [Apr 2022, p.59]