Smith and Unthank magnetise throughout with their combined vocals, even on unaccompanied songs such as “Captain Bover” (the story of Tyneside press gangs), melodically entwined, but contrasting soft and rugged. [Feb 2023, p.59]

Pole aka Stefan Betke is actually making the best music of his life right now. ... Tempus is mesmeric and that leaves space for Betke’s amazing painterly hand to weave magic. [Feb 2023, p.54]

Despite the obvious post-production touches and curation, the outtakes from 20 minute studio improv sessions featured across the four pieces feel authentically extemporaneous and evolve organically, akin to a late night jam between friends. ... “Bloodstream” provides the stunning album with a fittingly grandiose ending by digging into a psalm-like recital full of solemn organ, voluminous textures, invigorating fanfares and rumbling spectral melodies. [Feb 2023, p.52]

Such durational piece, composed from several instruments, recall Phill Niblock, but Malone’s album is softer, more atmospheric, even melancholic. Does Spring Hide Its Joy is material for deep listening, and its considerable length alone is a radical statement in times of fragmented attention. [Feb 2023, p.52]

Raven is full of powerful earworms that mobilise every inch of soul and flesh. [Feb 2023, p.52]

Cale remakes Nico’s trademark harmonium sound using electronics, imagining a future or celestial version of her. The effect is both moving and ghostly – a highlight of this typically imaginative album. [Feb 2023, p.46]

While their tonal depths speak to undiscovered worlds, they’re grounded by the sound of Sakamoto’s breath, audible on every piano track. The palpable humanity is moving, and Sakamoto’s ease with melodic phrasing remains astonishing. ... Would these stark, simple pieces be as moving and filled with meaning for newcomers to his work? Perhaps not, but becoming an understanding receiver of work is one of the great privileges of longtime listening. [Feb 2023, p.45]

It collates her various sides and strengths into the most complete and resonant recording of her career. [Feb 2023, p.44]

The large number of guest rappers (seven in all) makes the album sound like the voice of a rage-filled community rather than just one person’s desperate cries, magnifying its impact. [Feb 2023, p.44]

A definite return to form, Shook is the sound of a serious group equipped with the gravitas and shades of expression to carry their many ideas. [Feb 2023, p.44]

Like her otherwise innovative Couldn’t Wait To Tell You, the 41 minute album has its inevitable longueurs (the abstract “Snowing!”). Otherwise it moves along with purpose and confidence. [Apr 2023, p.56]

Paste is Moin at their strongest, at once familiar and strangely new. [Dec 2022, p.57]

To these ears at least, Rundgren’s finest since 2008’s Arena. [Jan 2023, p.75]

Hutchings is eloquent on flute, Mthunzi Mvubu plays searing alto, while Muhammad Dawjee (tenor saxophone) and Malcolm Jiyane (trombone) have inexhaustible drive. [Jan 2023, p.62]

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

Big Joanie have developed immeasurably since their debut and it’s a joy to see them, if not quite reaching their full potential, then imparting a genuine sense of what that fulfillment might entail. [Jan 2023, p.62]

The Elephant Man’s Bones is no disappointment – the factors that have cultivated reverence are displayed in full force, with Marciano’s pen game as sharp as ever and The Alchemist’s production showing no sign of peaking. [Jan 2023, p.68]

Richard may not be the most distinctive lyricist, yet she still leaves a strong impression. Her uniquely hazy voice and the way she adds unusual trills to her stanzas means that the listener is always aware of her presence. [Jan 2023, p.70]

Fans of retro-styled chamber pop should find the vibes here to be exquisite. That said, Mering cleverly balances the sumptuousness with a lyrical orientation that taps into a universal melancholy, cutting through the fog of nostalgia with a sober, contemporary sensibility. [Jan 2023, p.74]

Plaid are back with another album of music that twists geometric runs through nostalgic synth textures into minor key shifts like dimension folds gone wrong. [Jan 2023, p.77]

Throughout the album Nas sounds engaged, and his choices are unbeholden to the whims of the market. [Jan 2023, p.78]

Tyondai Braxton’s own Telekinesis is a symphonic work that sounds like a lost sci-fi film soundtrack. It has the clustered, hovering awe of György Ligeti’s Atmosphères and the eerie arpeggiated angles of Herrmann soundtracks like Vertigo and The Day The Earth Stood Still. [Dec 2022, p.50]

Perpetual Now has tangential relationships to house, techno, dub, ambient and psychedelic minimalism, but manages to plot a coherent and personal path between them all, with each of its four long tracks given space to breathe and expand. [Dec 2022, p.66]

New listeners may be drawn by these tributes, to experience something far more compelling, still flowing from the source. [Dec 2022, p.72]

There is a genuine synergy here. Khruangbin have crafted oneiric Manding inflected backdrops as though they have found what they were looking for all along, and Touré settles into them like he’s just got home. [Dec 2022, p.67]

Black Girl Magic is Honey Dijon’s most personal work to date. Over 15 tracks, Dijon collaborates with notable guests like Josh Caffe, Hadiya George, EVE, Mike Dunn and Channel Tres. The energy here is infectious. [Dec 2022, p.64]

Across the album woodwinds and brass establish the atmosphere, allowing Callahan to revisit some darker parts of himself with the safety of knowing that everything will be fine. [Dec 2022, p.64]

Each musician adopts a groove-plus approach, adding tunes, subtracting beats and spinning tension building, counterintuitive phrases off the common path, but never tripping it up. [Dec 2022, p.60]

While sparse guitar contortions made Both a melancholic record, the expanded palette here expresses a more nuanced but equally disarming range of emotions. [Dec 2022, p.58]

This new album manages to project an even simpler and more accessible surface with extraordinary depths of reference and feeling, even a track dedicated to Begum Rokeya, the Bengali feminist educator and author of the extraordinary genderswitching utopian fiction Sultana’s Dream. [Dec 2022, p.57]

Oh Death snaps them back on track right from the opening, where drips saturated with fuzz and wah on the sizzling “Soon You Die” are flung forward by a swirling guitar solo. Meanwhile, the group’s vocalist becomes a proper mistress of ceremonies. ... The chiming piano and guitar licks of the closing “Passes Like Clouds” suggest that Goat have finally rediscovered their true selves. [Dec 2022, p.54]

Come Around sees Carla dal Forno’s songwriting taking new shapes and routes, allowing her to pour her cratedigging folk knowledge (showcased monthly in her NTS show) into these open and confident songs. [Dec 2022, p.54]

It’s hard to know exactly what he’s singing about much of the time, but Dawson’s ardour for the sound of language is irresistible. ... The Ruby Cord is Dawson’s most accessible album yet, but as elaborate as his futuristic visions may be, they remind us of the mess we’re all in the middle of right now. [Dec 2022, p.52]

Horse Lords music has never been untidy, but this LP’s seven tracks evince a hyper-focused precision. Even when they flirt with entropy during the last two minutes of “May Brigade”, the transition from rhythmic grid to textural layering is immaculately executed. ... This may not lead the people to call for Comradely Objects rather than Ed Sheeran or (name your preferred chart topper here) but it’ll do the job just fine the next time you need some new minimalist jams for a highway drive. [Nov 2022, p.62]

Endure is smoother and glossier than the last album, but it’s still music that moves body and mind, inviting dirty dancing between flaming police cars. [Nov 2022, p.67]

Live In Cuxhaven 1976 may not dispel the impression that these live records are mainly for Can devotees, but it also confirms that the last word about their volatile processes has yet to be said. [Nov 2022, p.77]

The ten tracks on Is It Going To Get Any Deeper Than This? provide – with occasional turns towards kosmische or lounge music – some of the most pop oriented music Daniel has ever released. [Nov 2022, p.66]

It isn’t Blonde On Blonde or John Wesley Harding – two acknowledged influences, on the decision to go to Nashville, at least – but the sheer energy of association and the adolescent clarity of understanding often yields strikingly subtle results. ... It isn’t always grown-up, but there’s nothing more mature than embracing immaturity. [Nov 2022, p.62]

It’s the confidence and clarity of Dalt’s vision that makes this album a charming, compelling listen. In its best moments, it’s strange and familiar at once, like a weird, beautiful dream. [Nov 2022, p.59]

These are songs with enveloping atmospheres that dramatise their lyrics with crisping, gasping, blinding, thundering, quietly screaming sound design. [Nov 2022, p.60]

This is unmistakeably a Loraine James record – the synths are capacious and the beats are intricately counterintuitive – but Eastman’s work has clearly been generative. [Oct 2022, p.44]

Rather than concocting rich strata from the guitar of Reine Fiske or Johan Holmegard’s percussion, these pieces are mainly stripped back and sprightly, propelled by the dazzling vocals of Ejstes. ... Where previously these atonal chords and odd tempos would have been subsumed into the heavy mixture, they appear here open and light, forming something that’s less earthy and far more fantastical. [Nov 2022, p.60]

The pattern repeats elsewhere: the big showcase tracks like “Never Forget” and “Let Me Be Great” sag a little under the weight of their pomposity, where deep cuts “Imposter Syndrome” and “IDGAF” just get on with showcasing her untouchable cool. [Nov 2022, p.73]

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

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]

The result is a tougher but spacier sound. The original vocals are mixed in more prominently, and interplay with the deejay interjections relates to the lyrical content. [Nov 2022, p.71]

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]

The album is warm and lush, mixed and engineered by David Darlington, who has worked with Eddie Pamieri and Wayne Shorter. It’s a different side of The Arkestra in a convincing, throwback fashion – to a time when new jazz albums came fast and each was an event. [Nov 2022, p.68]

Oddly charming, goblincore aesthetic, one that capitalises on Björk’s unique strengths: the arrangements on Fossora are among the most complex and lavish of her career. [Nov 2022, p.58]

While the title Shebang has percussive compactness, the music on Ambarchi’s latest release, which is scintillating from the outset and exhilarating through and through, stretches out and expands across four continuous yet distinct sections. When the music fades away, after 35 minutes, the urge to hear it again straight away is simply irresistible. [Oct 2022, p.38]

There’s so much going on in these dense constructions, you’re likely to hear new layers and combinations with each spin. [Oct 2022, p.46]

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]

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.

His final, posthumous recording isn’t exactly Norman Rockwell, but it does take The Night Tripper back to his country roots. This kind of twilight recording, with carefully staged surprises – see Johnny Cash’s sepulchral take on Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt” – has become something of an industry cliche, but Dr John’s lifelong love for the music here is too well attested to seem like some kind of last minute A&R wheeze. [Oct 2022, p.41]

With Bajascillators the group have achieved master mood shift status, producing a work that is simultaneously dreamy and psychedelically transportive. [Oct 2022, p.38]

Even when the album’s second half remembers it was supposed to be a rock record, its raw proto-punk remains perfectly strange, with guitar licks alternating between J Mascis’s fuzzy melodicism and John Frusciante’s soothing warmth as they drift across a busy, restlessly baroque pop background. [Sep 2022, p.54]

Not every release in the heaving Boris discography is essential; this one most definitely is. [Oct 2022, p.52]

The vibe is hedonistic and dancefloor oriented, blending influences from techno, house and electroclash. The songs are horny, with lyrics occasionally stepping over the cringe line (“Oh yeah, you want it?”). Fortunately the album is also full of bangers. ... Diablo is a fun listen, but you might want a shower afterwards. [Oct 2022, p.40]

It is a gorgeous piece of work. [Jul 2022, p.48]

Air is also an omnipresent agent in Davachi’s extensive use of the pipe organ, as on “Vanity Of Ages” – an exquisitely slow unfolding of clustered tones that give rise to a shimmering microtonality. ... A similar compositional approach is used for the string pieces “Icon Studies I” and “Icon Studies II” but the effect is intimate and fluid rather than cosmic and imposing [Sep 2022, p.44]

An album of sombre yet uplifting electronic music. ... If that [a requiem for a close friend and respected artist] wasn’t the original intent, one can hardly imagine a finer tribute. [Sep 2022, p.43]

Galás crisply delivers excerpts from two works by the German expressionist poet Georg Heym, Das Fieberspital (The Fever Hospital) and Die Dämonen Der Stadt (The Demons Of The City). [Sep 2022, p.46]

It’s the input of guest musicians and co-producer Dave Harrington that draws the best out of the material. [Sep 2022, p.46]

The result is a record that feels in touch with the qualities that have powered Oneida in the past – the dogged repetition, the scorching climaxes – but this time trades the crankier avant tendencies for a sweet dose of bubblegum. [Sep 2022, p.48]

He raps in a stereotypically ‘white’ voice shorn of regional inflections, and the contrast between his deadpan vocals and the beats ranges from startlingly imaginative (the hammering blapper “Fundrazors”) to anodyne (“Indifferent”). [Sep 2022, p.57]

Best not to think too deeply about it. [Sep 2022, p.57]

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]

“All Souls Hill” itself is almost in Bad Seeds territory – the two bands were formed the same year and almost certainly aware of one another. “The Liar” is a swipe at Donald Trump but avoids sounding latecomerish by turning him into a folkloric figure. “Passing Through” does the opposite, giving political relevance to an old song. [Sep 2022, p.52]

Reset is bright and cheerful, drenched in supersaturated colour and psychedelic sunshine. Most impressive is the way the music explicitly draws from the past without slipping into pastiche or retro-nostalgic recreation. [Sep 2022, p.48]

Sprawling spaciness is absent from A Foul Form which marks a return to the California shredders’ punk roots. The vibe is set by opener “Funeral Solution”: blistering guitar fuzz, punch drunk double drums, stumbling basslines and ragged vocals. [Sep 2022, p.48]

Danger Mouse constructs decorative, melodic beats that don’t really bang, resulting in a hazy, slightly funky and psychedelic quality reminiscent of late 1960s pop. ... It’s frustrating to see him [Black Thought] shut off that aspect of his creativity in favour of “bars as hard as Angola’s”. ... Cheat Codes is compelling enough, but one wonders where it’s all going. [Sep 2022, p.42]

The remixes feel fresh and tight. ... 30 Something is a fitting way to celebrate their impressive body of work. [Aug 2022, p.54]

She extends her compositional technique, with added space, breath and timbre, into new dimensions. ... On Spirit Exit, Barbieri is closer than ever to club territory and the ecstatic. [Jul 2022, p.42

Pink Dolphins kicks off with four relatively short tracks (between three and eight minutes – I did say relatively) that demonstrate the evolution of an Anteloper sound. [Jul 2022, p.42]

The trio’s interpretation of the material is highly sophisticated, with the freshness and spontaneity of a newly minted band. [Aug 2022, p.56]

It is a working through of grief and abuse, characterised by Nastasia’s deeply resonant songwriting. ... It would be tempting to liken the run of songs in between to a personal descent followed by an emergence into the outside world, but Nastasia shuns such easy linear interpretations. [Aug 2022, p.53]

Even the occasional instances of hypergloss cinematic texture and vaporwave mannerisms have their place, glueing together spikes of noise, luscious organ reverberations and feverish glitch pulses into a synthetic yet intensely human whole. [Aug 2022, p.50]

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]

While lightness and a wondrous sense of possibility colour the album, there’s also depth. Every track is made of layers of glimmering melodies that collide in dissonance and fade away in consonance. [Aug 2022, p.58]

For all its bounce, this is a claustrophobic, airless LP, and you have to wait until the last track to hear a human voice free from distortion. [Aug 2022, p.52]

It serves as both a reconsideration of what’s come before and a confident step forward. [Jul 2022, p.52]

Back In Black actually manages to sound vibrant and resonant without sounding dated – thanks in no small measure to the immaculate production throughout from Black Milk. [Aug 2022, p.64]

Some will find Cruel Country monotonous; the patient however will be rewarded with an abundance of thoughtful, delicate, often brutally plaintive songcraft. [Aug 2022, p.60]

The long germination period of the project is an indication of the duo’s perfectionism, which unfortunately results in songs that are overworked to the point of blandness. [Aug 2022, p.57]

Despite her apparent striving towards sharpness and clarity, Hatis Noit avoids sterility in these pieces, all eight of which are constructed solely from her voice; while this starkness could leach the emotional impact, instead it is magnified. [Aug 2022, p.53]

It’s less focused, more instinctive in its approach to collaboration; the boundaries it sets for itself are less rigid. This meandering work is vastly more accessible than most of Moor Mother’s catalogue, but no less cerebral and impressive. [Aug 2022, p.52]

Hellfire confidently establishes Black Midi as a distinct musical personality. [Jul 2022, p.44]

Not a radical departure, then, but a very satisfying development of Reich’s totally distinctive stylistic approach. [Jun 2022, p.52]

It’s heavy but utterly lovely music, full of grave strings, piano stabs and deep synth reverberations. [Jul 2022, p.46]

Dunn’s production is broad and volatile yet retains a measure of mainstream appeal. At all times Danilova’s voice threatens to destroy – the compositions that try to contain her, the recording equipment that seems to clip and distort, reverb effects that overload and scream, speakers and ears that feel like they might melt from the sheer intensity. She’s never sounded better than this. [Jun 2022, p.48]

For those looking to block out the outside world and escape into something soothing and sublime, Past Life Regression will most certainly do the trick. [Jul 2022, p.56]

Armed with limited instrumentation and Knapp’s understated vocal, the album’s seven tracks take on a form of storytelling, made alive with synthesized fluttering bat wings, bouts of sax squall and sinewy electronic backbeats. [Jul 2022, p.53]

Joyful, heart-warming, brain-fizzing stuff. [Jul 2022, p.50]

Introspective, emotionally charged pieces such as “Father Time”, “We Cry Together” and “Savior” provide high – or jarring – points on the record, but elsewhere there are periods of lull absent on previous efforts. ... As sonically impressive as his latest album may be, his approach to the topics under discussion doesn’t feel sufficiently thought out. [Jul 2022, p.48]

This is what happens when you expose the oneiric to daylight. It’s jazzy, symphonic, tough, tender, true. Plain magnificent. [Jul 2022, p.45]

As Quelle Chris reverts to esoteric form on Deathfame, one can’t help but miss the sustained melancholy of Innocent Country 2. But there are plenty of delights here. [Jul 2022, p.53]

It’s very easy to get lost in this music, in the sense of immersively absorbed rather than uncomprehending. [Jun 2022, p.47]

It’s very easy to get lost in this music, in the sense of immersively absorbed rather than uncomprehending. [Jun 2022, p.47]