Confident and resourceful, All Time Present feels more open than its predecessor. [May 2019, p.54

What J Hus has over all else this year is an ebullient ironic pseudo-oblivious pomp, the kind of breathless mongrel music you’ll only ever get from folk young enough to miss how vital it is they’re breaking all the rules. [Jul 2017, p.62]

This recently unearth gem from Delmore is a fascinating insight into the creative mind of one of the brightest lights of the Greenwich Village breadbasket circuit, Karen Dalton. [Feb 2012, p.63]

A poised and playful opus of 11 tracks dominated byt the sound of maxed-out 1980s 8-bit videogame soundtracks zapped 300 years into the future. [Mar 2016, p.47]

A conventional song based offering, but essentially a continuation of the dialogue between Gunn/guitar and luscious underscoring this time more orchestral than electronic. The mood is generally soothing, but shot through with occasional suggestions of disquiet. [Nov 2025, p.53]

With Discombobulated, Hen Ogledd have grown to fully inhabit their costumes, Sun Ra Arkestra style, with the greatest musical and lyrical realisation yet of their diverse strengths. [Mar 2026, p.49]

Where Spectrum was full of empty (head) space, All Things Being Equal is flooded with warm, luxuriant modular texture, across its bandwidth. [Jun 2020, p.56]

A feeling of survival against the odds often permeates his music. Personally I would have enjoyed a few more drum-backed beats, but even those without are crafted to a point of excellence. [Dec 2021, p.63]

Throughout the album there’s a palpable refusal to push forward a frontperson – the vocals are truly shared, so Coriky merge and blend around each other and it’s this intuitively generated mutual conciseness that’s so gorgeous to hear. [Aug 2020, p.53]

What’s striking about this album, produced by Kenny Beats, is how all of its fear and anxiety are turned inwards. Sure, there’s storytelling, such as “Lakewood Mall”, in which Tyson narrates an instance where Staples evaded violence to end on homespun wisdom and a call to free Pac Slimm. But the psychic stress here is all-encompassing, preceding the threat and resulting in claustrophobia. [Sep 2021, p.64]

Pussycat is as excoriating and pitiless as anything Jenny Hval has produced to date and just as unflinching in its analysis of gender politics (the Wire-ish “Sex Machine” manages to be funny, poignant and upsetting) plus Hatfield cranks out some cathartic Ragged Glory solos (which could easily go on for twice as long as they do) and proves herself a fearlessly uninhibited vocal stylist to boot. Good work. [Aug 2017, p.61]

A confidently created body of work that shows her strength in piecing together abstract compositions. [Oct 2017, p.65]

A few guest vocalists pop up in vivid cameos. .... But the guests are mere added attractions. Some of the most compelling tracks, like "No Death No Danger", "Mala Sangre" and the closing "Covenstead Blues", are all her. .... She creates her own world of sound, and her own context, and we must enter cautiously, never sure what we'll find but ready for anything. [Sep 2025, p.50]

Anyone interested in just how far out and far in British music can be i 2017 should have Stillness spot-welded into their systems right now. [Mar 2017, p.50]

“Pensées Magiques” has little spoken word, yet it somehow perfectly conveys a sense of nightfall across the landscape, as if you and Atkinson are quietly absorbing it together. [Nov 2024, p.48]

While the Bowie tribute will probably garner most attention--hey, at least it saves Basinski having to explain the story behind Disintegration Loops again--for me, “A Shadow In Time” is the more absorbing work. [Feb 2017, p.44]

The album becomes more experimental and confident as it progresses. [#236, p.59]

When you listen to Made Out Of Sound, you feel encouraged to immerse yourself in every note, cherishing the beauty of this otherworldly space. [Apr 2021]

For music as heavy as this, the performances and production are impressively agile and light on their feet. Ultrapop is clear-eyed and enraged, pristine and pulsing with adrenaline. [Jun 2021, p.46]

On four extended tracks, Fennelly’s various keyboards (synthesizer, harmonium, piano) function as kind of bedrock that deftly accommodates a variety of tacks and textures from his partners. [Oct 2023, p.53]

Akoma is unpredictable without any recourse to smartarsedness, Jlin keeping everything sounding fresh and spontaneous, as though both she and the listener are on a journey of innovation and discovery. [Mar 2024, p.48]

The detail and artistry of Take Me Apart more than justify the wait. [Oct 2017, p.56]

He hits every track as if he’s smashing an Idaho potato. [Apr 2022, p.59]

Despite the sonic shifts – from grinding electronic roars to manipulated vocal samples and field recordings to shimmering harp to desolate piano – it remains unified, because of Ayewa. [Mar 2024, p.50]

The power of Sumac’s work has always been in the intersection between power and precision, raw crunch driven and inch perfect percussive pummel. The same precision exists here, the same balance between onslaught and lull, the murky ambiguities surrounded by crystal clear volleys of sculpted noise. [Jul 2024, p.60]

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

Keszler’s percussion underpins Coates’s soaring cello as Laurel Halo ensures the combination stays orderly. Its calm melancholy reflects the quoted text that ends: “Need little. Want less. Forget the rules. Be untroubled.” [Aug 2018, p.67]

Gendron’s penchant for vintage phrasing gives the record a mid-20th century folk revival vibe that even the guest squalls of guitarist Bill Nace and saxophonist Zoh Amba cannot dispel. Gendron’s singing alternates between French and English; the pitch of her voice is low, but its place in the mix is high, held aloft by her unhurried guitar picking. [Jun 2024, p.57]

A taut, brutal collection which is as strong as anything they've released in their previous incarnations. [June 2003, p.65]

The sound sources themselves are not of intrinsic importance – it’s what the musicians do with them that matters – but in opening up these questions, these wonderings, Under~Between does much to create its imaginative worlds. [Apr 2021, p.51]

Their current music has that wobbly centre of gravity that makes it sound both proto and post-punk at once, something between the garage fog of the Nuggets era and the more art-damaged end of the 1980s hardcore spectrum. Imagine Hüsker Dü or Saccharine Trust after they had too much to dream last night. [Aug 2024, p.84]

Godfather is no mere retread, not the sound of youth but an idealised memory of it. [Mar 2017, p.56]

Perhaps their most forceful to date. [May 2015, p.49]

It's a beguilingly well-delivered statement in a dialect that was sidelined in favor of the cult of bass or the florescent synths. [Dec 2011, p.53]

“I don’t know why I’m up here”, Hval ponders amid ebullient synths on “A Ballad”. “Lay Down” envelops her voice in a fluttering of strings and muted pads as it sifts through painful memories: “By the bed in palliative care/You had bled through your jeans” . Elsewhere, “The Artist Is Absent” paraphrases Marina Abramović, transforming presence into absence while juxtaposing low key ontological devastation with banging beats. [Jun 2025, p.52]

There is a mellowness to the album, underscored by Albini's older, deeper voice, that suggests their edge has been lost. [Nov 2014, p.68]

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]

Throughout her third album The Hollow, Forsyth hardly needs to name her emotions, using her voice to communicate them purely in terms of depth, size and shade. [Dec 2024, p.46]

Would their punk model work for a Stravinsky cover, with its unique challenges? The answer given by this recording is a resounding yes. [May 2014, p.58]

The guests (Denmark Vessey, Nick Offerman--yes, Ron Swanson himself--and Your Old Droog among others) are perfectly judged and the deeper message of the album, that relaxation and repose in 2018 are luxuries that those on the frontline can’t afford, is delivered with extra heft and power thanks to the lightness of touch and the sardonic style hiphop’s coollest couple demonstrate throughout. [May 2018, p.63]

Sonically, there is not much new ground to be found on Holograms On Metal Film as Stereolab are essentially revisiting the sonic pathways they carved out in the past. Yet the messaging in these songs is as timely as ever. [Jun 2025, p.49]

Hard edged synths and massive, crunchy beats lend righteous swagger to Gordon’s bleary guitar squalls and jetlagged sprechstimme. [Mar 2024, p.46]

On earlier releases, the traces of anger, sorrow or despair rippling through the found voices seeded roaring rock improvisations that empathetically rooted and resisted the calamities visited upon them. But the improvising on [Skinny Fists] falls within beat parameters too tightly determined to generate any really useful dissonance. [#200, p.66]

Not a visionary rollercoaster thundering around the heavens, but a rewarding slow and subtle grower. [Oct 2011, p.53]

Ghosts continues the work of previous albums, but nonetheless manages to be a blast of fresh air. [Mar 2012, p.57]

Now far from young, and sounding a little tired, his voice is still tender with yearning, and devotees will welcome a further installment in his emotionally ramshackle story. [Sep 2013, p.52]

[The] precisely arranged layers of keyboards and guitars have as many behind-the-door delights as an advent calendar. [Oct 2013, p.46]

Most of Infinity Machines' 110 minutes consists of lengthy, evolving jams build upon elephant's heartbeats bass beats overlaid by slowly building washes or jabbing trills of analogue synth, brain-sucking white noise and wailing saxophone. The later adds greatly to the miasmic atmospheres. [Apr 2015, p.56]

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

Much thought has gone into the arrangements and programming, and that provides surprises as well as variety, but the consistent bottom line is respect for the songs, which is surely the best way to pay tribute to Collins herself. [May 2015, p.52]

Become Zero sees Chesley using digital processing for the first time; “Radiate” benefits greatly, evolving over nine minutes from treated bowed dissonance into churchy ambient drone, while “Machine” adds layers to an initial loping pulse until it’s an enveloping roar. [Oct 2016, p.61]

A Common Truth is far more intimate, focusing on arrangements and whispered songs erupting around Foon’s distinctly emotive cello. Due to the shifting blend of fear, despair, togetherness, hope and anger that characterises the battle for climate change awareness, her song cycle aptly seeps its way into all nooks and crannies of the emotional spectrum. [Apr 2017, p.55]

The pop elements apparent on Uyai are deployed imaginatively and effectively rather than as a means of demonstrating the group's impeccable taste. [May 2017, p.48]

Translated lyrics illuminate and mystify in equal measure. [Oct 2017, p.67]

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

The live material captures a potent clash of styles and reminds that progressive rock was not necessarily a pseudo classical confection. [Mar 2018, p.66]

Belief is one of his more structurally conventional turns. [Mar 2018, p.58]

Don’t Look Away is an even tighter proposition, the majority of its songs being sparsely but sensitively arranged and melodically direct. [Sep 2018, p.62]

Beauty, tradition, experiment: American primitive guitar is in safe hands. [Oct 2018, p.55]

Berry consequently embellishes and embroiders these reassuring moments of collective memory, bringing out in each of his cover versions some surprising hidden detail. [Nov 2018, p.50]

Siblings is a powerful collection of choral singing, poetry, spoken word, field recordings and samples that draws from a vast and interconnected range of friends and collaborators, and times and locations, bringing this idea of activism through communality to its exuberant climax. [Jan 2019, p.73]

The sixth album by this Norwegian power trio is, like each of its predecessors, a fierce demonstration of their strengths as individuals and as a collective. [Feb 2019, p.54]

By no means a vintage JJ Cale record, but one with much to enjoy and a fresh chance to hear his songs as he originally heard them. [May 2019, p.48]

But if the technology has moved on, he’s moved with it, and the results are significantly more interesting than what he was up to in the 90s. It feels rural, but modern; rustic, but hardly an idyll; a feat of true uneasy listening. [May 2019, p.51]

Dig into the four-to-the-floor derangement of “Lapwing” and the post-rock inflected “First Light” to hear a band seemingly capable of doing anything, yet remaining fleetfootedly themselves throughout. [Jun 2019, p.56]

He doesn’t strain in the falsetto passages and there’s no papering over the cracks in his phrasing. He’s as accurate and precise as he ever was, projecting even at low volumes. [Aug 2019, p.55]

House And Land’s eternal music drone tendencies are more sparingly employed than their debut, but folkie staple “Blacksmith” is a glorious outlier to this end, Morgan’s shruti box a keening back and forth foil to a two centuries old tale of metalworker induced heartbreak. [Aug 2019, p.64]

Delivers on the forward-looking promise of The Art Ensemble’s motto: great black music – ancient to the future. [May 2019, p.61]

This is folk music for the post-industrial era, which aspires to the condition of a true world music, not as a postcard from some Club Med of the mind, but as a dispatch from the front lines of both climate change and the extinction of animal species (real and imagined). Essential listening, and a real adventure in the undergrowth of the underground. Sit a spell in the shade of the Borametz. [Aug 2019, p.56]

In mindbending, psych-wormhole cruising mode. Nobody should be able to write a song like “Flesh Fondue”, about alien invaders out for human snacks, as a stomping rock-out, but Hawkwind pull it off. [Nov 2019, p.55]

While The Daisy Age won’t hold many surprises for diehard hiphop fans, the collection is well curated. [Dec 2019, p.64]

The music on Ism is intimate. Pieces end with a jolt. Brief interludes take a questioning tone, as if the fragments are enough in themselves, no need for resolution. The album’s warmth – a quality shared by McCraven’s output – owes much to the International Anthem engineering approach. [Jan 2019, p.66]

Moments illuminate the nimble beats and perky dayglo synthetic patches and above all the fierce resolution of purist independent grime anthems such as “Dem Man Are Dead” and “Badman Walking Through”. [Feb 2020, p.48]

More passionate and sophisticated than much of what passes for musical eclecticism these days, Dark Matter is a fusion of old and new, acoustic and electronic. [Feb 2020, p.42]

We Are Sent Here By History is a meditation on all of the war, death and resistance that has shaped the world we live in today. Whether or not we can use the lessons learned from that pain to create a future that is worth living is a question that remains unanswered. [Mar 2020, p.56]

For Schofield, the word scrambler symbolises both a sort of opiate and a happy place from childhood, so the music highlights this dichotomy by fusing danger and warmth into an irresistible oxymoron. A sensation of the world ending while we carry on dancing. [Apr 2020, p.51]

With their reverent, celebratory tone, tracks like “Naked (You Enter & Leave This World With Nothing)”, “I Will Follow You For Life, Everywhere” and “We Must Grieve Together” speak to the music’s function as an integral part of a community’s healing process. Sung together in deep harmony and pulling their inspiration from a source too powerful and mysterious for words, fra fra’s funeral songs offer a glimpse into how the people of this particular corner of West Africa deal with the pain, uncertainty and finality of death. [Jun 2020, p.49]

Barring the title cut’s debt to Steely Dan, the pomp is dialled down just enough on Deleted Scenes for the band to flex their fusionoid chops, adding a whole other element of kookiness to their already brow-raising style. [Jul 2020, p.56]

Music to aspire to, music from when it seemed like there might be a future worth dreaming about. [Oct 2020, p.68]

With his propensity for collaboration across disciplines, Coates blends classical training with an ear for invention. [Nov 2020, p.55]

Raymond has learned the most important lesson of American primitive guitar: whatever your influences, they need to project a bit of your emotional life. This, as much as her robust tone and nimble picking, is what makes Raymond sound like a guitarist with staying power. [Dec 2020, p.56]

The ten tracks here sprint, pound, flex and grunt, the guitar equivalent of a vigorous workout. Cerebral turns and Derek Baileyesque abstractions burble throughout, but Stateless hits more like a punk rock record than a study in extended technique. [Oct 2020, p.51]

Nightcap further distinguishes them as more than a clever amalgam of Dead tropes. The shifting time signatures and dramatic dynamics of “Wasted Time” suggest a fondness for Gabriel-era Genesis while the courtly melody and stentorian storytelling of “Altered Place” conjure thoughts of The Moody Blues at their late 1960s zenith. [Jan 2021, p.72]

Sixth album Long In The Tooth burnishes the group’s analogue groove science with familiar movements of heroic, brassy swagger. [Jan 2021, p.72]

Universal Beings E & F Sides is explicitly more of the same for fans of the original double LP. [Oct 2020, p.57]

All of the music is a kind of West African funk, a loping groove that’s an ideal platform for long, discursive but rhythmically grounded solos. ... “Leta’s Dance” has the feel of a mellow track from an early 70s Pharoah Sanders album, sweeping along like a river of electric piano and gentle guitar chords but ending with Bartz alone, keening on the bank, the new song leading seamlessly into the old ones. [Jun 2020, p.46]

Uniquely for Martin’s music, In Blue isn’t dominated by its low end – it’s the precise absence of warmth, the way Chen’s heavily echoed vocals swim in among the grainy textures and hypnotically simple melodies (so much of this recalls the dankest 1990s hiphop in vibe and directness), that makes the set so compelling, a perfect soundtrack to derailment and decay. [Jan 2021, p.70]

Return To Solaris is a fearsome ride, sublime in the most complete sense of the word. [Jul 2021, p.60]

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

His bringing the audience in to the creative process only intensifies its authenticity and demonstrates his desire to emulate the endeavours of his family, his own version of working in a team that shares the labour of shifting piles of dirt and stone, or raising the foundations of a new building. [Dec 2021, p.58]

These pieces exude a jazz inflected cool that's immediately intriguing. ... Dramatic and cinematic in its conclusion. [Jun 2022, p.44]

The songs are politically sharp and socially conscious, and Vieux sends out darkly nutating tendrils of blue over rolling, ravelling backing. [Jun 2022, p.61]

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

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]

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]

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]

While ultimately not as inventive as some of Child’s earlier outings, Crash Recoil is nevertheless an urgent, kinetic techno record. [Apr 2023, p.60]

Lightning Dreamers may be over the top and all over the place, but that’s what it takes to project a complete picture of Mazurek’s vision. [Apr 2023, p.57]