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]

Not surprisingly, given Marhaug’s presence during the time of global crisis when it was produced, this album has a harder edge than Owens’s previous releases. [Jun 2022, p.60]

The issue with Pusha’s fourth solo album isn’t his insistence on portraying a heartless American striver as if he’s the rap game Al Pacino – it’s that he’s unable to consistently conjure the menacing intensity that enlivened his work with with twin brother Malice as Clipse. [Jun 2022, p.52]

One can’t help but be in awe of the production mastery on display and the confidence with which Matmos have turned a man’s creative remains into a freshly expressive musical instrument. [Jun 2022, p.51]

Suffice to say that future, past and present are safe in the hands of 700 Bliss. [Jun 2022, p.47]

Heavy Pendulum sees the group return with one of the most accomplished releases in their decades-long career, while Scofield’s songwriting spirit is kept alive. [Jun 2022, p.46]

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

Their words are not protest or polemic, but messages from the frontline of a war that’s being waged under our noses and hidden in plain sight. And also, crucially, it completely slaps. [Jun 2022, p.44]

Almond – who recorded his vocals while recovering from Covid – sounds audibly frail at times. But this works in the album’s favour, working humanity into the glossiness. The most effective tracks are those with sparse backing, such as “Polaroid” and the drolly misanthropic “I’m Not A Friend Of God”. [May 2022, p.53]

At least the fusion here doesn’t have the overly respectful politeness of similar multinational projects, with the guitar noise and roaring likembes providing aural grit. By the middle of the record, though, the shorter studio tracks shine with low-key brilliance. [May 2022, p.44]

Heavy with lurid and dazzling detail, seeking to put drum ’n’ bass-like textures and hyperkinetic beats against the gruff distortion of rock, it recalls Pitchshifter and Asian Dub Foundation in its genreless aggravation and futurist push. [May 2022, p.55]

While the overt campiness on display in Laibach’s The Sound Of Music has been toned down here, the choice to pepper the set with familiar German showtunes (“Flieger, Grüß Mir Die Sonne” and “Das Lied Vom Einsamen Mädchen”) feels ominous when paired with the stomach-turning paintings by Gottfried Helnwein on the cover. [May 2022, p.48]

A collection of grungy, haunting songs that sound and feel timeless. Led by Hersh’s velvety grunts, this is the sort of rock that borrows the best from all the music’s variations to create something familiar yet surprisingly fresh. [May 2022, p.56]

On the opening “Asynchronous Intervals”, Golding’s beautifully burnished tenor tone – sumptuously recorded here – plays against free drums that gradually morph into a slowly burning groove. On “ActiveMultiple-Fetish-Overlord”, that tone is broken up against Luthert’s palpitating, roiling low end work. “After The Machine Settles” is muscular jazz rock; “Because Because” with multitracked/echoing soprano, is a stirring conclusion. [May 2022, p.58]

The precision and control and grand guignol gothery are all still in place – but there’s also surprise (check the startlingly clean and gorgeous nine minute odyssey of “They Move Below”) and a palpable energy the band haven’t shown in years. [May 2022, p.55]

The dryness of the recording is key, there’s an intimacy to everything that makes even the heaviest moments (“Skin A Rat”) feel like you’re hearing them in a dead room, and the shifts in tone from the punchy (“Sorry Entertainer”) to the plangent (“The Greatest”, “Tried To Understand”) and the gorgeous chorale-like (“Feminine Water Turmoil”) remain utterly convincing thanks to Ashworth’s miraculous voice. [May 2022, p.55]

The album primarily features solo guitar, harmonica and lap steel, all cloaked in gauzy atmospheres, and often conjuring mental images of a sprawling, rural America. The most compelling moments on the album make a hazy blend of guitar twang and swirling electronics, as on “Outskirts, Dreamlit” whose nostalgic melody tumbles almost without a sense of time. [May 2022, p.52]

Marc’s production skills are impressive; he layers beautifully recorded organic instruments with synths and sampled vinyl crackle, adding just enough reverb and bass boom to bring it all to vivid life. [May 2022, p.50]

He remains a fascinating and fearless artist. But one can’t help but miss the outre experiments of Terror Management, where he bombed away over noise rock flurries and sepulchral beat loops alike. [May 2022, p.54]

Balance[d] between the exquisite – lines aching with elegant age and restraint, chords feeling bruised and heavy with knowing (“Hymn”, “An Intimate Distance”) – and the slightly underdeveloped (“Bells”, “Innocence”). ... The Turning Year is calming and often very beautiful. [May 2022, p.44]

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]

Valentine has gotten undeniably skilled at being slick; even at its weirdest, this record is quite easy on the ears. ... A welcome tonic. [Apr 2022, p.51]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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

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 six loose, expansive tracks on this collection offer a glimpse into the more convivial domestic recording scenario the band were enmeshed in at that time. Free from the need to shape these ideas into conventional structures you hear the band at their most Can-like. [Mar 2022, p.52]

What makes this Johnson’s most compelling album to date is its unexpected emotive clout. In submerging the melodic substance of the songs in rolling drones, it is able to approach almost undetected and slink away with guile. [Mar 2022, p.50]

For this album to be worthwhile, Hampson has to do more than revisit his old, gold moments. At the same time, this incarnation of Loop functions partly as a reassessment of what made the sound they landed on so glorious in the first place. Both notions can coexist, and for the most part they do, with loud, laudable abandon. [Mar 2022, p.48]

Much of the album feels like this – danceable songs with lyrics that urge thought about the state of the world and your own place within it. The most engaging moments are those where Hval lets herself escape into the pure fun of making jams. ... On a quarantine album, a little bit of escapism feels right. Hval continues to ponder philosophy in her writing, but throughout Classic Objects she brings light to her fears and memories too. [Mar 2022, p.48]

She’s an astonishing live performer, but this is the next best thing and most likely a shoo-in for the best concert recording of 2022. [Mar 2022, p.46]

The album is consistently fast-paced, a simple but effective trick to amp up its pop thrills. [Mar 2022, p.46]

A few of these ten songs burble with easy rhythms – “Lye” rocks with crunchy, prog rock horns looped by The Alchemist. But overall, the tone of SICK! feels contemplative, slowly unfurling with repeated listens even as Earl crams over 20 minutes of thoughts into the work, with no hooks to leaven the intensity. [Mar 2022, p.43]

While several guests appear on the album – Tool’s drummer Danny Carey and bassist Justin Chancellor, among others – Krüller feels gorgeously desolate, befitting a world in a dire state. [Mar 2022, p.42]

Adrianne Lenker’s songwriting and vocals have never been more inclusive yet forebodingly sui generis, sealing that simultaneous conviviality and strangeness that makes Big Thief’s music so addictive, and the band have got tighter and warmer from the years of touring that preceded the album’s creation. [Mar 2022, p.42]

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]

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

The final few songs swap flash-saturated self-portrait for figure in landscape, brooding and blurred. Their hermetic sound is breached – their future more uncertain than ever – and all the better for it. [Feb 2022, p.47]

An expansive record that thoughtfully integrates electronic elements. It almost feels transmitted from a parallel past – a form of retrofuturism where science fiction meets folk. [Feb 2022, p.48]

While 2016’s Painting With was a jumble of interesting ideas lacking direction, Time Skiffs is the opposite: a paint by numbers indie pop affair completed using a quirky palette. While paring down to a more focused format is welcome, the music is suffocated by anachronisms, both within AC’s own and wider pop contexts. [Feb 2022, p.46]

Where NO was extreme in its attack, W opts to let the group dream, as a more acoustic angle is explored – with Wata’s ephemeral vocal being an ever present guiding spirit force that trails like incense smoke through the songs. Things eventually kick off, however, with “The Fallen”, a time-tested metal guitar dirge with an electronic sting in its tail that effortlessly reverts back to Boris at their amplifier worshipping best. [Feb 2022, p.58]

With Dodging Dues they’ve thrown up another seven tracks – it’s not a long album – that will sustain many a night on the road. It all feels pleasingly old-fashioned and familiar. [Jan 2022, p.64]

Ping-ponging between krautrock, deep funk, free jazz and pre-techno synth workouts, they could have easily released it as three short, more coherent LPs; some credit, at least, ought to go to Soul Jazz for indulging them in these spartan times. [Jan 2022, p.72]

Book is likewise packed with songs that take a few listens to click. Flansburgh remains an acute observer of humanity’s pettiest manipulations as well as a shit hot guitarist; Linnell still has one of the most weirdly soulful voices in rock and a feel for poignant absurdity. [Jan 2022, p.72]

She’s doing something unique and off-kilter on her debut album. She plays analogue synth and pedal harp, both essentially dreamy instruments, and her compositions are like gentle blends of spiritual jazz and ambient music, not that far from Alice Coltrane’s devotionals, if remixed by The Orb and minus the chanting. [Jan 2022, p.71]

Ultimately, [“418 (Stairs In Storms)”] cannot avoid ending with a muscular crescendo, but those preceding moments of tranquillity provide the pinnacle of another excellent Mollestad record.

Beautiful. [Jan 2022, p.64]

Having all this material together is bittersweet – rather than four distinct sets, couldn’t these styles have been brought together in a more innovative way? Arca’s work is invariably surrounded by much chatter about disrupting musical forms, but four albums divided into four distinct moods feels like an unusually conservative vehicle for her ideas. [Jan 2022, p.59]

Having all this material together is bittersweet – rather than four distinct sets, couldn’t these styles have been brought together in a more innovative way? Arca’s work is invariably surrounded by much chatter about disrupting musical forms, but four albums divided into four distinct moods feels like an unusually conservative vehicle for her ideas. [Jan 2022, p.59]

Having all this material together is bittersweet – rather than four distinct sets, couldn’t these styles have been brought together in a more innovative way? Arca’s work is invariably surrounded by much chatter about disrupting musical forms, but four albums divided into four distinct moods feels like an unusually conservative vehicle for her ideas. [Jan 2022, p.59]

Having all this material together is bittersweet – rather than four distinct sets, couldn’t these styles have been brought together in a more innovative way? Arca’s work is invariably surrounded by much chatter about disrupting musical forms, but four albums divided into four distinct moods feels like an unusually conservative vehicle for her ideas. [Jan 2022, p.59]

They have edited a tightly bound collection of six monstrously loud tracks with titles like “Cuts On Your Hands”, “Starres” and “Dark Inclusions” that read like they have been torn from some eldritch book of spellcraft but are in fact informed by the cosmos and attempts to make contact with alien intelligence. Unfortunately any insight regarding this is hidden behind the pleasingly crushing avalanche of guitar shrapnel, thundering bass and percussion that muzzle Baker’s already clouded vocal. [Jun 2021, p.54]

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]

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]

A slice of otherworldly frolics that does both of its inspirations credit. [Dec 2021, p.61]

This release is less spooky than its predecessors, and more earthy. ... Phantom Orchid” pulses with the austerity of the botany lab, but in places, Entangled Routes is possibly the first Ghost Box release that sounds almost…sexual? [Dec 2021, p.61]

A terrifically engaging collage of incompletion and one of the most blazing returns of 2021. [Dec 2021, p.59]

A total blast from start to finish. [Dec 2021, p.59]

Glover’s voice is intimate and unguarded, as if every song were being run down for friends, but it’s hard to imagine them sung in any other way, without losing the burr of nostalgia suffusing them. [Dec 2021, p.58]

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]

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]

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]

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

The depths of the production reflect the depth of concept, as Morgan makes vertical connections between personal relationships and queer and Black histories. ... Water is a palpable step forward from a versatile, ambitious artist. [Dec 2021, p.52]

Hurley was simply ready to make a new record, which includes a cover of The Louvin Brothers’ gem “Alabama” and a remake of his gorgeous “Lush Green Trees”, and that’s what he did. It’s a gesture that shouldn’t be taken for granted. [Dec 2021, p.50]

Fortunately, aside from this piece “Let Me Sleep”], the banal Clark-adjacent string spiccatos of “The Horror” and certain sections that drag on and on, this is compelling, bodymoving and occasionally inspired music. [Dec 2021, p.

A general choogle drives most of the songs, the production tends to suppress any heavy metal impulses, while the dense arrangements also neuter Dawson’s gnarled improvisational guitar style, so extremes are essentially cancelled. It’s the most normal sounding record I’ve heard from either party, but the singer can’t help but entertain even within these surprisingly prim surroundings. [Dec 2021, p.48]

Charged with relatable warmth and an emotive, human energy that’s close to 2003’s For Octavio Paz or a less melancholy version of 2005’s School Of The Flower. [Dec 2021, p.47]

The overall effect is that of a mutated being, inexplicably functional but undeniably alive, slowly making sense of the alien world in which it finds itself. [Dec 2021, p.44]

Gay’s latest is a deep dive into memory but emerges as a triumphant celebration of a past and future antilineage, uniquely conjured from the inner complexities of an artist not tortured by the past but possessed by it. [Dec 2021, p.50]

The addition of Morgane Diet’s seraphic vocals provides an emotional access point, filtering a grand cosmic aesthetic into a relatable and human scale. [Nov 2021, p.64]

One of 2021’s most impressive and poignant examples of progressive rock? Damn the torpedoes, let’s go with that. [Nov 2021, p.62]

A polished affair which approaches doom metal with something like a pop sensibility – the melodies bring to mind Deftones or the accessible end of UK bands like Paradise Lost and My Dying Bride, though Esfandiari’s strain of gothic gloom, for all its theatricality, feels less superficial and more the product of genuine internal turmoil. [Nov 2021, p.62]

Pungent and atmospheric. [Nov 2021, p.62]

It would be very hard to see Y In Dub as completing the project of taking dub into white punk, but taken on their own, separate terms these tracks are deep and engrossing explorations of a set of possibilities few others have dabbled with. [Nov 2021, p.57]

The gauzy textures that she creates on New Decade do capture something of crystalline stasis. It’s only the rhythmical structure of the “Snow And Pollen” – two electronic pulses that sound, one, two, one, two – that connotes a diffuse sense of menace. [Nov 2021, p.57]

The 20 minute centrepiece “Water Meditation” is a startlingly realised suite of wonder that flows from fragmentary shards of sax, voice and synths to stealthy dubby menace through to a collage of impacted noise and shattered beats that’s one of the most emotionally affecting delineations and reimaginings of resistant Black art you’re likely to hear in 2021. Essential listening, and the same can be said for Open The Gates as a whole. [Nov 2021, p.53]

There’s a lot to wrap your ears and brain around, and it can make a strange load of sense if you allow yourself to be carried away by its relentless stream. [Nov 2021, p.52]

At over 22 minutes, it’s ["The Offender"] one of two side-long pieces and could just as easily have gone on for an hour, or all night. ... The short pieces are just as good as the long ones. [Nov 2021, p.52]

It’s darkly, powerfully feminine, exquisitely produced and haunted as fuck; maybe the best record she’s ever made. [Nov 2021, p.50]

Written on a piano and organ instead of guitar and featuring a 24-piece ensemble of strings, winds and brass, -io is the purest realisation of Fohr’s pop sensibilities. [Nov 2021, p.50]

With the stylistic anchor lifted, the 12 cuts sound progressively more deranged as they blossom into alien dance floor mutants from bubbles of heady synths, deliriously processed voices, absurd squiggles and reversed beats. ... It’s difficult to imagine a better debut for ex-DFA head Jonathan Galkin’s new imprint FourFour. [Nov 2021, p.48]

There’s a heavy Eddie Henderson vibe here, propulsive, warm and engaging, and by the time the album closes on the jagged street vignette of its title track, it’s evident that BBNG have gone back to find a new future, a new lease of life. [Nov 2021, p.48]

DJ Seinfeld’s new album is clean, crisp and emotional but irresistibly danceable. Parts of it recall Jessy Lanza, other parts Throwing Snow and Dark Sky. He became known via the lo-fi trend a few years back but Mirrors is more indicative of a welcome garage revival. [Oct 2021, p.59]

If anything, she has rediscovered the energy that defined her work with Uzi, Live Skull and Come, pouring imposing defiance into ten rocking cuts. [Oct 2021, p.58]

The self-titled release is (indie) rock at its most exuberant, positive and loving. [Oct 2021, p.58]

Polyphonic chants mesh with distorted piano hits and percussive clatter in an ecstasy of derision and judgment, before turning into a righteous roar. [Oct 2021, p.58]

Topped off with signature twin guitar harmonies, the album is often a blast, if a bit unbalanced overall. [Oct 2021, p.58]

At the heart of the album is a propensity for pop, memorable and simple – but Vanishing Twin are at their strongest when this impulse collides with an equally powerful drive towards texture and sensation – witness the propulsive “In Cucina” for example, or the furtive “Tub Erupt”. [Oct 2021, p.56]

The beginning of the record is slow – “News About Heaven” feels aimless, while the repeating melody of “Pray For Rain” gets tedious after its third or fourth time through – but with “Something Will Come”, the album’s ominous depth comes to light, ushering in a nostalgia that permeates through the final tracks and illuminates the depth of the duo’s sound. [Oct 2021, p.55]

More than a covers album, this is a cathartic reminder of pop’s revolutionary power. [Oct 2021, p.55]

The core line-up of guitarist Buzz Osbourne and drummer Dale Crover, along with the recent addition of Steven McDonald from Redd Kross on bass, attack the vast catalogue of songs with great zeal while making sure to confound the masses in the way we somehow expect. [Oct 2021, p.51]

Much like Mantronix, Injury Reserve’s strengths lie in their overall freshness, and the way they play with and reinforce hiphop’s borders. Phoenix is full of post-genre dynamics. ... Phoenix is a punch-drunk affair that finds Injury Reserve hurtling forward with a determined anguish. [Oct 2021, p.49]

With this stripped-back suite, HTRK demonstrate such alchemy – achieving dramatic tension and emotive resonance from skeletal means. [Oct 2021, p.49]

As always Harris’s dedication to using a small spectrum of sounds to convey a wide range of emotions is noteworthy. Shade is another stunning piece of work – after all these years, Harris still makes it easier for some of us to get to know ourselves. [Oct 2021, p.48]

Retaining his passion and knowledge for psychedelic music in all its multifarious shifting forms, together with a long incubated yearning to steer his guitar sound in the direction of Jimi Hendrix, on Little Eden Saloman intermittently flashes back and storms straight ahead with a honed set of crafted songs and short-fused acid/garage rock explosions. [Sep 2021, p.62]