This worthy sequel to XXX is the first release since 2011 to offer a convincing portrait of Brown as a wholly realistic character. [Jan/Feb 2024, p.81]

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]

LCD Soundsystem's gift is to forge iron from irony, show that cleverness need not be enervating. [#252, p.46]

The album retains a taste for annihilation. [Dec 2015, p.56]

The music shines with solitary delight. [Feb 2015, p.46]

The result is an intuitive and spacious sound. Controlled but organic and broken down into contained but naturally arcing pieces, The Gradual Progression becomes a set of sequences using long drum rolls, cloudlike synths and eventually gentle vocal noises and ascents.

Citizen Zombie is not a refusal. Rather, it's a fully plugged in reckoning with the eternal power of now. [Feb 2015, p.49]

Risveglio seems keen to be accepted on its own terms rather than a simple curio. This it warrants, and rewards patient listening.

The Light In You is palpably charged with love of music and gratitude for its redemptive powers. [Sep 2015, p.48]

On TFCF (short for Theme From Crying Fountain) Andrews comes into his own. The tracks might be loosely structured, ideas, samples, field recordings and styles scattered by the dozen across the album’s 33 minutes, but it’s a sense of a distinctive songwriter exploring fracturedness across a broad spectrum from the dancefloor to the introspective. [Oct 2017, p.64]

What makes Transmission Suite work beyond its sounds is the belief Massey and Barker still have in the 808 project, the push all their music has of maintaining the future both as ultimate aim and ultimate source of anxiety. 808 State’s music has lost none of its foreboding, finesse and power. Sit deep within and enjoy. [Dec 2019, p.44]

The album's primary emotion of disgust is cushioned by performances and production so luxurious as to be sinister. [Dec 2012, p.63]

The percipients' more abstract visions allow much joyful engagement with sampled, electronic and acoustic sounds. [Feb 2013, p.52]

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]

Broken Homes And Gardens is not his best record, but it is an absolutely pure statement of where he was at for the last few years, and is a sheer pleasure to hear. [Sep 2025, p.49]

Wolves In The Throne Room return at full throttle. [Oct 2017, p.64]

These are what protest songs can sound like, feel like and taste like in the 21st century. [#257, p.52]

I can attest that despite initial misgivings, this does grow on you. [Sep 2008, p.64]

The most anomalous thing about What the Brothers Sang, a collection of Everly Brothers covers, is how sincere it sounds. [Feb 2013, p.52]

Grassed Inn is both beautifully stupid, and much, much smarter than you think. [Jan 2014, p.63]

Lennox is an innovator and a stylist, impossible to accurately imitate or easily dismiss. [Feb 2015, p.50]

Sometimes being broad hits just as much as a sharp observation. Allbarone is a fun balance of the two. [Oct 2025, p.51]

The crisp and urgent execution on this recording has been immaculately produced, the overall result being an immediacy that only an accomplished performer and ensemble can achieve. [May 2017, p.47]

Consistently entertaining. [#215, p.69]

Brick Body Kids Still Daydream is a sublimely reflective slice of nostalgia with none of the comfort or security that term implies--it’s a both hysterically funny and sharply political skewering of the games nostalgic reverie can play on people, and a people’s consciousness. [Oct 2017, p.67]

If Brian Wilson had crashed a motorcycle and holed up to recuperate at Big Pink with The Band, this is how The Basement Tapes would have sounded. [#256, p.49]

Darkly beautiful release. .... Halo's entropic instincts are a perfect fit for the film in question. [Mar 2026, p.50]

These themes of anguish are not so much bleak as moving, for he always finds a way to inject his wry observations into the mix. [Feb 2008, p.54]

Daze's exhilarating intensity is tempered by an undercurrent of grim pleasure in physical discomfort, worming under your skin like Tri Angle labelmate Rabit's similarly caustic "Pandemic." [Feb 2016, p.53]

So here they are in 2015 with Apex Predator sounding as powerful and uncompromising as their debut. [Feb 2015, p.55]

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 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]

By unplugging the effects and simply playing, they sound re-energized. [Oct 2011, p.61]

Though primarily centered around Sweet's songcraft, Burnt Up on Re-Entry benefits from the judicious incorporation of primitive electronics. [Feb 2013, p.58]

Fetch sinks below the high water level of conscious synapses firing to collapse perceptions of time and warm the sheets of the subconscious. [Aug 2012, p.48]

On Scaring The Hoes, Brown and Peggy sound great together while offering few artistic revelations. [May 2023, p.52]

Washington can flirt with bombast and kitsch, but his commitment is undeniable and the tunes are great. [Oct 2017, p.68]

Frisell, as always, plays for the group and for the song rather than reeling off solos. He has never shredded, but he doesn’t just shuck corn and whittle, either. Every Frisell performance is shaped with love and care, and with a near perfect balance between form and freedom. He just gets better and better. [Dec 2019, p.47]

The closing 'Honey' leaves all the issues behind and drips with the kind of sultry retro-funk that proves New Amerykah to have been well worth any amount of waiting. [May 2008, p.70]

The grooves, textures, feel and playing here are immaculately realised but the unique way this band put together what they can do makes it, as ever, way more than just retro-psyche. Perhaps their best, most fully realised record yet. [Oct 2023, p.56]

The Notwist's songs sound almost too arranged and it's only after they've seeped in a little that it becomes easier to admire the trio's deftness, the way they absorb electronica's qualities of dissonance and disruption and use them as essential building blocks of their music. [June 2008, p.59]

Don’t let inevitable mainstream acclaim obscure the beauty and ingenuity of this album; it’s big enough for everyone. [Apr 2019, p.52]

The Symbol Remains finds a band with their sardonic humour, lurid pulp fascinations and ability to jam intact. [Oct 2020, p.65]

What could have ended up sounding like sketches, are now completed pieces,m full of suspense flashback, refrains ad other temporal tricks. [Oct 2011, p.61]

The fact that Ultimate Care II is also, in its flexible extremes of danceability and post GRM meditation, one of the most purely enjoyable albums I've heard recently. [Feb 2016, p.55]

The most interesting thing about this music isn't so much that it exists in 2013, more that there still seems to be a fundamental need for it. [Feb 2013, p.58]

The results are gorgeous. [Apr 2019, p.54]

The sounds produced here move beyond music and closer to language. These machines seem to speak, generating a kind of emergent syntax. Osmium resist genre and resolution, channeling collapse into rhythm and rhythm into form. [Jul 2025, p.58]

Despite its recourse to sentimentality, this is appealing, historic and culturally important music. [Dec 2015, p.68]

25 years down the line, Wire are still pulling off coups as daring and deadly as This Heat's debut. [#224, p.73]

Baird's mixture of history-steeped elements keeps her songs from being tethered to any given time period, including the present, which makes them apt vehicles for words about relationships fraught with uncertainty. [Jun 2015, p.42]

This is fierce, uncompromising music. [May 2017, p.47]

An exciting record crawling with new ideas. [#243, p.74]

Holtkamp and Anderegg have arrived at a strain of wide-eyed Americana with roots in the ashen wastes of the Pennsylvania landscape. [Feb 2013, p.58]

She delivers an almost unrelentingly banging techno set whose cuts, while perhaps underground, could never be referred to as deconstructed. [Apr 2019, p.57]

Anenon's third album represents a confident shift in gear. [Apr 2016, p.46]

Though Gonzalez has always been a great arranger and producer, this album demonstrates how much she has improved as a lyricist. [Sep 2021, p.56]

Everyone Was A Bird is a lot more than a pictorial guide set to music. [Jun 2015, p.46]

Lullaby For The Lost is McCaslin's boldest iteration to date. [Oct 2025, p.56]

Were it only instrumental, Dopesmoker would be some kind of masterpiece. [Aug 2012, p.55]

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

Sharp inhalations between melodic figures are given a multidimensional presence by the reverb, grounding the sound in an embodied ethereality. As track titles like “The Cosmic Spheres Of Being Human” and “Everything Is Hidden In You” make clear, the circular rhythms of this embodied presence are identical with those of the universe. [Sep 2024, p.49]

He has a fascinating rhythmic sense, phrasing almost like a man who is writing down his words as he sings them, which gives the record a strong sense of immediacy and almost improvised spontaneity. And yet the accompaniments are more elegantly constructed than that implies, a beguiling mixture of harmonic squidge and tight metrical control. [Apr 2019, p.57]

Deeply scored with pitch-black humour, concrete riffs and the mucus rattling squalling of vocalist Zack Weil, Oozing Wound shift effortlessly from the piledriver bludgeoning that motivates “Hypnic Jerk” to the more sustained instrumental fury of “Crypto Fash”, without surrendering any of their creative firepower or ability to surprise. [May 2023, p.60]

Every gesture feels bold and assured. [Nov 2015, p.53]

The whole album seems to be incandescent with anger. You would have to travel a long way to hear an acoustic guitar album as tough as this. [Jan/Feb 2025, p.82]

It manages to evoke both void and overload simultaneously, and feels by turns oppressively dense and light as a feather. [Dec 2012, p.74]

A surprisingly engrossing side project. [Feb 2013, p.58]

Little Simz’s latest--and greatest--album is divided between three emotional states: bravado, doubt and love. [Apr 2019, p.58]

No One Deserves Happiness alternates between bleak and industrialised grindcore and a powerful poetic presence that effectively conveys a sense of loss. [Apr 2016, p.46]

Musically, it’s a perfect mix. It didn’t seem possible to top Roberts’s association with Amble Skuse and the great David McGuinness, but Völvur’s use of saxophone and fiddle, paired with Roberts’s deceptively relaxed picking, makes for a perfect, unpredictable setting. Nothing synthetic here. The word, if you want it, is syncretistic. [Sep 2021, p.57]

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

It is a fine, unnerving album. [Mar 2016, p.45]

The entire affair has a bewitching ease, an effortlessness absent from Malkmus’s artistry since the days when he wanted to name his solo debut Swedish Reggae. [Apr 2019, p.58]

The signature sounds of each ensemble have been stirred together, so that Cooper Crane’s organ, Dan Quinlivan’s electronics and Lisa Alvarado’s harmonium pulse as one, and synths and woodwinds entwine like multiple species of ivy that have grown together on the same wall. [May 2025, p.58]

Both tends such fertile, fetid soil that it almost works as an argument against its creator bothering to break bread with anyone else. That is, until you remember that there’s no good reason that he or we should have to choose one course or the other. [May 2020, p.61]

She’s done it again but, as ever, differently. [Oct 2023, p.56]

On XXX his own aesthetic seems fully formed. [Oct 2011, p.65]

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]

The result is surprisingly seamless and the producer rarely puts a foot wrong. [Nov 2008, p.79]

Mr Mitch’s productions are as fastpaced, tight and spirited as his DJ sets. He makes the most of these sparse landscapes, marking a path for a complex of emotions to bleed though. Part of the album’s charm is that Mitch doesn’t shy away from adopting a pop sensibility nor embracing love as his subject matter. [May 2017, p.51]

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

Most of the 18 cuts clock under two minutes, long enough to showcase just how fresh and creative Raczynski still is, yet short enough to feel as concentrated jolts of energy. [Jan/Feb 2025, p.88]

Cabral’s vocals, typically hushed, make Mazy Fly feel like a shared secret, its own world, and it’s thrilling to enter. [Apr 2019, p.62]

These collaborations have been performed live over the past few years and for all its pristine yet textured presentation Gensho succeeds in capturing the dynamics of those live actions. [Apr 2016, p.46]

Unlike a lot of electronica, the music never lapses into mere tastefulness. [#235, p.75]

$ilkMoney's new album might well be his best to date. [Oct 2025, p.65]

You might not always know what they are saying but the wails in “Iron Maiden” and foreboding synths of “(Crystal Aura Redux)” don’t need translating. The bleak production and relentless beats should keep us dancing all the way through the apocalypse. [Jun 2023, p.54]

Double Figure is as good as anything they have done. [#207, p.65]

At the heart of Rain On Lens, [Callahan] comes clean for the first time: Smog is subjective, not omnipotent. Hardly a psyche stripped bare, but at least it's a start. [#211, p.65]

This album is his confident and impressive soundtrack debut. [Apr 2016, p.48]

The record is a meditation on masculinity, both lyrically and musically. But it is a sombre, barely lustful masculinity that growls and shrieks and howls and tells stories here. [May 2017, p.52]

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

A necessary record, and a thoroughly compelling one. [Jul 2023, p.51]

To Those of Earth & Other Worlds miss some of the cosmic darkness of Sun Ra. Instead it's a fulsome celebration of the most joyous heights of his work. [Nov 2015, p.66]

Those expecting further dubwize excursions from this duo may be disappointed by their venture into the lounge rather than the yard. Unfair, really, as Thievery Corporation have embodied eclecticism from their beginnings, and the bass booms as sweetly as on any of their previous efforts. [#200, p.83]

The result is a project dripping with atmospheric sound and real emotional weight. [May 2023, p.64]

Music for Shut-Ins is valuable for the manner in which it acknowledges the true masters while still allowing room for non-canonical influences, expanding rather than replacing or limiting possibilities. [Jan 2014, p.64]