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]

He introduces a dirty P-funk bassline to an endless whorl of hi-hats and swelling chords on “Ocean 1”, sounding tougher and sexier than ever, and the album’s middle section lays out long, uninterrupted trails of conga drums and Latin jazz piano, reaching a radiant crescendo on the title track. [Sep 2020, p.62]

A loop can be a grounded, limiting element to work with – the delightfully wobbly “Slappin’ Yo Face” has nowhere to go, quickly running out of steam. Elsewhere this very quality opens up beautiful meditative potential. [Sep 2020, p.60]

Lighten up and wallow in aural filth as Siifu and Liv.e preach on keeping shit clean. Allow such a space for the exquisitely sloppy breaks and moans to work their magic and sudden bursts of clarity, urgent insights. [Jan 2021, p.87]

We should be thankful at least for this one precocious masterpiece, where even the big closing motivational ballad “Energy” comes humble and soothing. The 14 flawless blasts of pure hunger that precede it are equally spare, allowing room for all sorts of monumental chords and vocal inflections to weave their way into Salieu’s tales of frontline Coventry. [Jan 2021, p.87]

7G doesn’t feel so much like an album as an extensive portfolio of a very exciting producer. [Oct 2020, p.52]

Embracing several facets of Lafawndah’s incredible virtuosic vocal abilities, every track on The Fifth Season leaves you immediately wanting more. [Oct 2020, p.56]

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

The album’s 78 minutes include ample shimmering prettiness and strafing digital energy, with only minimal concessions to anyone who would prefer one or the other.

Shygirl represents the very best of avant leaning contemporary UK pop on this generous seven track EP without a single dull moment. [Jan 2021, p.85]

It pains me to think they’d record something so vacant and unneeded. Maybe 30 years ago this would have been a different album. But here and now, Two To One is a case of too little, too late. [Jan 21, p.82]

Origin Of The Alimonies is Hunt-Hendrix’s most compositionally elaborate and layered work yet. [Jan 2021, p.74]

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

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]

Locked in sequences and formulae, there is a rich depth to the spectrum of sounds. [Jan 2021, p.69]

The nature of their interaction sheds light on the physics and mathematical realities which underlie music and its capacity to stimulate or move us. Often in that process Drift Multiply happens to be unapologetically beautiful. [Dec 2020, p.55]

I miss the grit and grain of Skelton’s unique string sounds, but he still gets a brightness in his melancholy, often via a bristling major chord. [Oct 2020, p.61 ]

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]

Especially potent are moments in which Rundle’s velvety delivery overlaps with Bryan Funck’s bitter growls. Here, they find strength in one another and traverse a valley infested by guitar riffs dripping with filth, earthshaking tom hits and forlorn swirls of folk, leaving behind a harsh yet stunning trail of music. [Dec 2020, p.62]

Deprived of fuzzy riffs, Domenic Palermo’s voice floats naked in a woolly, gentle sound, simultaneously confessing and recollecting. But from there on, they shift into higher gear, injecting doses of anxiety into colourful progressive dream pop and shoegaze bites. [Dec 2020, p.62]

Personal and political themes gestate within this gloss. They surface in full power on the giddy “Space Golf”, showering with sarcasm the absurd space escapism of xenophobic, misanthropic billionaires. [Dec 2020, p.62]

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]

As a superior melodic rapper, Open Mike Eagle seems to communicate with a kind of preternatural whimsy. Even when he sifts through his trauma, his voice serves as a velvet glove, keeping this 30 minute album from descending into painful self-pity. [Dec 2020, p.54]

Barry Walker’s softly rising and falling pedal steel melodies calcify the skeleton of “Memory Of Lunch”, while Patrick McDermott’s distorted guitar lines provide the flesh, shaping a harsher drone as a symbolic border between reality and dream. And while Roped In never renounces its cheerful perspective, the approaching darkness of his guitar overtones dispels childlike innocence. [Dec 2020, p.53]

A further cover from that era, Corrosion Of Conformity’s “Loss For Words”, features alongside three previously unheard songs by the teenage group: “Methematics” stands out as a twisty prog-thrasher with shades of Voivod. It still amounts to a bit of a frippery, and one doesn’t have to look far to find a fan of the band cheesed off at Mr Bungle doing this rather than writing a follow-up to 1999’s California, but they don’t owe anyone anything. [Dec 2020, p.52]

The way Shadow Of Fear seems to drift between the influence of Kirk’s old dystopia and new surfaces weakens the impact of its first half particularly, where the early 80s industrial model reigns. It takes multiple listens to focus through to the subtler pleasures of the oddly lopsided grooves and how he manipulates the layers of texture that swallow them. [Dec 2020, p.47]

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

With its mix of anxiety, fun and catharsis, it provides a compelling listen for a tumultuous year. [Oct 2020, p.56]

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

Plunges deeper into Saami’s isolate sonic wisdom. [Oct 2020]

Lamentations is a gently devastating and cathartic listening experience. [Nov 20, p.54]

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

Propulsive and beautifully weighted, this is music of absolute clarity. Sangare’s voice gleams adamantine. [Oct 2020, p.67]

What they sculpt is impressive if not entirely unfamiliar. [Oct 2020, p.65]

Fall To Pieces exists in this oxymoronic hinterland of nihilism and resilience, evocative of the contradictions of grief. [Oct 2020, p.64]

The album embraces bittersweet moods and moulds them into gorgeously transportive but deceptive cuts. [Oct 2020, p.62]

Things heat up a bit on “Misanthrope Gets Lunch” and “Oblivion Sigil”, when the shrill bursts from Kyp Malone’s synthesizer and Marcos Rodriguez’s guitar face off against one another like Irmin Schmidt and Michael Karoli of Can did on Delay 1968, but sadly, those are the only flashes of excitement to be found on the release. [Oct 2020, p.59]

As per usual after listening to an Oh Sees release, I’m impressed by the execution but left cold and hollow by their studious style. [Oct 2020, p.59]

Rough And Rowdy Ways is undoubtedly the work of an artist with one eye on his legacy, yet it’s so full of wit, mischief and life that it positively sings. [Sep 2020, p.52]

The first two tracks showcase the oddity of the album’s moods. ... The tension grows to breaking point on the two vocal numbers, “Play The Ghost” and “Canyon Walls”, in which the barest suggestion of melodic form, coalescing out of scatters of organ drone and faded, looping instruments has to provide a support for Davachi’s Grouper-like laryngeal ectoplasm.[Oct 2020, p.52]

Consists of a reasonable ten discrete songs that feature a manageable number of guest vocalists. ... His focus on hybridity and virality keeps his work fresh and intriguing. [Oct 2020, p.52]

John Foxx’s last few records have been both a late career second wind and a shameless romp through 20th century art rock tropes – but here it’s done with a level of glee and fuck-it energy that makes even the obvious references hard to resist. [Sep 2020, p.64]

We Have Amnesia Sometimes proves that Yo La Tengo should leave their comfort zone more often. [Sep 2020, p.61]

Allegiance & Conviction is Windy & Carl’s first new album in a good long while, and it was worth the wait. [Sep 2020, p.61]

Implausibly enduring, oddly endearing and extreme in ways both unexpected and otherwise. [Sep 2020, p.57]

Though not all the tracks are fully realised, Molina was clearly pushing into new territory: that he never got there is a tragedy. [Sep 2020, p.57]

Their latest concoction is a study in maximalism that weaves ideas from a multitude of artists into a succinct stylistic language. [Sep 2020, p.56]

Where the jazz content is foregrounded however, the music is less convincing. ... Garcia’s tone bears more than a passing resemblance to Kamasi Washington’s, with a similar paucity of harmonic complexity and grandstanding solos conveying an earnest seriousness that mistakes widescreen emoting for genuine emotional content. [Sep 2020, p.52]

The astonishing thing about Deap Lips is that it sounds nothing like either constituent band, though Troy’s nasal vocal sometimes gives it away. [Sep 2020, p.52]

They continue to surprise and enchant. [Sep 2020, p.52]

A polished version of the group’s classic style propels this concept, but their invigorating eccentricity disintegrates as the album progresses. The opening title track feels familiar, with its quintessential electric riff, but this vibrancy quickly breaks down with songs like “Reduced Guilt”, whose tense harmonies drive a constant sense of unease. The record feels rote for the band, until it reaches its enigmatic conclusion. [Sep 2020, p.49]

It builds on themes and ideas introduced earlier in a clear and discernible way. ... No Era Sólida is more organic and less definable. [Sep 2020, p.49]

The album demonstrates control at every point, moving effortlessly between elegant restraint and a precise, brutal pummelling that sounds like a battering ram smashing through a door. [Sep 2020, p.48]

Thanks to Muldrow, these compositions now bump and swing to the blues of the day. [Sep 2020, p.47]

Supple openendedness of texture and the cyclic reoccurrence become one and the same as the music goes on and on – liberating words in time, rather than setting them in stone. [Sep 2020, p.46]

The freshness and spontaneity of a new collaboration shines throughout The Quickening – it ensures a fresh, unmannered feel in its tangled explorations of American landscapes and is all the more compelling for not being too perfectly polished. [Sep 2020, p.46]

A band absolutely floating free, and realising that this Throwing Muses thing is beyond all of them, beyond all of us, an almost tidal pull on the cells, forward into life. Sun Racket is an essential truth kit for a post-truth world. [Jul 2020, p.52]

A mid-1970s Tangerine Dream vibe is more apparent than on previous Noveller albums, albeit still further removed from the trappings of rock music per se, and it largely comes off as a soundtrack in waiting for a film in which a hard-up community of 19th century nomads travel slowly across an arid plain. [Aug 2020, p.64]

The selections step sufficiently far from the territory established by their own songs to generate intrigue without stretching credulity. [Jul 2020, p.64]

Heart’s Ease picks up directly from where Lodestar left off. The lightness of touch of that earlier album, the delicate and sparse instrumental backing, so unobtrusive it enables rather than dominates, and her knack of filleting songs down to their bony essence, are all elements Collins pursues further here. [Aug 2020, p.52]

There’s a luxuriant impulse at work on this second album by the London-based keyboardist and producer. The strings in particular work beautifully on the soporific funk of tunes like “1989” or “Toulouse”, suggesting a Xanaxed Roy Ayers recording for CTI in the mid-70s. Aug 2020, p.68]

It fizzles out in places – there's none of the languor of previous work nor the melancholy that collaborator Jeremy Greenspan perfected in Junior Boys – but at its best this is aural champagne, chill, crisp and delectable. [Aug 2020, p.66]

The swelling, churchy ambient post-rock of Juliana Barwick’s latest could spill over into pomposity in heavier hands, but the freshly Los Angeles based artist exudes a modest air. [Aug 2020, p.64]

He knows that being the most complete version of himself requires lifelong searching – græ never fails to feel like such a journey. [Aug 2020, p.63]

Intoxicating oddness permeates some of these slow, shimmying jams. [Aug 2020, p.59]

Exquisite acoustic compositions meet Crampton’s taste for dissonance and distortion. [Aug 2020, p.54]

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]

Gane forgoes the intensifying momentum found elsewhere in his work for a more conventionally cinematic arc. [Aug 2020, p.52]

Far from being some utopian unity of the opposites her work has summoned – beyond binaries – she’s still clearly experimenting and sometimes failing. [Aug 2020, p.48]

The album suffers a little from its 14 song duration. The Mael wit works best when it’s tightly presented. [Jul 2020, p.52]

It’s a strange brew, some distance from the monumental party music that has tended to characterise the duo’s three previous albums. [Jul 2020, p.50]

Where Tuttle takes a more detached standpoint he’s less successful. Perhaps attempting to mimic corporate blandness, “Cambridge Drive Shopping Centre” mixes field recording of shoppers with a dogged guitar motif to fast diminishing effect. For the most part however he keeps cynicism at bay, a welcoming guide to his kingdom of everyday beauty. [Jul 2020, p.53]

It’s a much rougher around the edges effort than 2019’s GREY Area, but it works because Simz is an alum of the pirate radio days; this is her forte. Sonically it’s a dream. [Jul 2020, p.59]

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]

An exciting second album. ... Their otherworldly fetishisation of dystopian collapse is so exhilarating it’s almost tolerable. [May 2020, p.48]

The eight pieces here function as a drummer’s showcase, certainly, but Contact’s wilful limitations conceal an eclectic approach. ... Time spent immersed in Contact will reap reward. [May 2020, p.52]

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]

White noise is the most versatile tool in Brighton producer Alan Myson’s kit: he deploys it as a gloss on everything, to either mind-quieting effect on tracks like “Angel In Ruin” and “Oblivion Theme”, or as an anxiety accelerant as on the fuzzed out battle-pitch “Bladed Terrain” where static hisses behind stomping, crunching thwacks and arpeggios. [Jun 2020, p.60]

In the past this rage was intrinsic, wounds covered with cheery sugar, but now there is emotional distance at the core of Heavy Light, filled with others’ voices. Whether or not a deliberate choice, through this transformation the album loses some of its potency and ability to affect. [Jun 2020, p.59]

Music that feels lived in and vivid, instilled with notes that roam between lives of people on the fringes while finding magic in the mundane. [Jun 2020, p.59]

As a whole, Goons Be Gone feels strangely anachronistic, but not nostalgic. Retrieved from the heyday of punk rock, but with a lot of its own to say. [Jun 2020, p.59]

The record works best however when Leandoer wears his heart unashamedly on his sleeve.

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]

1988 is full of these striking juxtapositions, placing tales of hustling and gunplay in smoothed out, soulful musical beds. [Jun 2020, p.50]

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]

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]

Whether the listener feels it succeeds will depend on their willingness to accept its surface passivity. ... Shall We Go On Sinning is most persuasive on the second side. [May 2020, p.60]

There’s a kind of manic, excessive inventiveness here, as if the song needs just one more bridge or a doubling of the refrain to sustain its ideas. Yet on closer inspection they are often internally samey. [May 2020, p.53]

Apart from a few works for chamber instruments, which have a similar pleasing air of fakeness to Michael Nyman’s faux baroque cues for Peter Greenaway, these sketches all have uncertain origins and textures. [May 2020, p.66]

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]

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]

The too brief, purely instrumental “Sensational” is the best track, with suggestions of Weather Report’s jazz rock expansiveness. But the general impression is gimmicky and lightweight – effects without causes. [May 2020, p.66]

Filled with ghosts; confessions; jokes; an abundance of Jay-Z features and a prodigal son offering explanations for his disappearance and return. [May 2020, p.65]

The production is flawless. ... But the obvious big tunes fall flat.

It Is What It Is is a fitting ethos for an artist whose genre-twisting tendrils have extended themselves into the highest reaches of the pop canopy, simultaneously flexing their deep funk and jazz roots. [May 2020, p.62]

For those who appreciated the rigour of old, the new album might offer a challenge due to its lyrical sentiments and a base literalism that might be ironic. [May 2020, p.60]

Such excursions don’t amount to the group reinventing their personal wheel, but at just over an hour, this album is about the length of an average Necks performance, and at least as exploratory. [May 2020, p.58]

It’s hard to believe this is the same band who bowed out with Ghost Stories. There they sounded uptight and reticent; here they are restless and free. The creative rebirth continues. Where to next? [May 2020, p.55]