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]

The whole album feels like a coda, a soundtrack to the closing credits of a career that has taken them far beyond the exploratory punk of their roots. [Nov 2010, p.53]

Hegarty's eco-femism finds a much better ambassador in his songs. [Oct 2012, p.58]

The beats are tighter, the rhymes sharper and the subject matter more relevant. [July 2008, p.66]

The mood is always unsettled and unsettling, either furious or fragile. [#258, p.67]

Once you make the adjustment and accept these songs for what they are, ther are moments of loveliness. But for the most part, one can onlyy wonder what attracted Russell to indulge in this sort of stuff given his more renowned output. [Nov 2008, p.68]

Da Mind of Traxman Vol 2's density feels cryptic, a series of questions posed to listeners and the floor. [Jun 2014, p.57]

With mute on, Smith can project a tender fragility through a single lingering note, reminiscent of Miles at his most thoughtful and noirish circa Ascenseur Pour L'Echafaud. Smith's more strident statements convey an emotional rawness. [Apr 2016, p.65]

Rundle explores shadowy dreams and gothic fantasies through a series of precariously balanced electrified compositions that hover around her--light as a feather one minute, heavy as lead the next. On Dark Horses rides headlong into the singer’s psyche as she pulls us into the darkest corners of her imagination and breathes out fevered secrets. [Oct 2018, p.64]

Melnyk’s playing has a rare capacity to energise and exhilarate, and in that respect Fallen Trees does not disappoint. [Jan 2019, p.82]

Downbeat, deliberately anticlimactic, refusing to abide by rap orthodoxies, while affirming one of the genre’s dominant reflexes – calling out pretenders. Think of Marceliago as Macbeth transferred to Hempstead, Long Island, or any of the city’s other unacknowledged locales. Marciano’s rhymes read like rap koans. [Feb 2020, p.60]

Dirty and invigorating? Yes. [Jul 2021, p.67]

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

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]

Bores are in the minority and easily avoided, the exquisitely curated majority impress both in isolation and together as kaleidoscopic wonder. An unlikely joy. [Jul 2023, p.58]

Mystical, alluring and straight from the heart, We Are Together Again cements Oldham's reputation as a major force in the singer-songwriter tradition. [May 2026, p.60]

The One is both sonically and conceptually strong enough to transcend that small internet buzz circle. [Mar 2011, p.62]

This music never lacks for deep roots into Allen's background with Fela's Afrika 70, but it is also fresh in conception and execution. [Oct 2014, p.50]

At times 50 swerves near to MOR Americana, but Chapman’s guitar playing, the bedding of every track, bristling with thorns, won’t let it. [Jan 2017, p.61]

The songwriting is strong.

Sonic Youth have made a joyful return to their No Wave hardcore rock roots with a vibrating set of muscular songs which glide effortlessly from Gooey power pop to full on guitarmageddon meltdown, skulled out psychedelia and beyond. [#220, p.53]

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]

Most of the vocals elsewhere are unintelligible, blurred between endless layers of patchworked echolalia or overlaid with metal grid sheen and a mesh of hissing and crunching, skittering beats far removed from any sense of body based, physically entrained rhythm. But ultimately it’s just a shonkier version of the cut-ups and vocal splices Herndon’s been working with since her 2014 12" Chorus. [May 2019, p.52]

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]

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]

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

The frenetic, almost no wave angularity of that track ["Camera"] calls to mind Last Exit or James Blood Ulmer's most punk-accented moments, while the contrast between hymnal vocal harmonies and brutalist sonics in "Scene 4" recalls Swans' "A Hanging". Early in the closing track "Scene 5: Breathing Fire" we hear one of the album's more conventionally structured post-hardcore movements along with an oblique ascension narrative about “basic instructions before leaving Earth” continuing, “but what do we return to?”.

What stands out across Rather Ripped are the remarkable melodic turns throughout. [#268, p.63]

Desertshore is less a report than a dramatisation, an upending of their defiantly aura-less usurping of traditional performance modes in favour of a theatricality that feels more selfconsciously like a big event than the DIY/samizdat style of old.... [The Final Report] fares a little better, though again, it's a shame XTG have framed it in the form of a report.[Dec 2012, p.69]

Blank Project sounds like an empowered foundation stone for her next steps. [Feb 2014, p.44]

If there’s a heaven for a gangsta, Eazy-E is smirking down on South Central serene and secure that G Perico is doing immaculate justice to his legacy. [Mar 2018, p.61]

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]

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

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]

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]

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]

The album’s stylistic breadth and the cinematic sweep of its production add up to a more polished version of the anthemic, collaborative sound cultivated on the tour, heard on his 2020 Live At Le Guess Who? 2018 album. [Aug 2023, p.51]

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]

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

One has to look back to the golden age of the West African guitar bands to find this level of complexity executed with such brazen confidence and ability. [May 2015, p.59]

What unites them through the funk of “Zipper”, the smooth, slightly cheesy pop of “Hottie” and the sudden bursts of metallic dissonance on “Sister/Nation” is a sense of hiphop starting over, moving beyond iconography and iconoclasm into a world where they have absolute freedom to make shit up as they go along. [Feb 2018, p.46]

Band Red suggests they have reached meltdown and anybody encountering their post-punk roar would be advised to stand well back. [#243, p.74]

There's at once a sense that Venice is weightier and more purposeful than its predecessor. [#243, p.56]

Juggles multiple ideas of modernism with unusual grace and success. [#234, p.53]

The music resonates with a clarity Treanor had not yet achieved in the past, where the glassy shards of “ATAXIA A2” meet the staggered modulations and condensed hi-hats of “ATAXIA D1”, and ultimately reveal a unique and unexpected humanity. [Apr 2019, p.64]

One of his purely enjoyable recordings. [Sep 2010, p.68]

The result is one of the year's most thought-provoking electronic works. [Nov 2016, p.56]

Her voice is low and dragging, richly witch-like and wise. A selection of one-off recordings and “orphans”, Quieter is loose and beautiful, sludgy but solid. [Aug 2018, p.52]

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]

While Gunn gets in some liquid licks, they’re brief asides, never trips that’ll take you somewhere on their own, and they’re often folded into gleaming layers of keyboards and harp. While the drums occupy considerable sonic space, they are frustratingly unemphatic. ... He has never sung better. However, every time he solos, one wishes he’d keep going a bit longer. Here’s hoping that Gunn can figure out how to showcase his voice without doing so at the expense of his instrumental gifts. [Sep 2021, p.52]

The Crying Out Of Things, their latest album as a duo since 2021’s I’ve Seen All I Need To See, builds on the idiosyncratic elements of their established sound – monstrous distortion, crushed electronic beats and samples, scorched screams, fragments of punk, metal, pop, hiphop and dub – and the results are thrillingly, crushingly bleak. [Dec 2024, p.42]

Kate NV’s sense of play works at a deep grammatical level, particularly in her witty inversions of scale. Small sounds, squeaks, blips and twinkles are inflated into starring roles; boices are shrunk to decorative background shimmers. As with The Pastels, Haruomi Hosono or Pierre Bastien, WOW reminds you that playtime deserves serious attention. [Apr 2023, p.67]

Honor Found In Decay is a solid Neurosis album, but it doesn't find them doing anything new. [Nov 2012, p.63]

Better, Perhaps, to hear How To Dress Well as the latest in a lineage of lo-fi bedroom songwriting dating back to Sebadoh and Smog in the early 1990s, via Alexis Taylor, Antony Hegarty, Jamie Lidell even, and perhaps as far back as Green Gartside, and his would be soul diva falsetto. [Mar 2011, p.50]

Through poetry, wordplay and a sonic palette that seamlessly bridges the human and the mechanical, IRISIRI positions itself at a nexus of sonic and conceptual ambiguity, weaving openended narratives with a logic that eludes straightforward interpretation and exudes genuine wonder and fascination. [Jul 2018, p.45]

The rest of the album makes the distance between now and (Berlin) then of "Where Are We Now?" painfully evident, a pain heightened by Visconti's failure to convert this collection of session muso workouts into anything memorable. [May 2013, p.55]

A great part of the pleasure of Banga is revelling in the medium conveying the message. For the most part, the album is a smooth listen, its revelation couch within relaxed AOR-ish arrangements. [Jul 2012, p.64]

Atmospheric and engrossing, Birds & Beasts is a quiet triumph. [Oct 2024, p.62]

The album exhibits two players of formidable range and ability. [Apr 2015, p.60]

If there's one negative to this compilation m it's that Ghetto house is best heard in a fast and furious mix where the one trick pony tracks don't wear out their welcome and the salty language loses all meaning and becomes nothing by pure sound at high speed. Here, however, the focus is on individual tracks with no mixing. [Jan 2014, p.75]

The tempo is seldom above a crawl, and Toure's guitar weaves a crackling bed of thorns that even the typically crystalline over-production can't completely smooth out. [Mar 2015, p.59]

All told, there are some beautiful moments on this record, as well as a sense that the gap between what Fennelly wants his music to be and what he is able to accomplish is gradually narrowing. [Jun 2018, p.62]

Benin stalwarts including Black Santiago, The Picoby Band and El Rego Et Ses Commandos all deliver, while Poly-Rythmo De Cotonou get an outing on the atmospheric, if understated “Idavi” and the boogie funk of “Moulon Devla”. Les Sympathetics De Porto Novo’s set opener “A Min We Vo Nou We” is all ragged fuzz guitar and lifted JB licks, lit from within by the incendiary urgency of the Benin sound. [Jun 2018, p.69]

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

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]

A set of songs syruped in late 1960s and early 70s pop and rock nostalgia, yet still manage to sound unique. [Sep 2023, p.64]

In truth, every twist and turn, every tempo change on Siberia is evidence of the group's unabated thirst for adventure. [Oct 2013, p.55]

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

While not as suck your frozen heart out bleak as her last album, Abyss, Hiss Spun explores metal's darkness on a more intimate scale. [Nov 2017, p.67]

With its crashing together of narcotic pop, serialism and motorik rock, Find Me Finding You is in a similar mould to Sadier’s compatriot Pierre Henry’s concrète pop nugget Psyche Rock. Or, closer to home, Stereolab. [Apr 2017, p.55]

The album deftly balances expansive environments with a singular vocal intimacy. [Nov 2018, p.51]

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]

If Lightning Bolt works best live, Wonderful Rainbow loses nothing of the duo's spontaneous wallop. [#230, p.56]

The pairing of contemporary classical with electronic music is a concept that could easily--and often does--go wrong. At times Shelley’s On Zenn-La feels like it’s about to do just that, but this very awareness of historical context makes it a worthy tribute to its hallowed predecessors. [Oct 2018, p.51]

What a blessed relief, given all this, that Dan Bitney, John Herndon, Doug McCombs, John McEntire and Jeff Parker, collectively, still sound wholly and unapologetically like themselves. [Nov 2025, p.60]

The album is strong in the style, but offers no real surprises, with the familiar mixture of clacking Tuareg rhythm and scorched Sahelian riffing best illustrated here by the fiercely motorik “War Toyed”. [Apr 2017, p.63]

Lala Belu is his first new recording for decades, and it lives up to the expectation generated by their live appearances. [Apr 2018, p.67]

There's less sense of puzzle and struggle than we're used to with Aphex Twin... but Chosen Lords is certainly meticulous and absorbing. [#266, p.51]

Music For Writers is lovely to review, both because it does exactly what its title suggests aiding concentration and contemplation for writers, and reviewers while standing up to a degree of scrutiny. [Nov 2025, p.53]

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

Her own voice breaks sometimes, and it’s in these moments – when she seems to drop the mask – that the album lands its most impactful blows. Tracks like “Cosmic Joke” and “Anthem Of Me” bring more dense, pressurised operatics. [May 2025, p.51]

I dig a conceptual framework but to be honest my enjoyment of Rooting For Love has little to do with earthbound concerns and everything to do with sheer escapist pleasure in form and grain. [Mar 2024, p.52]

Each track is a mini drama of yearning and patience. These are studies in building momentum, meditations on how to temporarily tap into a shared singular spirit. [Jul 2024, p.50]

The Beach Boys and Merseybeat stylings are still present, only without a single note wasted; every gesture, shaker, blurp of synth, bubble of spring reverb feels deliberate and functional. The songwriting benefits from this directness, striking an effective balance between chipper pop hooks and more introspective, often sombre lyricism. [Apr 2025, p.56]

Granted, Flow's torrent of words is Thirlwell's familiar angsty blurt of near operatic proportions, but closer attention reveals his skill as an arranger, producer and rhythm sampler is now verging on the monumental. [#208, p.57]

[A] finely crafted and very songwriterly affair (with echoes of Talk Talk, The Auteurs and Roy Harper). [Jan 2017, p.74]

It’s a bold, defining album from the UK techno producer that will undoubtedly fulfill her wish to flip people’s perceptions. [Jul 2017, p.52]

For all its kinkiness Green Twins is indubitably an R&B record (tracks like “Cuffed” and “JP” really can’t be described as anything else) and an exceptional one at that. [Jul 2017, p.52]

This is von Hausswolff’s most open, personal and ultimately affirmative recording to date. [Mar 2018, p.48]

Hoffmeier’s fourth solo album The Drought sees her graduating from the Copenhagen based label Posh Isolation to PAN to deliver her strongest statement yet. [Nov 2018, p.62]

It blends jazz, funk, dub and electronic sounds into a seamless, at times psychedelic whole. [Nov 2019, p.66]

Denzel’s flows are as hungry as ever, at times managing to channel the untamed spirit of DMX (see “Diet”) while Kenny’s production is the ideal mix of weighty drums and potent bass. It’s an energetic listen and one that can hopefully act as some sort of cure for Old Heads Syndrome – the belief that no one is making real hiphop anymore. [Apr 2020, p.68]

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]

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]

There’s a mite more polish on Reason To Smile than some might favour. But there’s also a rich seam of dark humour and rage worthy of Kendrick Lamar or Silent Eclipse. [Jun 2022, p.62]

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]

Big | Brave roars into action with the immense “Carriers, Farriers And Knaves” and proceeds through five subsequent tracks whose heaviness is substantially derived from a keen sense of texture – abetted and encouraged by producer Seth Manchester – and the anguished wail of guitarist/vocalist Robin Wattie. [Apr 2023, p.64]

A welcome return from Baxter Dury, as he turns his gaze to the past to offer up a typically wry dissection of his upbringing and his formative years. [Aug 2023, p.50]