Each piece might be filled with personal meaning to the artist, but they all leave enough space for listeners to reflect on their own worries. The transition between the noisy, illusory interlude “[ A Backlit Door]” and the understated beauty of “Haruspex” is an especially poignant moment on an album rich with them. [Dec 2023, p.54]

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

Superficially, Lovage is a continuation of the Handsome Boy Modeling School aesthetic that collides HipHop, rock and electronica into an ironic hipster epic. [#213, p. 59]

The sound is crisp without sacrificing any of Chesnutt’s trademark grit. By adding a little glean, Cody Chesnutt gives you the best of both sonic worlds. [Aug 2017, p.48]

Torche’s engagingly awry blend of harmony and heaviosity finds full fruition on Admission, an album you might feel somewhat ashamed for enjoying so thoroughly. [Sep 2019, p.61]

Maus’s genius is to splice nostalgic sonic expectations for the future with new structural realities. [Nov 2017, p.60]

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 trio are in classic 1970s rock mode throughout. [Mar 2012, p.53]

Its feel is psychedelic but strong. [Apr 2015, p.60]

Dear is pervaded by a deep melancholy, but of a sweet, lovelorn kind, a looking back and a bitter-sweet attitude. Who knows if it’ll be their last record. If this is the case, it’s certainly a fitting send-off. [Aug 2017, p.49]

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]

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]

Yoshimi’s mesh of voices is sometimes overpowering, although, as with Björk, that feeling of overpowerment is part of the deal, constructed to bring the listener to a place that feels like the edge of something--the singer’s endurance; the listener’s understanding--only to push them over into somewhere else entirely. [Nov 2017, p.61]

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]

[Wyatt's voice} is not the most technically 'correct' voice, but in the setting of Ros Stephen's arrangements for string quartet, with Gilad Atzmon adding alto saxophone, it is as though that uncertain crack, that flaw floating in the clear quaver of his voice is a precise match for the happysad ambiguities that haunt so many jazz standards. [Oct 2010, p.62]

They're wise enough to leave breathing space, such as the final minute of "The Hurt That Finds You First," which codas into a swishing corridor of guitar licks, or "The Last vigil," which brings the album wordlessly to rest on a pall of interleaved, echoing guitar chimes. [Mar 2012, p.56]

In Black & Gold has a poise, purpose and maturity not heard before. [Apr 2015, p.63]

Many of these tracks barely scrape two and a half minutes. Crazed voices talk about “hair” and a “super-weird looking guy” while the deranged piano of a haunted ballroom plays for no one (“The Hidden Joice”). But it’s a fun, fairground of a record too, with a hare-brained 1960s Wurlitzer pop song (“Give It To Me”), dopey scat (“Scooba”) and silly names and phrases like “Chicken Butt” and “Eat Yourself Out”.

On Angels & devils, The Bug crystallises a vision of low end and lower urges that feels dangerously universal. [Aug 2014, p.48]

O’Dwyer’s explorations of forgotten spaces, ways of listening and acoustic phenomena are as rich as ever, this haunted collection of subterranean sounds revealing even greater depths to her sprawling, strange work. [Nov 2017, p.61]

It’s melodic, often strikingly beautiful and consistently daring. [Jan/Feb 2025, p.98]

Bird Machine is not a revelation, but it can be a joy. [Oct 2023, p.54]

Rarely has an album exemplified the 'body and soul' paid so much lip service in House music so willingly. [Apr 2008, p.58]

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]

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]

The comparison between [The Disco's of Imhotep] and Ancient Echoes revealing the absolutely consistency of Moss's vision over the years. [Aug 2016, p.50]

Another charming collection. [#248, p.51]

It’s all extraordinarily listenable thanks to Woolford’s clear vision in tracing various threads of connection between these forms of electronic funk. However, sometimes the direct, hyperspecific references, which can have such impact in club contexts, distract from the flow in the context of an album, and the moments where he navigates the spaces between those specifics become the most enduringly impressive. [Nov 2017, p.62]