Thrilling even as it plumbs the depths of anguish. [Aug 2021, p.52]

Although this record is Rhys’s most polished to date, he does squeeze in moments of strangeness – subtle and paired down, bubbling beneath lush production and melodic arrangements. [Mar 2024, p.52]

To say the album is all over the place musically is both understatement and compliment. .... No More Water: The Gospel Of James Baldwin is revolutionary fire music – but it’s also a celebration, a party held in honour of a man who did so much, expecting nothing in return. [Oct 2024, p.57]

You are reminded that yes, this has all been done before, but Out Hud get by with the wistful innocence of well-intentioned brainiacs. [#225, p.71]

Contrasting epic, experimental freakouts with concise chamber music, 5 is a diverse album, full of gems bleeding with icy brilliance. [#235, p.69]

There’s a beguiling modesty to tracks such as “Fire” and “4th Dimension”, while Yasiin Bey’s understated sprechgesang advising “Kids see ghosts sometimes” on the title track feels plausible, immanent, urgent. [Aug 2018, p.63]

With his best record in years, Gibbs gets a bump stock boost from Kenny Beats (03 Greedo, Key!), a former EDM DJ turned grimiest white boy rap producer since Alchemist. This is Gibbs being Gibbs. [Sep 2018, p.66]

It’s dense and esoteric, but gorgeous. [Oct 2019, p.55]

Dust floats along meditatively, and is Halo’s warmest and most familial record to date. [Jul 2017, p.52]

A captivating fourth album from the Richmond, Virginia outfit that casts a woeful eye over Trump’s America. [Jun 2019, p.56]

This decidedly literate songcraft has a range of ancestors, including Talking Heads, Sparks and David Grubbs, but three albums along, The Books are nailing down a distinctive soundworld of their own. [#254, p.54]

An air of devotion does indeed hover over this music, filtering through the stately intonation of Anima Brass and the a cappella singing of The Macadam Ensemble, as well as the quiet concentration of Malone’s own playing. Yet it emanates not from the rarefied air of religious sentiment, but from the composer’s passionate dedication to sound itself, and her respect for its potential capacity to realise, as the title of the concluding piece puts it, “The Unification Of Inner & Outer Life”. [Mar 2024, p.50]

Krlic combines a flexible approach with an impressive deftness of touch, and Excavation sees him feeling out new ways through the shadows. [Apr 2013, p.50]

The album glows white-hot with fury and energy, familiar yet fresh. [#243, p.66]

Throughout the album, multiple vocal lines with different rhythms and lyrics are frequently layered atop each other, lending to a dense, teeming maximalism. This tendency makes the moments of relative spaciousness, like the synth-laden and futuristic “Coming Back (From The Distance Between The Spaces Of Time)”, feel all the more boundless. [Oct 2018, p.49]

Where Inter Arma employ Cascadian elements and bottomheavy tonalities in order to plumb the depths of the soul, Full Of Hell express the desire to not simply ponder life’s futility but to actively resist those feelings. [Jun 2019, p.56]

It joins Titanic and Big Thief’s UFOF (members of Big Thief are present) as one of 2019’s leftfield pop gems, a record created with no detectable consciousness of a wider scene but with a bedroom-wide sense of possibility. [Jul 2019, p.52]

The magic of demos is being able to discover well known songs anew. In this form, the yearning and invitation of “Colour Me In” takes on a more literal meaning (“I am grey still on the page… Just an outline, sketchy but fine…Somehow I feel that I’m just the idea”), but is somehow even more poignant, and a reminder of how songs that began so deceptively simply would be taken into so many hearts, coloured in with countless listeners’ emotions and experiences. [Oct 2024, p.69]

This wonderful music is most certainly bleeding freely from somewhere deep inside Jenny Hval. [Nov 2016, p.58]

The musical quality is high, and it’s unusual among the saxophonist’s post-1959 studio recordings in reprising earlier compositions – he mostly featured new material. Coltrane’s rather unvarying dynamic level makes him a less effective film composer than his former employer Miles Davis, with his dramatic mastery – but Trane can’t be blamed for not fitting his music to the action, given that he had little idea what that would be. [Nov 2019, p.69]

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]

If Wilco have deliberately stepped back from the brink in recent years, the quality has been maintained, and one feels the door is always open for their return. [Jan 2015, p.80]

His concerns are serious--consumerism, race, fame, relationships--but he rarely addresses them with the craft or focus they deserve. [Sep 2013, p.66]

Body is a sound sculpture that cares less for internal time than for the cerebral pleasures of long duration. [Oct 2018, p.60]

Its 16 tracks are vignettes of memory and emotion, which see her thoughtful production informed by IDM, glitch and electronic emo. True to the album’s concept, there's a charming bedroom maximalism. .... Lovely, affecting record. [Oct 2023, p.48]

Countless Branches does nothing different, but seems to knock them all dead by virtue of its naked simplicity alone. Some of these tracks are scarcely crafted songs at all but simple musings, addressed to no one in particular, not even an inward self, just uttered over soft, slow piano chords. [Mar 2020, p.48]

While unconventional, the pairing is astute. [May 2019, p.55]

Empath is extreme in ways that extend beyond aggression or distortion. It’s melodic to the point of overload, layered to the point of obsessiveness. Conventions are disrupted in unexpected ways. ... Which is ugly to you? Which is beautiful? Townsend’s music urges both a thoughtful re-examination of these criteria and a long overdue redefinition of sonic extremity. [May 2019, p.56]