Much thought has gone into the arrangements and programming, and that provides surprises as well as variety, but the consistent bottom line is respect for the songs, which is surely the best way to pay tribute to Collins herself. [May 2015, p.52]

Become Zero sees Chesley using digital processing for the first time; “Radiate” benefits greatly, evolving over nine minutes from treated bowed dissonance into churchy ambient drone, while “Machine” adds layers to an initial loping pulse until it’s an enveloping roar. [Oct 2016, p.61]

A Common Truth is far more intimate, focusing on arrangements and whispered songs erupting around Foon’s distinctly emotive cello. Due to the shifting blend of fear, despair, togetherness, hope and anger that characterises the battle for climate change awareness, her song cycle aptly seeps its way into all nooks and crannies of the emotional spectrum. [Apr 2017, p.55]

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]

Translated lyrics illuminate and mystify in equal measure. [Oct 2017, p.67]

Throughout there's a strangely prosaic lyricism at work making the mundane threatening. [Dec 2018, p.48]

The live material captures a potent clash of styles and reminds that progressive rock was not necessarily a pseudo classical confection. [Mar 2018, p.66]

Belief is one of his more structurally conventional turns. [Mar 2018, p.58]

Don’t Look Away is an even tighter proposition, the majority of its songs being sparsely but sensitively arranged and melodically direct. [Sep 2018, p.62]

Beauty, tradition, experiment: American primitive guitar is in safe hands. [Oct 2018, p.55]

Berry consequently embellishes and embroiders these reassuring moments of collective memory, bringing out in each of his cover versions some surprising hidden detail. [Nov 2018, p.50]

Siblings is a powerful collection of choral singing, poetry, spoken word, field recordings and samples that draws from a vast and interconnected range of friends and collaborators, and times and locations, bringing this idea of activism through communality to its exuberant climax. [Jan 2019, p.73]

The sixth album by this Norwegian power trio is, like each of its predecessors, a fierce demonstration of their strengths as individuals and as a collective. [Feb 2019, p.54]

By no means a vintage JJ Cale record, but one with much to enjoy and a fresh chance to hear his songs as he originally heard them. [May 2019, p.48]

But if the technology has moved on, he’s moved with it, and the results are significantly more interesting than what he was up to in the 90s. It feels rural, but modern; rustic, but hardly an idyll; a feat of true uneasy listening. [May 2019, p.51]

Dig into the four-to-the-floor derangement of “Lapwing” and the post-rock inflected “First Light” to hear a band seemingly capable of doing anything, yet remaining fleetfootedly themselves throughout. [Jun 2019, p.56]

He doesn’t strain in the falsetto passages and there’s no papering over the cracks in his phrasing. He’s as accurate and precise as he ever was, projecting even at low volumes. [Aug 2019, p.55]

House And Land’s eternal music drone tendencies are more sparingly employed than their debut, but folkie staple “Blacksmith” is a glorious outlier to this end, Morgan’s shruti box a keening back and forth foil to a two centuries old tale of metalworker induced heartbreak. [Aug 2019, p.64]

Delivers on the forward-looking promise of The Art Ensemble’s motto: great black music – ancient to the future. [May 2019, p.61]

This is folk music for the post-industrial era, which aspires to the condition of a true world music, not as a postcard from some Club Med of the mind, but as a dispatch from the front lines of both climate change and the extinction of animal species (real and imagined). Essential listening, and a real adventure in the undergrowth of the underground. Sit a spell in the shade of the Borametz. [Aug 2019, p.56]

In mindbending, psych-wormhole cruising mode. Nobody should be able to write a song like “Flesh Fondue”, about alien invaders out for human snacks, as a stomping rock-out, but Hawkwind pull it off. [Nov 2019, p.55]

While The Daisy Age won’t hold many surprises for diehard hiphop fans, the collection is well curated. [Dec 2019, p.64]

The music on Ism is intimate. Pieces end with a jolt. Brief interludes take a questioning tone, as if the fragments are enough in themselves, no need for resolution. The album’s warmth – a quality shared by McCraven’s output – owes much to the International Anthem engineering approach. [Jan 2019, p.66]

Moments illuminate the nimble beats and perky dayglo synthetic patches and above all the fierce resolution of purist independent grime anthems such as “Dem Man Are Dead” and “Badman Walking Through”. [Feb 2020, p.48]

More passionate and sophisticated than much of what passes for musical eclecticism these days, Dark Matter is a fusion of old and new, acoustic and electronic. [Feb 2020, p.42]

We Are Sent Here By History is a meditation on all of the war, death and resistance that has shaped the world we live in today. Whether or not we can use the lessons learned from that pain to create a future that is worth living is a question that remains unanswered. [Mar 2020, p.56]

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]

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]