Hobo Sapiens is a confident and consistently rewarding record, and some of its songs rank alongside Cale's best. [#236, p.56]

The songs are long, mostly clocking in somewhere between ten and 20 minutes; the minutely orchestrated whole gives the misleading impression of a tightly controlled collective improvisation, with everyone doing their own thing together with spectacular commitment and focus. [Dec 2025, p.56]

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]

There’s a gracefulness to Patton’s rhythms that sets her apart from other footwork producers--something deeply contemplative. [Jun 2017, p.66]

Sometimes the sensuousness of Serpent Music is missed, but Tumor’s drive to take this radically new music to audiences as big as Blake’s, Ocean’s or even Radiohead’s is exhilarating. [Oct 2018, p.63]

Hot Rats is testament to the power of the overdub, and as such, The Hot Rats Sessions mostly consists of a selection of instrumental parts presented in isolation, which won’t be of interest to all. As with the album, the rambling blues jams are the least interesting, and the real magic is in the origami-like marvels of “Peaches En Regalia”, “Son Of Mr Green Genes” and “It Must Be A Camel”. ... Most remarkable are the outakes.

On the opening “Asynchronous Intervals”, Golding’s beautifully burnished tenor tone – sumptuously recorded here – plays against free drums that gradually morph into a slowly burning groove. On “ActiveMultiple-Fetish-Overlord”, that tone is broken up against Luthert’s palpitating, roiling low end work. “After The Machine Settles” is muscular jazz rock; “Because Because” with multitracked/echoing soprano, is a stirring conclusion. [May 2022, p.58]

Wendy Eisenberg is a remarkable record for many reasons, but the sublime interplay between Eisenberg's songwriting and Rubio's string arrangements is miraculous, hitting that sweet spot of skill and effortlessness. [May 2026, p.49]

What’s most thrilling about Big Fish Theory is that it doesn’t sound leftfield or challenging; instead it provides a scintillating snapshot of both the state of the art and the untold history of underground black music for the past 30 years. [Aug 2017, p.65]

She draws you into the shadows and crumbling concrete of America, a nation in which, as Knowles pointed out in a recent online essay, “a former Ku Klux Klan leader is running for Louisiana senator.” [Dec 2016, p.54]

Knowles’s instincts guide the cultural conversation in a way that feels healing, intentional and authentically collectiveminded. A well-constructed spell, cast with intention. [May 2019, p.63]

A sense of foreboding and emotional struggle is expertly crafted, so much so that at times it can feel like there’s little air and no escape. Outside of the songs, there’s a more uncanny, ineffable sense of power on the instrumental jig or reel passages of “Master Crowley’s” and “The New York Trader”. [Jul 2023, p.55]

No album in hiphop history has been less in need of a padding. [Jun 2014, p.63]

The more we listen, as the images and phrases and grooves swim past, we're glimpsing pieces of a private puzzle, an exhilarating series of riddles with no answers. [Sep 2025, p.50]

It is a working through of grief and abuse, characterised by Nastasia’s deeply resonant songwriting. ... It would be tempting to liken the run of songs in between to a personal descent followed by an emergence into the outside world, but Nastasia shuns such easy linear interpretations. [Aug 2022, p.53]

This remake justifies the whole shebang. So perfect is the fit, in fact, that it feels uncannily like Scott-Heron’s sonorous rasp must have been recorded to fit this backing. ... Though often dark, this is both a celebration and a vindication: a truly great album. [Mar 2020, p.56]

To Be Kind is even moodier and more desolate than 2012's The Seer.... The more structured, traditional tracks don't cut quite as deep, largely because they echo other groups, at times overtly. [May 2014, p.68]

There are moments when the insights of Newsom's improvised mythology fall into pseudo-profundity... But still it easily stands with this year's entrancing reinventions of song--Julia Holter's Have You In My Wilderness, Jim O'Rourke's Simple Songs--and the high points of her own catalogue so far. [Nov 2015, p.46]

An even deeper dig into the wound exposed on her debut. The album is drenched in divinity, its consideration of good and evil as polar concepts is biblical, elevating vengeance to a God-given imperative. Her classically trained voice deals in spiritual cadences, and commands gothic instrumentation of strings and drones. [Aug 2019, p.58]

The result is an enriched soundworld, more ambitious than her much discussed debut, Tragedy. [Aug 2013, p.53]

No News Is Good News is a grown up rap album by a grown up rapper that still manages to be utterly thrilling. [Aug 2018, p.69]

At this moment, Bad As Me might be his best ever. [Nov 2011, p.68]

Timeless and considered, Lives Outgrown is a complete, but still complicated, portrait of the intersection of grief and life. [Jun 2024, p.50]

Clark’s fifth album isn’t a retreat to an earlier style--if anything it’s even brighter, bolder and broader than St Vincent, even more given to IMAX worthy gestures-- but Clark does appear to have reconciled the streamlined automation of her new aesthetic with the orch pop crafting of her first three records, Marry Me (2007), Actor (2009) and Strange Mercy (2011). [Nov 2017, p.64]

In classic Simz style the journey’s more fulfilling a little further down the rabbit hole. ... But ultimately it’s hard to escape the comedy of such grand ambition also spawning the corniest voiceover since Prince invited Kirstie Alley to vandalise his symbolically titled 1992 album, and a cringe so intense it threatens to undermine everything.

It feels a little overstuffed, though the effect on the listener isn’t boredom – more enjoyment at an impressive speaker taking up a little more time than expected. [Jun 2025, p.61]

Despite its recourse to sentimentality, this is appealing, historic and culturally important music. [Dec 2015, p.68]

A strong addition to Tyler’s catalogue and a good intergenerational connection for the fans. [Aug 2021, p.69]