The effect of these new elements is to bring a new solemnity and calm to Pioulard's already gentle brand of blissed out songwriting. [Mar 2013, p.62]

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]

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

Protect Your Light, recorded at the late Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in New Jersey, is the group’s warmest work yet. [Sep 2023, p.57]

Lost Themes satisfies more than it irks, and it's unambiguously the most enjoyable creation Carpenter has put his name on in probably 27 years. [Feb 2015, p.44]

Where Vernon’s album [For Emma, Forever Ago] registers like a melancholic exorcism of listless youth and failed relationships, Bachman does not engage in that kind of soul searching, though he elicits a similarly potent emotional response. [Jan/Feb 2024, p.77]

Mogwai eschew their trademark squall and fuzz for measured and clenched guitar chords, echoed piano notes and eerie arpeggios of guitar that stalk unresolved through a stark, naked soundscape. [Mar 2013, p.62]

The recording and mixing is impeccable, with each instrument distinctly isolated, enabling the tracks to take on lively 3D forms. This does result in a striking directness, but the tightly wrapped sound sometimes feels like it’s in battle with the naturally inventive playing of the trio. [Sep 2021, p.56]

Others have their own versions of slow, simmering beauty, but rarely with so many other approaches and conceptions integrated. [Jun 2012, p.54]

Few among us can craft an album as seamlessly fine as Fade. [Feb 2013, p.51]

This is one of the best garage pop sides sine The Chills' own "Brave Words." [Dec 2008, p.70]

This worthy sequel to XXX is the first release since 2011 to offer a convincing portrait of Brown as a wholly realistic character. [Jan/Feb 2024, p.81]

Oddly charming, goblincore aesthetic, one that capitalises on Björk’s unique strengths: the arrangements on Fossora are among the most complex and lavish of her career. [Nov 2022, p.58]

LCD Soundsystem's gift is to forge iron from irony, show that cleverness need not be enervating. [#252, p.46]

The album retains a taste for annihilation. [Dec 2015, p.56]

The music shines with solitary delight. [Feb 2015, p.46]

The result is an intuitive and spacious sound. Controlled but organic and broken down into contained but naturally arcing pieces, The Gradual Progression becomes a set of sequences using long drum rolls, cloudlike synths and eventually gentle vocal noises and ascents.

Citizen Zombie is not a refusal. Rather, it's a fully plugged in reckoning with the eternal power of now. [Feb 2015, p.49]

Risveglio seems keen to be accepted on its own terms rather than a simple curio. This it warrants, and rewards patient listening.

The Light In You is palpably charged with love of music and gratitude for its redemptive powers. [Sep 2015, p.48]

On TFCF (short for Theme From Crying Fountain) Andrews comes into his own. The tracks might be loosely structured, ideas, samples, field recordings and styles scattered by the dozen across the album’s 33 minutes, but it’s a sense of a distinctive songwriter exploring fracturedness across a broad spectrum from the dancefloor to the introspective. [Oct 2017, p.64]

What makes Transmission Suite work beyond its sounds is the belief Massey and Barker still have in the 808 project, the push all their music has of maintaining the future both as ultimate aim and ultimate source of anxiety. 808 State’s music has lost none of its foreboding, finesse and power. Sit deep within and enjoy. [Dec 2019, p.44]

The album's primary emotion of disgust is cushioned by performances and production so luxurious as to be sinister. [Dec 2012, p.63]

The percipients' more abstract visions allow much joyful engagement with sampled, electronic and acoustic sounds. [Feb 2013, p.52]

Despite the sonic shifts – from grinding electronic roars to manipulated vocal samples and field recordings to shimmering harp to desolate piano – it remains unified, because of Ayewa. [Mar 2024, p.50]

Broken Homes And Gardens is not his best record, but it is an absolutely pure statement of where he was at for the last few years, and is a sheer pleasure to hear. [Sep 2025, p.49]

Wolves In The Throne Room return at full throttle. [Oct 2017, p.64]

These are what protest songs can sound like, feel like and taste like in the 21st century. [#257, p.52]