Allegiance & Conviction is Windy & Carl’s first new album in a good long while, and it was worth the wait. [Sep 2020, p.61]

The speech modelling software used to articulate the narrative generates a somewhat grittier, odder voice than your average online speech synthesizer, but that doesn’t keep the album’s expository moments from being momentum killers. The passages where artificial voice gets fed into some typically squelchy MOM electro beats are considerably more fun to listen to. [Feb 2021, p.52]

Oddisee is a hyper-eloquent, charismatic rapper, and this album is buoyed with lyrical wit and lush instrumentation. [Jul 2015, p.57]

Everything that 30 years ago made Dinosaur Jr a lightning bolt of enervated languor is present here. [Sep 2016, p.59]

The best thing they've done since Stakes Is High. [#250, p.73]

Oozing Wound frontman Zack Weil has an unhinged screech reminiscent of Destruction's Schmier, symbolising the group's mastery of a kind of primitive thrash with no goal greater than the release of energy. [Nov 2013, p.52]

The production on Carnival OF Souls is particularly vivid. [Sep 2014, p.58]

Swagger can be infectious and the album works as a playful, blissed out hymn to the dancefloor. [Nov 2016, p.55]

Where the 1982 take was hollow and grating, the gaps and silences gradually roaring with accumulating noise, this version is euphoric and transparent. [Jun 2014, p.42]

"Feral," "Codex" and "Giving Up The Ghost" finally win me over. [Apr 2011, p.62]

Donaldson’s lyrics tend towards the observational, and are often delivered with a wry turn of phrase that can be laugh out loud funny. ... The Town That Cursed Your Name juggles pathos and bathos throughout. [Apr 2023, p.58]

Romantiq is hypnotic, curious and, at its best, genuinely fresh and beautiful. [May 2023, p.54]

There's such a freshness to Brett Sparks's music that few comparisons can be made. [#269, p.42]

Whether K Bay is progressive rock or not, White hooks you in with his big warm voice and big tunes, and then goes weird on you in such a strong way that he can’t really be asked to leave. [Aug 2021, p.55]

Indebted to various traditions of US rock, from resonant folk and blues to elegant indie pop, its understated songs are looser and more varied here than in her music with bands like Helium and Ex Hex, as if serving a different, affirming purpose. [Jun 2024, p.61]

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 album’s first half is simultaneously some of Godflesh’s most aggro material and as gleaming and chromed as a Terminator that’s been burned down to its metal skeleton. Purge isn’t a completely boom-bap orientated album, though. “Lazarus Leper” is both one of the album’s longest tracks and one of its most old school. The primitive drum machine beat sounds like something that could have come off the group’s very first EP. [Jul 2023, p.51]

It's an almost-pitch-perfect progression of eight tracks across 39 minutes. [Oct 2014, p.54]

The first half of the album presents a disparate sequence of songs, the punky “I Want To Tell You About Want I Want” mixing with a rather laboured piece about Virginia Woolf’s and Sylvia Plath’s suicides (“Virginia Woolf”). ... This second half finds Hitchcock at his most purposeful. [May 2017, p.46]

An unequivocally rocking set on which Chasny is backed by his former group Comets on Fire. [Aug 2012, p.56]

More often than not the group sound like they're going through the motions. [Jul 2012, p.57]

As the 12 minute “The Lure Of The Mine” closes out this odd and enigmatic record in typically relentless fashion, the sensation is one of standing back and watching, impressed but stubbornly, confusingly unmoved. [May 2017, p.56]

Tracks like "Steel Drummer" shade between euphoric rave and freakout energy, while "Black And Blue" has a distinct rock edge with its dark riffs and darker mood. [Sep 2013, p.63]

Legacy + is a unique intergenerational conversation on wax. Both halves are set in Afrobeat, while one sticks more to the tradition than the other, and the contrast is beautiful to hear. [Apr 2021, p.58]

For their fifth album The Witness, Montreal group Suuns pick their way through new songs that on the surface sound sparse but are actually thickets of sonic invention. [Sep 2021, p.62]

“Working The Ditch” and “Smiler” sound like they could come from the same sessions as Melvins’ 1993 major label debut Houdini. But there are atypical twists in “She’s Got Weird Arms”, whose new wave-ish verses are broken up by cascades of bug-eyed dissonance and “Allergic To Food”, which reminds this listener of “Forkboy” by Al Jourgensen and Jello Biafra’s side-project Lard with the tempo lowered to mid. [May 2024, p.50]

The Invisible Way has Wilco's Jeff Tweedy behind the faders, and he superbly captures the concentrated simplicity of Low's aesthetic. But sometimes the restricted palettes can be a little cloying,[Mar 2013, p.56]

The result is a kind of lo-fi dream music, sea-changed and composite, with whisper-core mbalax drifting in and out focus between vaporous synth washes, low-key beat programming, spoken teachings and lilting song. [Feb 2021, p.61]