Almond just made one of his best records, completely out of the blue. [Mar 2015, p.49]

Zola Jesus is back to her dark roots, but enriched by intense layers of experience. [Oct 2017, p.55]

Shorn of vocals, Xen suffer the same fate as much beloved contemporary beat music, which is a kind of dazzling monotony. [Nov 2014, p.63]

The Footwork moves might be hard to master, nut there's every chance your brain will o a jig to this. [May 2012, p.66]

Her lyrics see human experience both on an intimate and an epic scale: such expansiveness is well complemented by her music, even if the dancefloor only exists within her home. [May 2013, p.56]

Climactic yet precisely controlled, it's a reminder of The Necks strengths, all of which are on display at different points throughout Open: their astute handling of pacing and momentum, finely honed collective sense of timing, and their shared ability to balance at length a group equilibrium, be it delicate or clamorous in register. [Oct 2013, p.50]

Something about the music's rhythmic flexibility, the paradoxical slippage between half-speed, double-speed and triplet grooves, allows almost anything to be folded in to its matrix without altering its essential character. [Oct 2013, p.57]

What’s exceptional about Novelist Guy is the ease with which he remakes grime in his own image, gifting it a breadth and charm and appeal others have struggled for over a decade to synthesize. [Jun 2018, p.62]

Patton and Vannier make a fine combination, vintage and modern, taking familiar sounds wonderfully elsewhere. [Oct 2019, p.58]

Oh Death snaps them back on track right from the opening, where drips saturated with fuzz and wah on the sizzling “Soon You Die” are flung forward by a swirling guitar solo. Meanwhile, the group’s vocalist becomes a proper mistress of ceremonies. ... The chiming piano and guitar licks of the closing “Passes Like Clouds” suggest that Goat have finally rediscovered their true selves. [Dec 2022, p.54]

A delightfully disorientating new missive from David Thomas and his band of talented reprobates. [Aug 2023, p.62]

The disc's closing one-two punch of "white Electric" and "Sundome," render Glass Drop a triumph, and a major evolutionary leap. [July 2011, p.44]

With its warm timbres and cushioning delays, sonically Captain Of None is Colleen's most approachable record yet. [Apr 2015, p.52]

The production is so delicate and the arrangements so well crafted that you can't help being utterly seduced by this open-ended, non-narrative yet elegant and accessible pop music. [#227, p.71]

Built around the usual sluggish grammar of instrumental hiphop, the tracks seems at times to collapse in on themselves, swollen with lugubrious 1970s jazz funk keyboards, strategically aimless organ vamps and miscellaneous concrete samples. [Jun 2016, p.60]

The Brian Eno collaboration “Here Come The Warm Dreads”, despite having the cheesiest, winking at the camera/self-referential title, coalesces around a regal brass melody and popping rhythm section to created a solidly funky slice of spaced out dub. “Rattling Bones And Crowns” is sharper, darker take on the Rainford cut “Kill Them Dreams Money Worshippers”. [Dec 2019, p.52]

Nepenthe pushes the formula to [a] breaking point, where emotional manipulation crosses over into cloying, calculated and claustrophobic. [Aug 2013, p.53]

Baird's mixture of history-steeped elements keeps her songs from being tethered to any given time period, including the present, which makes them apt vehicles for words about relationships fraught with uncertainty. [Jun 2015, p.42]

The nine songs her give a reason for detractors to raise their voices and for devotees to hope for something a little more evolved. [Sep. 2007, p.49]

You Know What's It's Like presents the emotional cente of dal Forno's work with a clarity previously absent from either band. [Nov 2016, p.55]

Pig Destroyer explore transgression on their sixth album by creating a new narrative that begs for more careful introspection about who we are and the world we live in. [Oct 2018, p.60]

Thankfully, Underneath The Pine burns brightly at both ends. [Feb 2011, p.51]

There’s a sense of indecision to the overall sound of the album, which results in a fragmented listening experience. [Apr 2017, p.52]

Sprawling spaciness is absent from A Foul Form which marks a return to the California shredders’ punk roots. The vibe is set by opener “Funeral Solution”: blistering guitar fuzz, punch drunk double drums, stumbling basslines and ragged vocals. [Sep 2022, p.48]

This album eclipses their previous output and hits a consistent note of righteous force. [Jan 2008, p.69]

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

There is some extremely sophisticated signal processing going on here, resulting in complex subliminal sound patterns in the spaces between beat and the 303s’ scrolling and glooping. However each track is about relentless repetitions of one monolithic kick and one acid riff above all else. While the processing can occasionally resemble some of Tin Man and Cassegrain’s recent dismantlings of acid, which float in motionless seas of reverb, the primacy of the kick ’n’ riff lends the forward momentum of these tracks a glorious singlemindedness. [Sep 2018, p.52]

Hersh’s lyrics are pithy character portraits (“Nola nobility/And you her superhero in drugstore plastic”) peopled with lovers and wanderers (“Where are you walking?/Can I join you?”). Her lyrical brevity matches the straightforwardness of the musical set-up, as well as a well-honed confidence and swagger. [May 2025, p.60]