McGuire creates a journey that will absorb and transport any listener willing to let its sincere warmth and good wishes into their hearts. [Feb 2014, p.54]

Dance Music 4 Bad People features some of his headiest and most luscious productions, which conjure imagery of bodies glistening with sweat while moving in unison within the dusty confines of some basement club. [May 2025, p.54]

The music is smooth, the message is simple and the demands aren’t easy, but they’re vital. [Mar 2025, p.51]

Real world concerns – motherhood, self-growth, the responsibilities of adult life – are transformed into brightly synthesised fantasias. ... For a small scale project, Bamboo’s vision of pop feels pristine, a little utopia realised. [Jul 2019, p.57]

It's a generous, open-hearted collection of jams. [Nov 2025, p.50]

The results are sketches, in the best sense: unplanned, absorbing accidents as new pathways, concerned with mood rather than architectural precision. [Oct 2012, p.60]

Their debut album King Night defies genre tagging and, for once, lives up to the drooling media accolades already smeared on it. [Dec 2010, p.54]

A smorgasbord of bittersweetness, with yearning pads providing a translucent bed for snatches of fragmentary counterpoint. [Sep 2023, p.50]

The clunkier, funkier patterns mapped out here have something proufound to say about the relationship between us and our technological world, about where our dancing and moving bodies fit in among the conurbations and databanks of our lives. [Apr 2015, p.57]

There's a generous, sloppy fistful of day-glo power-pop in these songs. [Apr 2014, p.52]

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]

Nikki Nack is a terrific album with charm and invention to spare. [Jun 2014, p.58]

Charged with relatable warmth and an emotive, human energy that’s close to 2003’s For Octavio Paz or a less melancholy version of 2005’s School Of The Flower. [Dec 2021, p.47]

The album feels both of the original vintage in its occasional psychedelic trappings and, masterfully, altogether new. But, perhaps most importantly, it richly rewards repeat listens. It’s a dense record, but not an overly busy one, and different instruments bubble to the top with each run through. [Apr 2023, p.59]

The Omnichord Real Book isn’t for Me’shell Ndegeocello new jacks or the musically light hearted, but for listeners who aren’t afraid of taking a musical journey with no straight path. [Jul 2023, p.58]

Ultimately the digressions charm and gel thanks to the generosity of Freedia’s performances, marshalling us through dance manoeuvres in service to the communal heart of bounce. [Sep 2023, p.52]

It’s the input of guest musicians and co-producer Dave Harrington that draws the best out of the material. [Sep 2022, p.46]

Lyrically, Mm.. Food is the best of the three albums released by Daniel Dumile this year. [#250, p.73]

[A] cunning, witty album. [Oct 2012, p.62]

Craft and primitivism are often presented as opposites, but here they complement each other so completely that you couldn’t have one without the other. [Mar 2018, p.55]

Ghettoville feels dead, finished, hopeless. If this is, as the publicity hints, an end to the Actress project, then it is a dramatic one. [Feb 2014, p.44]

Haley retains the analogue wobble of his earlier work, particularly evident on 2010’s Cyanide Sisters and 2011’s Galactic Melt where his crisp and crunchy beats are at their impactful best. But on Persuasion System he’s combined them with stronger melodies and arrangements, elevating their effect from that of incidental, if still effective background music to the gripping theme of a main character. [May 2019, p.48]

Map Of A Blue City is the closest Ribot has gotten to a singer-songwriter album. It suits him. [Jun 2025, p.53]

Gengras's sublime drones--layers and layers of modular synth--evoke the spectacle and tragic history of his native California's wilderness. [Jun 2014, p.62]

There is a roughness and a sense of surprise to these tracks completely lacking from many other Four Tet productions. [Oct 2012, p.62]

The result is often similar in sound to the classic Malian groups, but much gnarlier. ... The drumming is a pummelling, clattering hailstorm of toms and snares, thrashed out at heart attack tempos. It’s all-consuming, exhilarating and fearfully hard playing, and as a truly disorienting backdrop to a virtuoso band, it pushes Tal National’s music into the realm of the unique.[Mar 2018, p.51]

What on the record might be the magnified pop of dust and surface scratch, here could represent imperfections on a cosmic scale--the debris of space and time, swallowed and digested. Where Basinski succeeds is the tone he adopts; rather than the heavy dread of inevitable supermassive doom, these sections are somehow wide-eyed and full of slowly drifting wonder. [Mar 2019, p.49]

Something about its balance between geometric elegance and genuine emotiveness gets at the heart of what makes him a great composer. The playful movement lends a sense of humanity to the structure, and the structure lends rigour to the dance. [Apr 2018, p.60]