In spite of the road drill rhythms, punished percussion and damaged vocalising, though, the collaboration fails to fully connect. [Apr 2016, p.46]

This intelligently compiled collection brings together the best (and sometime worst) of these mostly forgotten groups. [Aug 2016, p.66]

Do Not Disturb, VDGG’s 13th album and their third since regrouping in 2005, bears little evidence of engagement with music’s outside world, but it’s creative and sprightly on its own terms. [Oct 2016, p.61]

[A] glorious record. [Feb 2017, p.44]

This is a deep but balanced record, elegant in its melancholia and experimental. [Jul 2017, p.57]

As a cranky comeback album, it's as welcome as the amped-up reprise of Dr Jacobi as podcast prophet on Twin Peaks: The return. [Nov 2017, p.67]

Musically it’s a joyous triumph: vocally Estelle is utterly assured but naturally ebullient, the sound of someone totally at ease. [Nov 2018, p.68]

Choirboys sing the poems of Nils Christian Moe-Repstad over Eivind Aarset’s guitar, but as with the more expansive orchestral passages, it can come across as earnestly ecclesiastical. The most affecting pieces are those where Henriksen and Bang strip it down, such as on “The Swans Bend Their Necks Backward To See God”, where pitched down trumpet lows like foghorns over the Humber valley. [Nov 2018, p.68]

Thankfully here, in spite of the occasional song in Latin or mention of the Peninsular War, Batoh succeeds in stripping things all the way back to a jewel-like clarity. ... Even when things do take on a heavier and more expansive turn, technique, structure and lyrical meaning are powerfully combined. [Feb 2019, p.44]

John Foxx’s last few records have been both a late career second wind and a shameless romp through 20th century art rock tropes – but here it’s done with a level of glee and fuck-it energy that makes even the obvious references hard to resist. [Sep 2020, p.64]

It’s darkly, powerfully feminine, exquisitely produced and haunted as fuck; maybe the best record she’s ever made. [Nov 2021, p.50]

Pungent and atmospheric. [Nov 2021, p.62]

Glover’s voice is intimate and unguarded, as if every song were being run down for friends, but it’s hard to imagine them sung in any other way, without losing the burr of nostalgia suffusing them. [Dec 2021, p.58]

Tyondai Braxton’s own Telekinesis is a symphonic work that sounds like a lost sci-fi film soundtrack. It has the clustered, hovering awe of György Ligeti’s Atmosphères and the eerie arpeggiated angles of Herrmann soundtracks like Vertigo and The Day The Earth Stood Still. [Dec 2022, p.50]

As The Forest In Me progresses, it’s interesting to consider which sounds are made with purpose and which are accidental – what is substance and what is ephemeral. When locked in to Xylouris and White’s deeply connected sound, it can feel like great secrets are being offered up to the listener, but heard in passing it’s barely anything at all. What magic. [May 2023, p.59]

I consider 2018’s Digital Garbage one of their finest albums and the fact that Plastic Eternity doesn’t quite measure up to its scorching brilliance is understandable – few records do. This one is looser, less wound-up and perhaps a little less cohesive. But it is always, always nice to have them back. [Aug 2023, p.62]

Founding Melvins members Buzz Osborne and Mike Dillard join forces with electronic musicians Void Maines and Ni Maîtres (aka Gareth Turner) for a lively and experimental session. Both guests are let loose on “Vomit Of Clarity” where, by way of introduction, they squeeze out an involved synthesized sound collage – an effectively intriguing interval to herald in the main event. [Jul 2025, p.61]

These half-asleep compositions inhabit the porous spaces between songform and atmosphere, the result being a remarkably relaxed album that is perhaps the strongest of the trilogy. [Nov 2025, p.52]

As ever, he works with a solid dub toolkit, but tracks like "The Well Is Poisoned" (co-written with Brian Eno) and "Hiroshima Dub Match" sound newly anxious. [Nov 2025, p.56]

Both Ishibashi and O'Rourke have spent lifetimes devoted to improvisation, and even if they only pick up a conventional instrument here and there on Pareidolia, the magic they weave on computers is no less spontaneous. [Oct 2024, p.54]

His music has an airless, contrived and over-polished quality. However, the production style developed by his team of collaborators is glacially impressive, if gloomy. [Apr 2015, p.66]

Live From KCRW suffers from the stilted atmosphere that plagues most live radio sessions, with the audience, Cave and his Bad Seeds all on their best behavior. [Jan 2014, p.59]

Whether it’s political (the second half looks pretty Brexit: “Aftermath”, “Catastrophe Anthem”, “Living Fantasy”, “Un UK”) or more private, there’s something at stake in every track. [May 2017, p.61]

Dream A Garden only starts to sound radical when it breaks the bounds of its songforms and an eerie melancholy steals in. [Mar 2015, p.48]

Both NV and Deradoorian maintain their musical identities but balance each other’s urges with concision to the point where the record emerges as a holistic, kaleidoscopic transmission from a duo at play with each other and with the possibilities conjured by their shared will. [Jul 2023, p.51]

This is dance music, but not as we know it, and a delight to experience. [Oct 2013, p.47]

There are occasions when vocal inadequacy can be more emotionally fetching than full-throated virtuosity.... This, however, is not one of them. [#239, p.57]

Consistently entertaining. [#215, p.69]