“Pensées Magiques” has little spoken word, yet it somehow perfectly conveys a sense of nightfall across the landscape, as if you and Atkinson are quietly absorbing it together. [Nov 2024, p.48]

They feel energised with Keenan back in the fold, and while the pronounced riffs on the introduction of “Little Man” might hark back to their hardcore days, the emphasis here is on groove. [Feb 2018, p.46]

While Haram was a bit heavy on the neo-noir vibes, Test Strips bustles with dynamic turns, and guests inspired to step out of character. [Oct 2023, p.51]

An album as complex as this encourages listeners to reflect on themselves. [May 2021, p.46]

It isn’t Blonde On Blonde or John Wesley Harding – two acknowledged influences, on the decision to go to Nashville, at least – but the sheer energy of association and the adolescent clarity of understanding often yields strikingly subtle results. ... It isn’t always grown-up, but there’s nothing more mature than embracing immaturity. [Nov 2022, p.62]

A captivating fourth album from the Richmond, Virginia outfit that casts a woeful eye over Trump’s America. [Jun 2019, p.56]

This is fierce, unpredictable music; her sounds ripple and explode, dropping in from above, rarely settling into a groove. It’s rare to encounter an electronic album that feels quite so specific and personal, despite the ego-dissolving intentions of its meditating creator. [Jun 2018, p.54]

Disturbing and delirious when it's not romantic and hilarious, the songs have a much more direct emotional appeal than the patently surrealistic Alice. [#219, p.72]

These New Puritans feel better equipped than most to carry that mantle, a vision of English pastoral music heavy with stoicism and solitude; both steeped in, yet strangely unencumbered by history. [Jun 2013, p.55]

A clear triumph, a dense work destined to grow thicker with each listen. [#266, p.65]

Youngs’s knack of picking resonant phrases is at peak levels. [Dec 2016, p.66]

The Crying Out Of Things, their latest album as a duo since 2021’s I’ve Seen All I Need To See, builds on the idiosyncratic elements of their established sound – monstrous distortion, crushed electronic beats and samples, scorched screams, fragments of punk, metal, pop, hiphop and dub – and the results are thrillingly, crushingly bleak. [Dec 2024, p.42]

For music as heavy as this, the performances and production are impressively agile and light on their feet. Ultrapop is clear-eyed and enraged, pristine and pulsing with adrenaline. [Jun 2021, p.46]

Barring the title cut’s debt to Steely Dan, the pomp is dialled down just enough on Deleted Scenes for the band to flex their fusionoid chops, adding a whole other element of kookiness to their already brow-raising style. [Jul 2020, p.56]

Though this particularly esoteric presentation was not unique to Serpentwithfeet, few executed it as well. But just as he did with the genre tag pagan gospel and his initial handle Josiah Wise Is The Serpent With Feet, this time around Wise has, lyrically at least, mostly discarded such trappings in service of something more tangible and familiar. [Jul 2018, p.49]

For music built around the shrouding and decay of its composer’s bodily presence, Thresholder feels curiously non-corporeal. In large part that’s attributable to the purity of Craig’s voice. ... But elsewhere--when melting between the tremulous organ tones of “And Therefore The Moonlight” or forming grainy cirrus wisps in “Sfumato”--Craig sounds as though he’s already shed his physical shell and ascended into the cosmos. [Dec 2018, p.46]

Good as the present iteration of The Chills is – featuring Erica Scally on guitar, keyboards, violin, Oli Wilson on keys, Callum Hampton on bass and Todd Knudson on drums – it’s Phillipps’s darkly catchy writing that dominates this seventh studio record from the band. He has a synoptic vision that takes in everything from fake news to cargo cults. An essential contemporary voice. [Jun 2021, p.48]

The Pyramids may not be breaking new ground here, but Afro Futuristic Dreams is arguably the best thing the reunited group have created. [Nov 2023, p.46]

The eight tracks and 40 minutes here feel far more porous and open than a lot of contemporary electronic music allows itself to be--edited together by Hassell from various performances, its erratic, switch-backing progress sketches large structures but leaves them light and airy, rich and heady without crowding the mix. It demands to be played on a big system, to enter the air. [Jul 2018, p.50]

A sense of foreboding and emotional struggle is expertly crafted, so much so that at times it can feel like there’s little air and no escape. Outside of the songs, there’s a more uncanny, ineffable sense of power on the instrumental jig or reel passages of “Master Crowley’s” and “The New York Trader”. [Jul 2023, p.55]

The Hard Quartet manage to create a collection of tight, fun songs that feel at once old-timey and modern. [Oct 2024, p.52]

Hot Rats is testament to the power of the overdub, and as such, The Hot Rats Sessions mostly consists of a selection of instrumental parts presented in isolation, which won’t be of interest to all. As with the album, the rambling blues jams are the least interesting, and the real magic is in the origami-like marvels of “Peaches En Regalia”, “Son Of Mr Green Genes” and “It Must Be A Camel”. ... Most remarkable are the outakes.

Most songs are laid over a percussion track that despite the occasional presence of Max Kennedy Roach is mostly programmed and staccato. It’s not a classic, but the songs are as urgent and effective as ever and you’re recommended to complete the course. [Mar 2018, p.53]

Even when the album’s second half remembers it was supposed to be a rock record, its raw proto-punk remains perfectly strange, with guitar licks alternating between J Mascis’s fuzzy melodicism and John Frusciante’s soothing warmth as they drift across a busy, restlessly baroque pop background. [Sep 2022, p.54]

Throughout the album, multiple vocal lines with different rhythms and lyrics are frequently layered atop each other, lending to a dense, teeming maximalism. This tendency makes the moments of relative spaciousness, like the synth-laden and futuristic “Coming Back (From The Distance Between The Spaces Of Time)”, feel all the more boundless. [Oct 2018, p.49]

Darkness At Noon works because it doggedly pursues its convictions through to a satisfying conclusion and in doing so creates its own kind of offbeat logic. [#254, p.53]

She mostly succeeds at marrying that [transcendent black pop] to a sound that’s broader and more accessible than anything she’s put out to date. [Jul 2018, p.53]

Like most Aphex Twin releases Collapse contains moments of queasy brilliance. [Oct 2018, p.48]