Fine Art is a consistently uplifting experience even if on record Kneecap’s excesses don’t always convince. The banging “Rhino Ket” feels like Poisonous Poets doing Slowthai impressions with Bad Boy Chiller Crew. But more often it works. [Jan/Feb 2025, p.96]

If you value surehandedness, richness, immaculate timing and the occasional tilted eyebrow then there's a lot to enjoy on Tortoise's most assured set to date. [#204, p.65]

The album's primary emotion of disgust is cushioned by performances and production so luxurious as to be sinister. [Dec 2012, p.63]

They're wise enough to leave breathing space, such as the final minute of "The Hurt That Finds You First," which codas into a swishing corridor of guitar licks, or "The Last vigil," which brings the album wordlessly to rest on a pall of interleaved, echoing guitar chimes. [Mar 2012, p.56]

The 11 songs here are energised, chest beating anthems that are positively soul elevating. [Oct 2014, p.61]

For Ulver's three-part collaboration with Sunn))), the mood is equally holy, reverential and mysterious. [Feb 2014, p.52]

One And Sixes brings a welcome edge... Unusually for Low, the lyrics are where One And Sixes falls down, frequently dealing less in acutely felt emotions than in questions and negotiations. [Sep 2015, p.47]

Guitarists John and Michael Gibbons tar into riffs which, for all their power, articulate a cosmic loneliness, while Isobel Sollenberger intones troubled mantras with the benighted insistence of an unquiet spirit. [Oct 2013, p.55]

Toure's tone is richly sonorous, his vocal strength such that he actually buttresses and strengthens the tracks... It's a great shame that the sound quality falters on the later tracks. [Jul 2015, p.58]

The album primarily features solo guitar, harmonica and lap steel, all cloaked in gauzy atmospheres, and often conjuring mental images of a sprawling, rural America. The most compelling moments on the album make a hazy blend of guitar twang and swirling electronics, as on “Outskirts, Dreamlit” whose nostalgic melody tumbles almost without a sense of time. [May 2022, p.52]

A complex and challenging listen. [#257, p.61]

As well as these old school paeans to rock's cosmic moments, there are tracks fascinating through a percussive complexity that nods to minimalism. [Sep 2013, p.63]

If music is ever really going to change the world, it's going to need more vigour and vitality than this. [Jan 2014, p.66]

Yoshimi’s mesh of voices is sometimes overpowering, although, as with Björk, that feeling of overpowerment is part of the deal, constructed to bring the listener to a place that feels like the edge of something--the singer’s endurance; the listener’s understanding--only to push them over into somewhere else entirely. [Nov 2017, p.61]

The album works best when the trio downshift to embrace Kaur's vocals and rhythmical sitar twangs. [Mar 2011, p.61]

His final, posthumous recording isn’t exactly Norman Rockwell, but it does take The Night Tripper back to his country roots. This kind of twilight recording, with carefully staged surprises – see Johnny Cash’s sepulchral take on Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt” – has become something of an industry cliche, but Dr John’s lifelong love for the music here is too well attested to seem like some kind of last minute A&R wheeze. [Oct 2022, p.41]

Almost overpowering in its anthemic positivity, Constant Future is unfashionably fearless, and all the better for it. [Apr 2011, p.58]

Its infusion of HipHop drum programs, Old Skool electronics, rabblerousing calls-to-arms and repetitive guitar riffs is highly addictive. [#213, p.58]

With Dodging Dues they’ve thrown up another seven tracks – it’s not a long album – that will sustain many a night on the road. It all feels pleasingly old-fashioned and familiar. [Jan 2022, p.64]

Will To Be Well has a vivid inner life. [Aug 2014, p.49]

DJ Paypal's take on footwork does to R&B, disco and 1980s adult contemporary smoothness what sometime collaborators AG Cook and SOPHIE of PC Music do to bubblegum ad teeny pop. [Dec 2015, p.47]

No Highs is a soundtrack for knotted stomachs – introverted, devoid of catharsis and all the more moving for its honesty and restraint. [Apr 2023, p.54]

Fading out, they leave the impression of an album too ambitious for its own good, but offering moments of real awe. [Apr 2021, p.52]

Isles offers multiple reboots of the “Glue” formula: chunky broken beats, keening voices in many languages, and duvet-warm basslines, as on lead singles “Atlas” and “Apricots”; the latter is based around a clip of the much sampled Bulgarian State Television choir. Guest vocalist Clara La San adds a femme-pop twist to “Saku” and a tight electro jam called “X” which is the best of the bunch. [Mar 2021, p.61]

If anything Quadra is even better [than 2017’s Machine Messiah], expertly filtering fresh textures (the fat synth that opens “Isolation” immediately raises an eyebrow, along with the Carl Orff-like chorale of “Last Time” and the Bollywood-ish orchestration of “Capital Enslavement”) into tightly coiled songs whose ferocity is comparable to Exhorder’s 2019 comeback Mourn The Southern Skies – albeit with a great deal more ambition and (effective) experimentation. [Feb 2020, p.56]

Plunges deeper into Saami’s isolate sonic wisdom. [Oct 2020]

The album’s eight tracks meander, but they never get lost. “Basin” for example sounds like Brian Eno’s Music For Airports might if it were scaled down to be played in an apartment hallway instead of a spacious terminal. [May 2023, p.51]

After The Flood is a great spin, and should be revelatory to the many folks who’ve not been able to keep up with Kuepper’s Australian-only output. [May 2025, p.57]