While lightness and a wondrous sense of possibility colour the album, there’s also depth. Every track is made of layers of glimmering melodies that collide in dissonance and fade away in consonance. [Aug 2022, p.58]

A band aware of where they’ve been but also reconnected and plotting a future. [Nov 2023, p.46]

Crackle and hiss are still in evidence, but the effect is toned down, and less suggestive of sonic patina than of the hostile climate of a world far removed from the languid, sun-dappled pools and rolling vistas suggested by 2005's The Campfire Headphase. [Jul 2013, p.53]

The pursuit of risky and rigorous music-making continues to feel wiser and nobler for his prodigious, elevating presence. [Oct 2018, p.52]

The diversity of the record, it’s ability to flow from gnarly jazz to doomy funk of to peachily perfect quiet storm pop like “Conmigo”, never feels forced; and there’s a new wisdom and wonder to Muldrow’s voice that leaves things suggestive more than doctrinaire, open rather than sealed, playful rather than penetrative. Superb. [Dec 2018, p.63]

Here’s a Kool Keith album you don’t need to take in 20 minute doses. Lap it up. [Dec 2016, p.71]

The ninth album from Wolverhampton born singer-guitarist and producer Stephen James Wilkinson is even more vague and numinous than 2016’s A Mineral Love and far better for it. [Feb 2018, p.58]

This is unmistakeably a Loraine James record – the synths are capacious and the beats are intricately counterintuitive – but Eastman’s work has clearly been generative. [Oct 2022, p.44]

Another stellar release by this persistently valuable band. [Jun 2018, p.57]

Each artist has taken her songs on their own terms, with out grandstanding, and this approach has yielded some inspired performances. [Jul 2015, p.46]

It's the multilingual, mulch-direcctional, half sung, half spoken vocals that really make The Visitor though. [Jul 2013, p.66]

Clamber aboard and settle in for a very sweet ride. [Jul 2011, p.55]

With Exai they've created a work which reveals renewed faith in their own identity and which should act as compass in years to come. [Mar 2013, p.57]

LEGACY! LEGACY! is just as much a celebration of Chicago musical talent. ... It also demonstrates Woods’s vast talent as singer and songwriter. [Apr 2019, p.69]

It feels like a resumption of a music that has been going on uninterrupted, in private, like it was music playing itself forever. [Jul 2015, p.48]

A whole album of these bolts would be nuts, in a good way. [Jul 2013, p.66]

The laser-like concentration on groove and gorgeous textural flutterings just about keep them away from pastiche; the result is like having honey poured in your ear for 50 minutes. [Oct 2016, p.64]

It’s no radical departure, but Gamble nonetheless conjures a new and unsettling sense of richness from differently focused materials. [Oct 2017, p.52]

Bright, booming and unhinged in its musical complexity, Big Mama is electronic music pushed to its most futuristic and utopian possibilities. [Apr 2026, p.58]

It’s wild, almost bacchanalian, Ambarchi leading everyone to shared euphoric experience with his guitar--then it’s over, and everything dissolves rapidly into a dazed silence [Nov 2016, p.57]

On The Comeback Kid Marnie Stern has returned bolder, brighter and stranger than ever, an artist in complete command of her idiom. [Nov 2023, p.51]

An impeccably crafted sonic exploration of environmental destruction and renewal, whose haunting soundscapes evoke the textures of fire and ash. Many tracks work with rhythmic, noise shaping filters, lending a throbbing, breathing, convulsive quality. [May 2025, p.66]

Again and again the same transition is repeated, as the album slips between the utopian and the real. [Jul 2015, p.49]

Largely Chewed Corners has the sound of an artist at complete ease with a vocabulary built over 20 years and its parameters. [Jul 2013, p.67]

Beauty, tradition, experiment: American primitive guitar is in safe hands. [Oct 2018, p.55]

You might not think you need new versions of these. But you’d be wrong. [Nov 2017, p.52]

It moves with a tighter, more mechanistic gait than 2012's similarly relentless Sagittarian Domain, but it's no less transfixing. [Nov 2014, p.72]

Listened in sequence, the nine cuts are like chapters of a hike through a black pine forest, where the air is sharp and time stands still. A sense of foreboding makes way for desolation, ultimately unearthing liminal pockets of awe. [Dec 2023, p.52]