Micachu & the Shapes have yet to blunt their edge. [Jul 2012, p.60]

M:FANS sounds way too much of its moment: it sounds just how you expect right now to sound. Worse, maybe: it actually sounds like a few years back. [Jan 2016, p.84]

With the Jicks now sharing the spotlight, sees Malkmus's familiar tangled lyricism and meandering tendencies offset by some tremendous group performances. [Mar 2008, p.57]

Moore runs the risk of seeming absorbed in some kind of midlife episode, but he gets away with it by deploying punk spunk as just one of an arsenal of countercultural referents rather than as a means to regain or revisit his youth. [Mar 2013, p.50]

Down there, his most accessible work outside the confines of Animal Collective, revels in that upside-down gravity. [Nov 2010, p.61]

Those expecting further dubwize excursions from this duo may be disappointed by their venture into the lounge rather than the yard. Unfair, really, as Thievery Corporation have embodied eclecticism from their beginnings, and the bass booms as sweetly as on any of their previous efforts. [#200, p.83]

It may lack subtlety but it sounds incredibly vital. [#229, p.68]

Though it’s no concept album, eight of the 12 tracks address either social issues or spiritual solutions. There’s the odd Prince bit of obscure esoterica but mostly it’s direct and effective. ... Welcome 2 America is vital enough to render such matters moot. it’s the sound of Prince truly not giving a damn and that should be edge enough for anybody. [Sep 2021, p.70]

Byrne's Who Is The Sky? has a similar foundation of strong songwriting, but with bigger production and instrumentation. [Oct 2025, p.50]

The mainstreaming of yoga, mindfulness and other pursuits of spiritual enrichment in our digitally distracted, permanently anxious modern reality might have tipped the balance, as Laraaji pulls in listeners who aren’t necessarily collectors of forgotten, strange or otherwise outsider music. [Nov 2017, p.58]

Exactly how delicately balanced their chemistry together is becomes apparent on the two solo albums that round out this three disc set. Both are decent in their own right but pale in comparison to the group disc. [Jul 2018, p.62]

[JR Robinson] edited them later into a musical Frankenstein breathing life into the stories of monsters. [Sep 2016, p.59]

There is a distinct lack of filler (as usual) but the best of the 11 songs is “Dead Weight”, which adopts a sideways crawl like a hermit crab in hobnail boots as our anti-hero tears herself to pieces and hurls them at the feet of an admirer. [Jul 2021, p.67]

The expanded bag of references and methods that he draws from on The Rarity Of Experience indicates that Forsyth and company aren't settling for what they know they can do, but using it as a starting point to figure out where to go next. [Feb 2016, p.50]

It sometimes seems too restrained, too polite. [Dec 2011, p.62]

The album cuts across a plethora of genres, refusing to be static. “La Vacanza” and “Sublime” completely submerge you into this dream state, slowing down, giving a reprieve from the increasing intensity. [Sep 2023, p.56]

Bonnie Prince Billy shows no sign of slowing down his slowness, despite, or perhaps because of, the misery. [Nov 2011, p.56]

Think of Young Prayer as the demos deemed too spectral, too elusive, to be revisited for [Brian] Wilson's new take on Smile. [#249, p.61]

Even without Gobert's cinematographic backdrop Simon Werner A Disparu stands as a solid instrumental album in its own right. [Apr 2011, p.63]

This is liminal pop music for sure, with Pioulard’s bedroom-recorded mixture of field recordings, dubbing tape experiments, ringing acoustic guitars, glockenspiel and murmuring vocals creating cloudlike, ephemeral textures. [Dec 2016, p.67]

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]

When it works, it’s pretty thrilling--as on their version of Joe Henderson’s “Earth”. Whether bassist Domenico Angarano will ever forgive himself for fluffing the galaxy-unlocking riff at the start of Alice Coltrane’s “Journey In Satchidananda”, however, is between him and the Creator. [Dec 2018, p.63]

What makes Transmission Suite work beyond its sounds is the belief Massey and Barker still have in the 808 project, the push all their music has of maintaining the future both as ultimate aim and ultimate source of anxiety. 808 State’s music has lost none of its foreboding, finesse and power. Sit deep within and enjoy. [Dec 2019, p.44]

It would be very hard to see Y In Dub as completing the project of taking dub into white punk, but taken on their own, separate terms these tracks are deep and engrossing explorations of a set of possibilities few others have dabbled with. [Nov 2021, p.57]

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]

It's so sweet and monotonous they should try [naming the album] something instead like Strawberry Ice Cream. [Jul 2012, p.62]

Almost without exception, these 11 tracks lurch along at a donkey's pace that seems designed to signify grace and dignity, while the crystal cave reverb applied with such liberality by Randall Dunn, producer of choice for the likes of Sunn 0))), Wolves In The Throne Room and Earth, seems after the nth track to cloak a more profound problem, which is that much of the material on Strangers is thin pickings. [Jun 2016, p.54]

At her best she lives up to the statement of intent on “This Sound” where her style is pitched as physical, literal but metaphysical, mystical and medicinal. ... But by the time she implores us to “do yourself a favour and eat some shrooms”, she sounds dangerously like just another hippy with too much faith in her medicine. [Jun 2021, p.