A highly engaging and very endearing album. [#223, p.59]

Ariel Pink's writing is completely scattergun, but this is what can make it so disarming. [Sep 2012, p.56]

It's just a coarser, clumsier version of the updated industrial bashing of their last album, without the dreamy coronae of guitar.[Jun 2016, p.60]

Boosie's attempts to remain commercially relevant in today's rap climate, however, makes the album a diluted draught of medicine and mediocre chart fodder. [Jul 2015, p.57]

With an outfit like Napalm, one looks for the subtle touches, and they're present: clean vocals on "Analysis Paralysis" and "The Wolf I Feed," a psychedelic burst of guitar noise on "Leper Colony." [Mar 2012, p.58]

Those nostalgic for the Aphex sounds of old may find them here, but served up rotten and misshapen, as an agreeably queasy warning that nostalgia can only get you so far. [Aug 2016, p.46]

This mixtape sounds more coherent than its 2012 predecessor, the shroomed-out Tumblr rap artefact King Of The Mischievous South Volume One Underground Tape 1996 . The features are bigger. [Sep 2024, p.60]

Mouse on Mars's melodic power has been greater across the years, but the textural richness of Parastrophics is unmatched. [Mar 2012, p.57]

Hold It In finds these crusty veterans meeting the threat of middle-age ennui with ingenuity and enthusiasm. [Oct 2014, p.57]

Vol 3 finds Sean C at the helm, resulting in a batch which sounds clunky at times, but works perfectly at others. [Dec 2020, p.66]

The effect of these new elements is to bring a new solemnity and calm to Pioulard's already gentle brand of blissed out songwriting. [Mar 2013, p.62]

Citizen Zombie is not a refusal. Rather, it's a fully plugged in reckoning with the eternal power of now. [Feb 2015, p.49]

The selections step sufficiently far from the territory established by their own songs to generate intrigue without stretching credulity. [Jul 2020, p.64]

The Notwist's songs sound almost too arranged and it's only after they've seeped in a little that it becomes easier to admire the trio's deftness, the way they absorb electronica's qualities of dissonance and disruption and use them as essential building blocks of their music. [June 2008, p.59]

There's not much going on texturally. [Nov 2015, p.56]

The music is meditative and calm-inducing, though occasionally it leans a little too much towards Opal Records tropes, particularly the piano-led pieces. [Apr 2016, p.62]

Orchestra Hits is the truest iteration of Rice and Schrader’s aesthetic to date. By polishing these songs, buffing them to relative shininess and adding serrated electronics, their emotive impact and melodic drama are greatly magnified. [Oct 2024, p.60]

Lost Themes satisfies more than it irks, and it's unambiguously the most enjoyable creation Carpenter has put his name on in probably 27 years. [Feb 2015, p.44]

Dragged out doom riffs and saw-edged unison vocals capture their fury and helplessness. [Sep 2016, p.59]

Weird is more insular, almost cabin feverish in Hatfield’s tendency to celebrate her own company (“All Right, Yeah” and the impossibly wholesome “Do It To Music”) or conversely magnify her own physical flaws (“Broken Doll”). If you hold some nostalgia for Hatfield’s early years but tuned out some time ago, you might get more from this than you expect. [Mar 2019, p.62]

Far from being some utopian unity of the opposites her work has summoned – beyond binaries – she’s still clearly experimenting and sometimes failing. [Aug 2020, p.48]

A usually sharp MC, Murs sounds conflicted throughout, a little too anxious to be loved by everyone. [Dec 2008, p.74]

Ten is forever on the point of falling apart but somehow doesn't. [#241, p.55]

An album of mostly pleasant contemporary pop. [#218, p.61]

The Clearing isn't a work of artfully suspended melancholy which leaves the listener wanting and wondering00it gestures ahead toward comfort and resolution. [Jun 2015, p.48]

Live In Cuxhaven 1976 may not dispel the impression that these live records are mainly for Can devotees, but it also confirms that the last word about their volatile processes has yet to be said. [Nov 2022, p.77]

Though you'd be justified in hanging this writer for conflating person and persona, you're asked to contemplate the uneasy positivity that chacterizes Paper Trail's three mot popular songs. [Dec 2008, p.74]

Patten's ability to conjure such urgency with out ever slipping into anything so easy as a typical groove goes some distance. [Oct 2011, p.65]