Kavain Space's freaky beats are done with a logic that maintains a crucial connection with dancers, even as it bamboozles, tests and wrongfoots them. Still, the rigor is exhausting, even alienating. [Jun 2013, p.46]

I can’t recommend this as a great hiphop record or remotely the state of the art right now. But for fans it’s an essential, harrowing work – Gang Starr’s equivalent of Big Star’s Third. [Jan 2020, p.60]

It's pervaded by numbness, claustrophobia, pain intensified to the point of dissociation. [Jun 2012, p.49]

It has a few surprises and sharp edges, but the structures are unstable. Like the post-rock improv of Aethenor, occasional bolts of energy strike and convulse the players. In its second half, however, 13 finally picks up momentum. [Oct 2016, p.60]

Part of Souleyman’s thing is upsetting delicate ears with his so-called vulgarity – it’s music for taxi drivers and party crashers. Likewise these swooning synth stabs may sound kitsch to discerning ravers, but the fun is heroically nonstop. [Jan 2020, p.69]

Sushi is more centred in the present, and more focused altogether. [Jan 2013, p.64

These half-asleep compositions inhabit the porous spaces between songform and atmosphere, the result being a remarkably relaxed album that is perhaps the strongest of the trilogy. [Nov 2025, p.52]

The album comes over as a political parable as much as an investigation into the spirit of place. [Jun 2012, p.56]

Throughout, strings carry forward brief, carefully composed interludes, dipping into sound fields that recall early 2000s post-rock; pensive percussion and melodic guitars riffing in and out of focus. The compositions are painterly and precise, punctuated by chimes and deep piano tones. [Dec 2025, p.56]

The most successful moments come when the supernatural energy of Rimbaud’s work are palpable in their musical translation. [Jan 202, p.69]

There’s a consistent low level sense of discomfort, or of familiar sounds or words taking on bizarro parallel forms. Lyrically, the album is enigmatic, full of personal mythologies, and swings between the divine (Jesus, Elvis) and the domestic (schools, peanut butter sandwiches). The song titles are a puzzle of repeated words and variations of phrases, like a secret language in plain sight. All over the album are sounds that can’t easily be identified, or that sit in between recognisable timbres. [Jul 2023, p.52]

Probably his most accessible work to date. [#269, p.45]

Less successful is “Turned To Stone”, a somewhat sluggish performance that indicates a temporary loss of direction, hobbled by formless vocal grunts that are accompanied by bouts of panic stricken death metal guitar noodling when the otherwise omnipresent grim mood falters. Mercifully Obituary swiftly regain their footing and kick back with “Straight To Hell.” [Apr 2017, p.52]

As stylistic cross-fertilising vanity projects by rock stars of pensionable age go, this one has bags of charm at least and is eminently listenable. [Jan 2013, p.65]

You are reminded that yes, this has all been done before, but Out Hud get by with the wistful innocence of well-intentioned brainiacs. [#225, p.71]

Something In The Room She Moves feels impossible to completely pin down. [May 2024, p.52]

As the album progresses, uneasiness is subliminally incorporated into otherwise deceptively easy rockin’ tunes. [Oct 2016, p.60]

There's Me And There's You, it turns out, a perfectly logical oddity. [Nov 2008, p.62]

The only problem with Politics of the Business is that there are too few of the loose ends and lateral leaps of, say, Three Feet High. [#232, p.69]

Some of these tracks have a stark, haunting beauty that marks them out as perfectly realised compositions in their own right. [#258, p.68]

On “Pure GreyCircle” Malliagh intensifies the mixture, introducing slabs of bass tone that flex and squeeze against elusive beats. There’s some weird subject matter, too; across polished surfaces and sharp corners, tracks such as “Sylph Fossil” and “Zones U Can’t See” smuggle cosmic lyrics inside voices that whisper or glide, always diving below the mix or spinning above. [Apr 2021, p.66]

While there's no doubting that Subtle can create, populate and soundtrack a world of their own, it's not always clear whether it was worth it. [May 2008, p.65]

The frenetic, almost no wave angularity of that track ["Camera"] calls to mind Last Exit or James Blood Ulmer's most punk-accented moments, while the contrast between hymnal vocal harmonies and brutalist sonics in "Scene 4" recalls Swans' "A Hanging". Early in the closing track "Scene 5: Breathing Fire" we hear one of the album's more conventionally structured post-hardcore movements along with an oblique ascension narrative about “basic instructions before leaving Earth” continuing, “but what do we return to?”.

It's hardly an essential record; more a reminder of past possibilities, really, than something that points toward the future. [Jul 2012, p.60]

Congo Natty always brings confrontational or cultural elements to set the context of the tracks. [Jun 2013, p.48]

Without a doubt these are good songs, and Osborne's vocal is always ear grabbing. But I'd love to hear the full band versions they deserve. [Jun 2014, p.55]

What the album lacks in innovation, it more than makes up for with its sheer edginess. [#228, p.59]

It radiates with a confidence fuelled by acolytes and its fun is infectious. But... the angry cynicism coursing through the album creates a distance between its maker and the listener. [#237, p.53]