The results are overwhelmingly chirpy, but there's a frisson between his uniquely crusty voice and the shimmering digital surfaces. He sounds comfortable, but he doesn't blend in. [Dec 2025, p.63]

Pissing Stars sees his songwriting separate more fully from the motherships of Silver Mt Zion and GY!BE, skirting new fringes only a solo artist could reach. [Mar 2018, p.52]

It’s a startling new sound she has here, featuring voices of an unplaceable vintage, piano, bells and chains that carry centuries’ worth of dust and shadow, the songs a distorted and twisted take on gospel that’s sometimes slurred like a warped record, sometimes scarifyingly stark and always tightroping between redemptive faith and avant garde oddity. [Jan/Feb 2024, p.92]

Only occasionally, as on the Daft Punk-ish disco of “Real Time” does it feel generic, and when it gets really sophisticated--as on “True” where How To Dress Well sheds his recent 1980s pop affectations to operate in pure (and not in any sense alt) R&B mode--its ambition is clear. [Apr 2017, p.56]

Wiggs’s music works best when it sets out its melodic ideas, then takes its time subtracting elements until you’re left with a filament of what you started with, as on the stunning penultimate track “The Soft Stars That Shine”. [Jul 2019, p.58]

The acoustic guitar led instrumental “Underwater City” being an exemplary diversion into acid folk. Elsewhere “Re-generate” and “The Black Sea” are a couple of highly enjoyable (albeit slight) space jams, and exit track “Stargazers” regrettably bails out just when it starts to take off. [May 2024, p.60]

That the album works so well is less a testament of Twigs's charisma and talent--real as those may be--than it is the limitless possibilities of well-paid freelance teamwork. [Nov 2014, p.63]

Woptober, his second album as a free man, returns to the knotty, impenetrable rabbit holes of his storied mixtape run. [Jan 2017, p.77]

Now more than ever, political songs need engagement and direct prescription. In that respect Spirit rarely cuts it. But as with many DM albums, it can still resonate in quieter moments such as “Cover Me”, and the group’s continued existence is one of the great love affairs between man and machine in modern music. [Apr 2017, p.56]

Gane forgoes the intensifying momentum found elsewhere in his work for a more conventionally cinematic arc. [Aug 2020, p.52]

A mid-1970s Tangerine Dream vibe is more apparent than on previous Noveller albums, albeit still further removed from the trappings of rock music per se, and it largely comes off as a soundtrack in waiting for a film in which a hard-up community of 19th century nomads travel slowly across an arid plain. [Aug 2020, p.64]

The ideas are better realised here than on [Why?'s] earlier material. [#258, p.67]

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]

Rocky synthesises the cutting edge experiments of his peers into a more commercially polished product that lacks the eccentricity of its influences but is uniquely out there when compared to most mainstream fare. [Feb 2013, p.61]

It always feels uncomfortably like being trapped in someone's else's headspace. [Jul 2012, p.68]

There’s no denying that braggadocio has always been a key component of the genre but after a while it does become wearing when little more is on offer to elevate the tunes. What rescues the whole affair is Daniel Boyle’s dedication to the task at hand and his skills in bringing the rhythms and end mixes together, though with session input from the great but unsung UK reggae sessioneer Hughie Izachaar on guitar and bass plus old Upsetter Robbie Lyn on keyboards it’s enough to infuse any session with confidence. [Nov 2018, p.62]

Their second album feels more palatable. [Jul 2012, p.68]

The first two tracks showcase the oddity of the album’s moods. ... The tension grows to breaking point on the two vocal numbers, “Play The Ghost” and “Canyon Walls”, in which the barest suggestion of melodic form, coalescing out of scatters of organ drone and faded, looping instruments has to provide a support for Davachi’s Grouper-like laryngeal ectoplasm.[Oct 2020, p.52]

Exo alternately provokes astonishment at its kitschiness and the sensual thrill of its dazzling inhumanism, but that's probably the whole point. [Aug 2012, p.58]

Ab-Soul music fuses street-level concerns with the sort of erudite, rhyme scheme-fixated wordplay more commonly associated with rapper who value beats and rhymes over life. [Jul 2012, p.71]

The album's seven winding tracks, inspired by 1980s country, fit squarely within the impressionistic ambient country movement. But while its influences loom large, the album finds its strongest footing when familiar structures dissolve. [Oct 2025, p.53]

RAP Music is a self conscious throwback sonically, lyrically and even visually.

Musically, the songs favor stripped-down and straight ahead garage rock production values, often driven by organ chords. [Jul 2013, p.65]

A high-level concept album that never wastes a note. [#266, p.59]

These heavily layered, smoothly produced compositions emit occasional warmth, but coolness is the prevailing order; the intricacies of arrangement demand admiration but fall short of engendering a more heartfelt response. [#204, p.68]

Fall To Pieces exists in this oxymoronic hinterland of nihilism and resilience, evocative of the contradictions of grief. [Oct 2020, p.64]

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

The set concentrates on one style and tends to accentuate the crossover aspects of its kinship with house and techno. [Aug 2015, p.55]