The results are pleasing and anticlimactic at once. [#240, p.57]

Nothing Is Quick In The Desert shows them in fantastic form, sidestepping those laboured moments of musical correctness that made 2015’s Man Plans, God Laughs so patchy, and focusing on the kind of ear-popping chaos that made so much of 1994’s Muse Sick-N-Hour Mess Age so uniquely addictive. [Sep 2017, p.55]

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

Transcending its function as a score, this music works as a collection of instrumental vignettes, individual yet circular in structure. [Nov 2011, p.64]

Beautifully performed, but otherwise unadventurous. [#243, p.69]

Musically the project is weighed down by Haigh’s hugely uninteresting and one-dimensional piano playing. ... Haigh’s ear for electronic texture does do some of the heavy lifting for which his piano playing is not equipped. [Feb 2020, p.47]

The production has remained faithfully jagged and abrasive, where a trebly and bass-starved sonic narrative enforces a fresh take on what continues to be intense and difficult listening. [Apr 2019, p.50]

They're indubitably human this time around. [Jun 2015, p.54]

The five pieces do indeed feel like direct transmissions from Batoh's withered soul. [Mar 2012, p.50]

["f=(2.5)"] has a nice queasy seasick vibe, but feels over-egged, with too many ideas thrown at it too quickly. Other tracks repeat this formula with diminishing returns and cut 'n' paste fatigue sets in.... "f=(2.6)" is a lot more fun. [Oct 2015, p.48]

What could have ended up sounding like sketches, are now completed pieces,m full of suspense flashback, refrains ad other temporal tricks. [Oct 2011, p.61]

A resplendent albeit slightly cloying selection of meticulously arranged songs, bloated with instrumental detail and performed in a way that makes the sound like a revived soundtrack for some old, forgotten art house movie. [Oct 2014, p.61]

Butler offers seven tracks whose energy swings between chaotic and cool. [Nov 2023, p.62]

He doesn’t sound quite engaged anywhere on Lady, Give Me Your Key – more like a talented but wayward kid trying out for the school show. [Nov 2016, p.75]

Rather than fetishing these sound sources, Neubaten vacuum-pack the lot inside a hermetic and constricting production that is immensely disturbing. [#241, p.57]

There's everything to like about this release, but nothing to grip or to enage the senses... Stereolab have now defined and refined themselves to a point where they are almost invisible. [#211, p.53]

May be the year's most surprising pure pop pleasure--precisely because it's nothing like you'd expect a pop album to be. [#224, p.61]

To counter the straightforward songs there's a raucous stoop-start freakout on the likes of "Beat" and "Separate." [Sep 2013, p.63]

The Redeemer, despite its pinpoint sonics, doesn't take the logical next step of offering a moment of reflection or clarity. [May 2013, p.50]

The songs that Kramer left behind, however, turn out to be wholly life affirming and full of energy – and what seems at first like a tagged solo project reveals itself to be informed by an intimate understanding of the values that MC5 stood for, with Kramer fanning the embers of the group to keep the Motor City spirit burning. [Nov 2024, p.53]

Each song on Universe Room offers up a unique aural sensation that becomes more acute with repeated hearings. While some of the material takes several playbacks to fully tune into, other songs such as the opening “Driving Time” (with its crackling night-time cricket chorus intro), the mysterious “I Will Be A Monk”, the Pixies sounding “Elfin Flower With Knees” and hit single (surely!) “Fly Religion” become instant ear worms burrowing their way into your brain. [Mar 2025, p.59]

The problem is that this music, heard purely as a piece of product rather than as part of a wider performance with site-specific logic, leaves the listener with too much time in which to speculate what wider agenda the group may be spinning. [May 2018, p.54]

In flashes it could be a parallel universe in which Mahavishnu Orchestra ended up inventing Japanese city pop: a luxuriously hi-tech vision of urban utopia. But just as often it has the futile atmosphere of those projects in which string quartets would perform Aphex Twin. [May 2017, p.61]

Niblett takes the old quiet-loud dynamic and stretches it to unexpected lengths. [#258, p.68]

The too brief, purely instrumental “Sensational” is the best track, with suggestions of Weather Report’s jazz rock expansiveness. But the general impression is gimmicky and lightweight – effects without causes. [May 2020, p.66]

[Tipsy] painstakingly process small episodes of manufactured excess and thoughtless musical effect into tracks evoking the giddy pleasures to be found in running your favourite party tapes at the wrong speed. [#206, p.81]

Buck's refusal to recognise musical boundaries and his instinctive ability to pick out elements that work together--sometimes surprisingly so--have given us a genre-bending album of high artistic vision, spit and grit. [#258, p.52]

Ununiform demonstrates that Tricky has retained his sense of adventure; even at its most opaque and cryptic lyrically, his music remains hypnotic. [Nov 2017, p.64]