Throughout the album Nas sounds engaged, and his choices are unbeholden to the whims of the market. [Jan 2023, p.78]

Tyondai Braxton’s own Telekinesis is a symphonic work that sounds like a lost sci-fi film soundtrack. It has the clustered, hovering awe of György Ligeti’s Atmosphères and the eerie arpeggiated angles of Herrmann soundtracks like Vertigo and The Day The Earth Stood Still. [Dec 2022, p.50]

Perpetual Now has tangential relationships to house, techno, dub, ambient and psychedelic minimalism, but manages to plot a coherent and personal path between them all, with each of its four long tracks given space to breathe and expand. [Dec 2022, p.66]

New listeners may be drawn by these tributes, to experience something far more compelling, still flowing from the source. [Dec 2022, p.72]

There is a genuine synergy here. Khruangbin have crafted oneiric Manding inflected backdrops as though they have found what they were looking for all along, and Touré settles into them like he’s just got home. [Dec 2022, p.67]

Black Girl Magic is Honey Dijon’s most personal work to date. Over 15 tracks, Dijon collaborates with notable guests like Josh Caffe, Hadiya George, EVE, Mike Dunn and Channel Tres. The energy here is infectious. [Dec 2022, p.64]

Across the album woodwinds and brass establish the atmosphere, allowing Callahan to revisit some darker parts of himself with the safety of knowing that everything will be fine. [Dec 2022, p.64]

Each musician adopts a groove-plus approach, adding tunes, subtracting beats and spinning tension building, counterintuitive phrases off the common path, but never tripping it up. [Dec 2022, p.60]

While sparse guitar contortions made Both a melancholic record, the expanded palette here expresses a more nuanced but equally disarming range of emotions. [Dec 2022, p.58]

This new album manages to project an even simpler and more accessible surface with extraordinary depths of reference and feeling, even a track dedicated to Begum Rokeya, the Bengali feminist educator and author of the extraordinary genderswitching utopian fiction Sultana’s Dream. [Dec 2022, p.57]

Oh Death snaps them back on track right from the opening, where drips saturated with fuzz and wah on the sizzling “Soon You Die” are flung forward by a swirling guitar solo. Meanwhile, the group’s vocalist becomes a proper mistress of ceremonies. ... The chiming piano and guitar licks of the closing “Passes Like Clouds” suggest that Goat have finally rediscovered their true selves. [Dec 2022, p.54]

Come Around sees Carla dal Forno’s songwriting taking new shapes and routes, allowing her to pour her cratedigging folk knowledge (showcased monthly in her NTS show) into these open and confident songs. [Dec 2022, p.54]

It’s hard to know exactly what he’s singing about much of the time, but Dawson’s ardour for the sound of language is irresistible. ... The Ruby Cord is Dawson’s most accessible album yet, but as elaborate as his futuristic visions may be, they remind us of the mess we’re all in the middle of right now. [Dec 2022, p.52]

Horse Lords music has never been untidy, but this LP’s seven tracks evince a hyper-focused precision. Even when they flirt with entropy during the last two minutes of “May Brigade”, the transition from rhythmic grid to textural layering is immaculately executed. ... This may not lead the people to call for Comradely Objects rather than Ed Sheeran or (name your preferred chart topper here) but it’ll do the job just fine the next time you need some new minimalist jams for a highway drive. [Nov 2022, p.62]

Endure is smoother and glossier than the last album, but it’s still music that moves body and mind, inviting dirty dancing between flaming police cars. [Nov 2022, p.67]

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]

The ten tracks on Is It Going To Get Any Deeper Than This? provide – with occasional turns towards kosmische or lounge music – some of the most pop oriented music Daniel has ever released. [Nov 2022, p.66]

It isn’t Blonde On Blonde or John Wesley Harding – two acknowledged influences, on the decision to go to Nashville, at least – but the sheer energy of association and the adolescent clarity of understanding often yields strikingly subtle results. ... It isn’t always grown-up, but there’s nothing more mature than embracing immaturity. [Nov 2022, p.62]

It’s the confidence and clarity of Dalt’s vision that makes this album a charming, compelling listen. In its best moments, it’s strange and familiar at once, like a weird, beautiful dream. [Nov 2022, p.59]

These are songs with enveloping atmospheres that dramatise their lyrics with crisping, gasping, blinding, thundering, quietly screaming sound design. [Nov 2022, p.60]

This is unmistakeably a Loraine James record – the synths are capacious and the beats are intricately counterintuitive – but Eastman’s work has clearly been generative. [Oct 2022, p.44]

Rather than concocting rich strata from the guitar of Reine Fiske or Johan Holmegard’s percussion, these pieces are mainly stripped back and sprightly, propelled by the dazzling vocals of Ejstes. ... Where previously these atonal chords and odd tempos would have been subsumed into the heavy mixture, they appear here open and light, forming something that’s less earthy and far more fantastical. [Nov 2022, p.60]

The pattern repeats elsewhere: the big showcase tracks like “Never Forget” and “Let Me Be Great” sag a little under the weight of their pomposity, where deep cuts “Imposter Syndrome” and “IDGAF” just get on with showcasing her untouchable cool. [Nov 2022, p.73]

It’s heavyweight stuff delivered with a beautiful lightness of touch. [Nov 2022, p.73]

An album that for the most part is ebulliently nasty pop, the monumental “Big Steppa” and the gleefully foul “No Face” in particular will be irresistible to anyone raised on Trina and Missy Elliott, daring us to switch off as the party spirals out of control. [Nov 2022, p.73]

The result is a tougher but spacier sound. The original vocals are mixed in more prominently, and interplay with the deejay interjections relates to the lyrical content. [Nov 2022, p.71]

Along with the usual guitar/bass/drums/vocals, the group have added vibraphone, theremin and back-up singers, a move that has significantly enhanced their sound and bolstered the sci-fi boogie that rolls through the songs. [Nov 2022, p.70]

The album is warm and lush, mixed and engineered by David Darlington, who has worked with Eddie Pamieri and Wayne Shorter. It’s a different side of The Arkestra in a convincing, throwback fashion – to a time when new jazz albums came fast and each was an event. [Nov 2022, p.68]