Moments illuminate the nimble beats and perky dayglo synthetic patches and above all the fierce resolution of purist independent grime anthems such as “Dem Man Are Dead” and “Badman Walking Through”. [Feb 2020, p.48]

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]

Despite its self-effacing title Workaround comes not as an afterthought to the above, but as distillation and progression, its 14 tracks at once crisply compelling and filled with playful delight, honed by minimalism and absorbingly complex, a constant 150 bpm that’s the opposite of metronomic. [Feb 2020, p.46]

It Should Be Us returns to the lunging bass distortion and nauseous slowed down beats of his instrumentals – the only voices to speak of rising from the churning depths as eerily pitched-down house vocal moans. [Jan 2020, p.73]

The music on Ism is intimate. Pieces end with a jolt. Brief interludes take a questioning tone, as if the fragments are enough in themselves, no need for resolution. The album’s warmth – a quality shared by McCraven’s output – owes much to the International Anthem engineering approach. [Jan 2019, p.66]

Wet Tuna always sound as if they’re trying to escape the constraints of product and profit. “Disco Bev” is delightfully sour and affectionate, “Sacagawea” more expansive and produced sounding, but it all hangs together brilliantly, even as it falls (dis)gracefully apart. [Oct 2019, p.52]

There probably isn’t a better sequenced album on your shelves. ... The remastering is immaculate, tightening up the jangle and twang, cleaning up Russ Kunkel’s drums and improving the separation of instruments throughout. Some of the alternative versions are a little slower than others; take three of “Some Misunderstanding” might just possibly be superior to the issued take, in the usual sense that sometimes musicality was sacrificed to technical perfection. [Jan 2020, p.78]

A highly enjoyable and entertaining album. [Jan 2020, p.74

I’m always holding out hope for more of the genius heard on Doris but it’s unfortunately absent on Feet Of Clay. [Jan 2020, p.74]

No sound is extraneous, every lick is needed, a minimalist musicianship that focuses you on Jeff Tweedy’s heartbreaking words. Their best in ages. [Jan 2020, p.71]

London based trio The Comet Is Coming unleash their finest yet, letting rave electronics, jazz funk and a dancefloor directed low end meet and mingle and mash, again suffusing everything with a positivist but markedly apocalyptic mysticism. [Jan 2020, p.71]

It’s a smart meld, digging up some real finds and gesturing towards a switched-on DJ mind. [Jan 2020, p.70]

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

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]

DJ Shadow’s latest is a hulking, 26 track beast that shifts from uptempo breakbeat and rubbery electropop to string-laden suites with relative ease. ... With synthesized tones ranging from lush to jarring, the instrumentals indicate the ear for texture that has characterised Shadow’s work since 1996’s Entroducing. [Jan 2020, p.69]

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]

The undulating, snarling “Black Transit Of Jupiter’s Third Satellite” is a bubbling 12 minute antimatter expanse, the pot of black gold at the end of this particular rainbow. The journey to get there is ravishingly bleak and massaging. [Jan 2020, p.58]

The Brian Eno collaboration “Here Come The Warm Dreads”, despite having the cheesiest, winking at the camera/self-referential title, coalesces around a regal brass melody and popping rhythm section to created a solidly funky slice of spaced out dub. “Rattling Bones And Crowns” is sharper, darker take on the Rainford cut “Kill Them Dreams Money Worshippers”. [Dec 2019, p.52]

Debut album Labyrinth is Kanda’s most sophisticated solo effort to date, swaying through 13 tracks of gorgeous melodies and electroacoustic layers that skip and skitter between beats and material states. [Dec 2019, p.48]

The five CD expansion pack of his 1982 double LP offers a far more enticing peek behind the purple velvet curtain [than Originals]. ... The outtakes are the real draw here. ... It only leaves you wanting more. [Dec 2019, p.66]

Gloopy Aphexian synths add a heady, after-hours quality to his itchy drum patterns, but the takeaway moment comes on the rather different closing track “Phosphorescence”, an endless plateau of serene deep house laced with jazzy keys, Mike Banks style. [Dec 2019, p.54]

Frisell, as always, plays for the group and for the song rather than reeling off solos. He has never shredded, but he doesn’t just shuck corn and whittle, either. Every Frisell performance is shaped with love and care, and with a near perfect balance between form and freedom. He just gets better and better. [Dec 2019, p.47]

What makes Transmission Suite work beyond its sounds is the belief Massey and Barker still have in the 808 project, the push all their music has of maintaining the future both as ultimate aim and ultimate source of anxiety. 808 State’s music has lost none of its foreboding, finesse and power. Sit deep within and enjoy. [Dec 2019, p.44]

While The Daisy Age won’t hold many surprises for diehard hiphop fans, the collection is well curated. [Dec 2019, p.64]

Ultimately Plantasia is often hard to love for the music itself. It was released several years after more evocative pieces for the Moog had already been released – from Perrey and Kingsley, Dick Hyman and even Garson himself – but it remains beloved as an amusing curiosity first and foremost, and for good reason. [Dec 2019, p.66]

The result is an often awkward assemblage of trial and error decisions that either allow the tracks to keep their era’s verve or attempt to punch things up in a modern sense, where the cut-off date is the mid-90s. ... All is not lost, though. It’s insightful to hear where Davis was heading with sleek arrangements such as “Give It Up” and “Maze”. [Dec 2019, p.65]

He’s hung up on Jesus rather than pneumatic women. It’s hard to tell if that’s an improvement, but it doesn’t seem like a regression either. ... An album with zero fat, dense in at least three senses, two of them positive. [Dec 2019, p.60]

Earthgang have one foot in the now, the other turned toward the horizon and an uncertain future. [Dec 2019, p.60]