Where Lopatin’s earlier work often evoked the sense of a simultaneous need and impossibility of love--most notably in his Chris de Burgh sampling “Nobody Here”--the music here seems to strive for immediacy. [Jan 2019, p.70]

The delicacy and lightness of the album is underpinned by mesmerising, rich textures, constantly buzzing and clunking away beneath the surface. [Jan 2019, p.70]

“Exactlyfourminutesofimprovisedmusic” is one of the highlights on Blow, not least because it toys so wittily with ideas of genre and song versus freedom. [Jan 2019, p.70]

The unreachable past collides with a dark, unpredictable future, leaving the listener with a pit in the stomach and endless respect for the way that Ishibashi has upped her game. [Jan 2019, p.67]

A record that awakens mysteries and meaning from sparse elements; a masterful ritual. [Jan 2019, p.67]

The songwriting and lyricism are strong, but her storied voice elevates the album and invests it with a depth and serenity that few can match. [Jan 2019, p.64]

There Is A Place flirts with pastiche, but it’s hard not to be swept along by its uplifting grooves. [Dec 2018, p.52]

Lyrically, Foster possesses both esoteric wisdom and an ascetic purity yet never wanders out of reach; she has the musical instinct of her troubadour sisterhood (Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Judee Sill et al) and in the spoken word moments, the cosmic gravitas of Eden Ahbez. [Dec 2018, p.48]

“Sky Burial” gives us a melodic refrain of “I’ve been looking for you” bouncing over phantasmal electronic, squelching synths and a bass that almost clangs with detuning; “Dyma Fy Robot” revels in Metal Mickey vocals and a tumble of discombobulated percussion and trilling birdsong; “Tiny Witch Hunter” tangles helium-fuelled vocals with wailing sax and African rhythms. [Dec 2018, p.59]

This record has its moments, for instance the squarewave basslines and breakbeats of “Edelweiss” and the outro to “Climb Ev’ry Mountain”. However, as is often the case with Laibach, the pervasive air of calculated irony prevents the album from passing from the ridiculous to the sublime, even when it all gets so silly that on paper it sounds like it should. [Dec 2018, p.52]

Admirable in its candour, if at times hard to swallow. [Dec 2018, p.56]

The hi-hats and furiously brushed cymbals of Badalamenti’s pseudo-jazz cues outline these tracks, along with heavy but oddly affectless arco bass. He performs Lynch’s lines, describing scenes of unearthly violence, banality and menace, as if growling the menu of a New York Brooklyn trattoria. What guides the album away from this rather dated aesthetic, apart from the glaring crispness and pitch-black texture of the mixing, is the quality of the noise. [Dec 2018, p.69]

This collection, and its atmosphere of sharing a bench with the 20th century’s Mozart as he explores still nascent songs, is an appropriately seductive tease to what will doubtless be a decades-long unearthing of the vault’s untold treasures. The songs themselves, as they’re presented here, really are secondary to this feeling, something like finding a just unearthed message from a departed loved one. [Dec 2018, p.69]

The diversity of the record, it’s ability to flow from gnarly jazz to doomy funk of to peachily perfect quiet storm pop like “Conmigo”, never feels forced; and there’s a new wisdom and wonder to Muldrow’s voice that leaves things suggestive more than doctrinaire, open rather than sealed, playful rather than penetrative. Superb. [Dec 2018, p.63]

Tender without being overly sentimental, this is music with real feeling. [Dec 2018, p.59]

The music still nods to Broadcast in its gothic otherness, and the basic format of analogue synth driving the bass, drums and vocals is unchanged. But the sound is more structured, more--gasp!--song-like. Unfortunately the production is imbalanced, rough and thin. [Dec 2018, p.59]

The conceptual core of Vessel’s third album is rather ambiguous. Queen Of Golden Dogs follows a loose narrative of self-discovery and transformation and a couple of queer literary and surreal visual art references. ... Musically, Queen Of Golden Dogs is similarly vague and amorphous. [Dec 2018, p.58]

His music, which radiates humour, tenderness, frustration and audacity, remains seductively mysterious. [Dec 2018, p.54]

For music built around the shrouding and decay of its composer’s bodily presence, Thresholder feels curiously non-corporeal. In large part that’s attributable to the purity of Craig’s voice. ... But elsewhere--when melting between the tremulous organ tones of “And Therefore The Moonlight” or forming grainy cirrus wisps in “Sfumato”--Craig sounds as though he’s already shed his physical shell and ascended into the cosmos. [Dec 2018, p.46]

Cocoon Crush is, partly, the album that you’d imagine Future Sound Of London’s Lifeforms might have become if they’d had a million times the processing power at their disposal. Poised and composed. [Dec 2018, p.45]

While Lattimore is willing to put her instrument through some effects, she never subdues its essential character. Its inherent lightness gives records that bear her name a yielding quality that contrasts with the stark clarity of Baird’s solo work, let alone the body blows delivered by her combo Heron Oblivion. [Dec 2018, p.44]

Explicit references to surrealism and Japanese ambient, alongside DJ Screw and Jodorowsky, read as clumsy and uncritical homages to tired tropes and cliches, which ultimately serve a tactless and indulgent end. [Nov 2018, p.63]

Choirboys sing the poems of Nils Christian Moe-Repstad over Eivind Aarset’s guitar, but as with the more expansive orchestral passages, it can come across as earnestly ecclesiastical. The most affecting pieces are those where Henriksen and Bang strip it down, such as on “The Swans Bend Their Necks Backward To See God”, where pitched down trumpet lows like foghorns over the Humber valley. [Nov 2018, p.68]

Hoffmeier’s fourth solo album The Drought sees her graduating from the Copenhagen based label Posh Isolation to PAN to deliver her strongest statement yet. [Nov 2018, p.62]

Shorn of its images, Carpenter’s score for David Gordon Green’s reboot of the Halloween franchise is oddly aimless. There’s the instant jolt of recognition: that simple piano phrase is resurrected, and given a steroidal boost, its famous 5/4 rhythm now underpinned with a sturdy kickdrum. But after that the music hardly seems to build in intensity, or riff off each other; there are certainly no new hooks or textures that sear the listening ear like the first. [Nov 2018, p.53]

A record that is often overwhelming, at times breathtaking. [Nov 2018, p.55]

Berry consequently embellishes and embroiders these reassuring moments of collective memory, bringing out in each of his cover versions some surprising hidden detail. [Nov 2018, p.50]

Universal Beings is heady and refined. [Nov 2018, p.58]