They [Born On A Gangster Star and Quazarz Vs The Jealous Machines] can be appreciated either together or apart from each other. [Aug 2017, p.58]

He’s grown up, but he’s done so better than most, and crucially Mellow Waves hits you not just with ravishing sonics, but with a plangent heart, a sense of emotional growth that fulfils the promise Cornelius’s music has always had. [Aug 2017, p.57]

Deftly slice through seemingly disparate arenas--the fertile intersection of past and present, acknowledging both without succumbing to the whims of either. [Aug 2017, p.56]

The director has previously been namechecked by Lopatin as an early idol. Consciously or not, he applies a more vivid psychedelic impulse to a comparable tying together of sound and vision. [Aug 2017, p.56]

It is surprisingly polite and beautiful in places yet conjures up an air of real menace and myriad Nietzschean altitudes and climates. Fras’s voice and heavy, laden, deadpan German is perfect for Nietzsche’s portentous fragments and aphorisms. But there is a lightness here too. [Aug 2017, p.54]

It was recorded the same year and it is a fierce final epistle. [Aug 2017, p.52]

Patton’s signature style is overpowering, transforming an opportunity to create something unique into another of his side-projects.

This is an album, and a genre, to ponder--one that remains musically rich, deep and mysterious. [Aug 2017, p.50]

Many of these tracks barely scrape two and a half minutes. Crazed voices talk about “hair” and a “super-weird looking guy” while the deranged piano of a haunted ballroom plays for no one (“The Hidden Joice”). But it’s a fun, fairground of a record too, with a hare-brained 1960s Wurlitzer pop song (“Give It To Me”), dopey scat (“Scooba”) and silly names and phrases like “Chicken Butt” and “Eat Yourself Out”.

Dear is pervaded by a deep melancholy, but of a sweet, lovelorn kind, a looking back and a bitter-sweet attitude. Who knows if it’ll be their last record. If this is the case, it’s certainly a fitting send-off. [Aug 2017, p.49]

The sound is crisp without sacrificing any of Chesnutt’s trademark grit. By adding a little glean, Cody Chesnutt gives you the best of both sonic worlds. [Aug 2017, p.48]

While The Singles fails to represent Can’s adventures in untethered improvisation and oceanic drift, if you wanted to hand somebody one record that told them what Can was, you could do far worse. [Jul 2017, p.67]

What J Hus has over all else this year is an ebullient ironic pseudo-oblivious pomp, the kind of breathless mongrel music you’ll only ever get from folk young enough to miss how vital it is they’re breaking all the rules. [Jul 2017, p.62]

It is mixed heavy in the low mids, blanketed by chorus effects, yet somehow misses warmth. Its ambitions are little short of symphonic. [Jul 2017, p.62]

Opener “Reverance” gives us a great deal--tremolo string flourishes and swirling synthesizers, filter gates as grand as castle keeps that slowly open up to reveal lush vegetation within--but of percussion it gives us none. From there on, the album offers up interplanetary R&B. [Jul 2017, p.62]

Ex Eye fuse together in a whirring blare of intricately constructed math metal, where each player can be distinctly heard weaving their individual musical craft within the group’s membrane. [Jul 2017, p.60]

Crazy, tender and occasionally corny, Rundgren remains defiantly unpredictable. [Jul 2017, p.60]

Because of the time lapses involved in recording the material, the album sounds uneven and sometimes stale, sadly lacking the Misfits punk rock kick that he managed to reboot into early Danzig offerings with producer Rick Rubin. Of note, however, is the closing “Pull The Sun”, a majestic hovering ballad where Danzig drops the Jimbo stance to elevate his group and his more subdued vocal to a higher rock pinnacle. [Jul 2017, p.60]

Perhaps some of the head-scratching freshness of Burgess-Olson’s early material has been lost--but with her gear-led, no-fuss production sensibility, she slots in perfectly on Ninja Tune’s Technicolour imprint alongside prolific mavericks like Hieroglyphic Being and Legowelt. [Jul 2017, p.59]

New material is conspicuous by its absence, and several shambolic passages indicate that the band barely managed to rehearse, let alone write songs. [Jul 2017, p.58]

Nite Jewel sounds like a latter-day Prince protégé, with a beatific calm to her tone. [Jul 2017, p.56]

Just as these wise, bittersweet, intimate and wry songs and poems about love and the everyday have a life of their own beyond being haunted by the Nick Drake legacy, so too The Unthanks’ quietly scholarly interpretation of Molly Drake has a distinctive and nuanced self-assuredness. [Jul 2017, p.54]

The overall effect is fresh and forward thinking throughout. [Jul 2017, p.53]

Whether with Supersilent or on his own, Arve Henriksen has demarcated his own world of sound, communicating in ways that are sometimes inscrutable but always deeply felt. [Jul 2017, p.53]

A good bit stranger-sounding and more interesting in their excavation of the past. [Jul 2017, p.53]

Dust floats along meditatively, and is Halo’s warmest and most familial record to date. [Jul 2017, p.52]

For all its kinkiness Green Twins is indubitably an R&B record (tracks like “Cuffed” and “JP” really can’t be described as anything else) and an exceptional one at that. [Jul 2017, p.52]

It’s a bold, defining album from the UK techno producer that will undoubtedly fulfill her wish to flip people’s perceptions. [Jul 2017, p.52]