Here’s a Kool Keith album you don’t need to take in 20 minute doses. Lap it up. [Dec 2016, p.71]

Monument Builders itself could do with some of that malfunction, some warped colour and cathode ray snow. [Dec 2016, p.69]

The tracks don’t so much develop as flow--and don’t so much flow as slide slowly, tidally, from one pole to another. Those poles are, to put it crudely, a smooth Badalamenti-like gloom and a more polyphonic, Vangelis-style choral sound. [Dec 2016, p.69]

This is liminal pop music for sure, with Pioulard’s bedroom-recorded mixture of field recordings, dubbing tape experiments, ringing acoustic guitars, glockenspiel and murmuring vocals creating cloudlike, ephemeral textures. [Dec 2016, p.67]

Youngs’s knack of picking resonant phrases is at peak levels. [Dec 2016, p.66]

She draws you into the shadows and crumbling concrete of America, a nation in which, as Knowles pointed out in a recent online essay, “a former Ku Klux Klan leader is running for Louisiana senator.” [Dec 2016, p.54]

America’s National Parks is as consistent musically as it is conceptually diverse. What appear on first listen to be reserved essays on grand topics are steadily revealed to be eloquent statements of a mature and unified vision, realised with collective mastery. [Dec 2016, p.64]

Rather than confessional catharsis, Highway Songs has the diaristic, sketchbook feel of the compulsively creative. [Dec 2016, p.64]

This music reminds you how alone you are; it consoles you through its insolubility, comforts you by jabbing you in the chest and letting you know how complex the struggle is, how inaccessible we are to each other but just how universal our pain can be. [Dec 2016, p.63]

This is the adult Metallica at last, monolithic, grandiose and grizzled. Maturity suits the band, makes them a weightier proposition than the pursuit of former glories ever could. [Dec 2016, p.62]

The whole album has a distinct and mothball-smelling late 90s vibe, the parts gelling with a certain clunkiness that characterised their last album Low Impact, as if the two were taking a vacation in their own pasts. Like other people’s holidays, it isn’t always as fun for the onlookers as it may have been for them. Nevertheless, Analogue Creatures features some genuinely lovely work. [Dec 2016, p.60]

Throughout, what’s so revelatory and gratifying is hearing Zedek pushed by others and pushing others in turn. [Dec 2016, p.58]

It’s a gorgeous sounding album, with a fat, woody drum sound and well-defined bass frequencies that are headphone umami. [Dec 2016, p.57]

Broken Knowz sounds cleaner, more restrained and organic than his previous material. [Dec 2016, p.56]

What makes Lodestar a genuine progression from what has gone before--is the sinking and deepening of her voice. It is still neutral enough to act as the conduit it always has done, but the milkmaid’s lilt has been transformed into a maven’s burden. [Dec 2016, p.55]

Without bass or rhythmic anchor, the pair create a sense of immeasurable depth, as though listeners bob helplessly on the surface above an unfathomable abyss; a feeling heightened by how Gordon’s vocals often resemble abject cries into the void. [Dec 2016, p.55]

This constellation of miniature masterpieces is arguably the finest introduction to the Ra universe there is. [Jan 2017, p.84]

The audio material is an illuminating reflection of the group’s transition from pop copyists to psychedelic adventurers, en route to becoming champions of rock’s progressive faction. [Jan 2017, p.82]

Woptober, his second album as a free man, returns to the knotty, impenetrable rabbit holes of his storied mixtape run. [Jan 2017, p.77]

Trap Or Die 3 is a uniformly strong effort. [Jan 2017, p.77]

What's Your Sign is a brash, vigorous session that maintains discipline and freedom in equal measure. [Jan 2017, p.74]

The Silence are less pastoral and more raucous, from the sax-laden opener "Rituals Of The Sun" onwards. There's a healthy dose of early 1970s British prog throughout too.

Mandel's combination of virtuosity, shopworn aesthetics and lustful neediness is ultimately winning. [Jan 2017, p.73]

Sounding like nothing else out there, distinct even from Tribe's previous work, We Got It From Here is political without being preachy, fun without being unintelligent and next level out while being street corner down. A superb swansong. [Jan 2017, p.71]

Eno's striving nature and his ability to morph sounds, alter moods and conduct psychoacoustic experiments still yields weird and enjoyable fruits here. [Jan 2017, p.64]

Dense, frustrating, perplexing and fun on record, Demdike's sound works best when bleeding osmotically into strange visuals. [Jan 2017, p.63]

Building a strong, solid foundation for his skyscraper of words, the rapper channels everyone from Malcolm X to James Brown into a mountainous manifesto of beautiful blackness that is reflective of the struggle for dignity and equality, while also working towards the banishment of stereotypes. [Jan 2017, p.61]

Totalling a scant half hour, the album’s fleeting length leaves me wondering whether some tracks exhaust all potential within their mayfly-like timespans. But it captures a moment, and judging by the collaborative rapport between Levi and Coates it suggests, hopefully it’ll be the first of many. [Nov 2016, p.59]