The tracks succeed more where they move away from those compromises towards experiments, extremes of play, texture, tempo, density or sparseness. [Mar 2025, p.53]

With nowhere to hide, her voice is revealed as an equally fine instrument, informed by previous interpreters such as Sandy Denny, Anne Briggs and Jacqui McShee, but with an earthier, softer edged quality. [Mar 2025, p.48]

As the work progresses, the architectural aspects of English’s music become apparent and alive, with the aural suggestion of fluid movement within rigid structures, frames that can hold and refract spatial mysteries. By “V” and “VI” the movement of amorphous sonic forms becomes magisterial, the air, increasingly heavenly. [Mar 2025, p.48]

Closing track “Alone Together” is the exception, with its laidback 70s groove. Otherwise there is a rich sense of eerie detachment, more Eno than disco. Not a desolate one but a widescreen richness of field recordings, sweetly echoing synth tones, spoken word interludes, plaintive wheepling of birds and clarinets, ghostly acousmatic sounds and layered vocal harmonies. [Mar 2025, p.46]

Those arrangements, many drawn from Ra’s own vintage charts but others assembled by Allen, have an urbane lushness, the 24-piece ensemble swinging hard in tight formation, only occasionally letting their freak flags fly. [Mar 2025, p.44]

The various elements at work on these five finely etched pieces rarely settle into any single pattern or vibe, but they also never feel like pastiche. It’s all music for the trumpeter – whose playing has never sounded more mature and exploratory – and every component of the music is as rigorous and evolved as his own vision. [Mar 2025, p.44]

For this project, Bakorta’s vocals are left at the studio door, which initially struck me as a shame, but a few listens reveal how much stronger the album is for being entirely instrumental. .... It’s clear enough what the remixes set out to achieve and, on their own merits they sound good. But in the context of the album as a whole they feel slightly tacked on; worth listening to, but maybe in a separate sitting. [Jan/Feb 2025, p.92]

It’s melodic, often strikingly beautiful and consistently daring. [Jan/Feb 2025, p.98]

There’s no real sense of ebb and flow in concession to the album format, but Active Agents & House Boys ruts away enthusiastically throughout its 58 minute running time without any hint of flag. [Jun 2024, p.48]

There’s real delight in these waters – and some shadows too. [Dec 2024, p.45]

The material from Antibes and Paris is similar – standards, plus modal compositions such as “So What” and “All Blues” that first appeared on Kind Of Blue. The difference – and it’s huge – lies in the freedom with which these are explored. This excellent set brings out that difference in all its aspects. [Jan/Feb 2025, p.102]

Afrikan Alien consolidates renewed supremacy with casual swagger, epic statements like “Afrikan Di Alien” and “YGF” sandwich more routine slices of virtuosity from the flex of “Big Smile” to the earnest romance of “Round & Round”, normality victorious against a hostile world. Strutting victorious on “Ya Zee”, he’s aspirational, iconic. .... He’s still in a league of his own. [Jan/Feb 2025, p.97]

Fine Art is a consistently uplifting experience even if on record Kneecap’s excesses don’t always convince. The banging “Rhino Ket” feels like Poisonous Poets doing Slowthai impressions with Bad Boy Chiller Crew. But more often it works. [Jan/Feb 2025, p.96]

The themes may change, but draped around catchy and crisp melodic motifs, the textures remain as gorgeous as ever. [Jan/Feb 2025, p.95]

Most of the 18 cuts clock under two minutes, long enough to showcase just how fresh and creative Raczynski still is, yet short enough to feel as concentrated jolts of energy. [Jan/Feb 2025, p.88]

GNX plays like a extended victory lap. None of the year’s singles are included, references to the beef are scattershot and subliminal but its embers suffuse every preening boast and putdown. There’s no need for big conceptual flourishes of previous albums. This time around Kendrick is the concept, his creative intensity manifested as weaponised normality. .... From thereon [“Wacced Out Murals”] it’s a rap masterclass. [Jan/Feb 2025, p.86]

The whole album seems to be incandescent with anger. You would have to travel a long way to hear an acoustic guitar album as tough as this. [Jan/Feb 2025, p.82]

Tuttle has not so much completed the pieces as translated them. .... What makes this release, however, is the inclusion of Another Fish. .... It allows the listener to hear the before to Tuttle’s after, adding depth to the process of Another Tide. And to hear Chapman’s response to Fish, in which rather than return to its thorny Fahey-esque blues chromaticism, he explores a strangely plastic but warm mode.

We get the sense that everything has changed; life goes on despite this. Her lyrics carry the same sort of dull, resigned honesty, recognised all too well by those who have experienced profound loss. [Oct 2024, p.48]

Mikael Åkerfeldt’s death growls are back, as are the intricate sextuplet grooves familiar from Ghost Reveries – but the style is also restlessly omnivorous, deftly changeable between moments of brutal death metal, bucolic folk, orchestral segues, power balladry and the head-spinning melodic complexity of 1970s progressive rock. Recently recruited drummer Waltteri Väyrynen shines throughout. [Nov 2024, p.55]

“Pensées Magiques” has little spoken word, yet it somehow perfectly conveys a sense of nightfall across the landscape, as if you and Atkinson are quietly absorbing it together. [Nov 2024, p.48]

The Crying Out Of Things, their latest album as a duo since 2021’s I’ve Seen All I Need To See, builds on the idiosyncratic elements of their established sound – monstrous distortion, crushed electronic beats and samples, scorched screams, fragments of punk, metal, pop, hiphop and dub – and the results are thrillingly, crushingly bleak. [Dec 2024, p.42]

It’s off to a shaky start – for this writer at least – with the lugubrious dirge of Procol Harum's “A Whiter Shade Of Pale” – and I wouldn’t mind never hearing The Small Faces’ “Itchycoo Park”, which follows, again – but The Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset", Pink Floyd’s “See Emily Play” and Tomorrow’s “My White Bicycle” all receive tasteful, stripped back renditions. [Dec 2024, p.54]

Songs are short with a pop-punk punchiness. “Defendants” could be a relationship song encoded in the to and fro language of a courtroom and features a breezy guitar solo, as do several tracks that follow. [Dec 2024, p.47]

Throughout her third album The Hollow, Forsyth hardly needs to name her emotions, using her voice to communicate them purely in terms of depth, size and shade. [Dec 2024, p.46]

One of the most intriguing aspects of the artist’s work with drones is their anticipatory quality, which makes it feel like time is standing still. Even in its noisiest, most overwhelming moments, Natur renders the world in slow motion. [Aug 2024, p.52]

Sharp inhalations between melodic figures are given a multidimensional presence by the reverb, grounding the sound in an embodied ethereality. As track titles like “The Cosmic Spheres Of Being Human” and “Everything Is Hidden In You” make clear, the circular rhythms of this embodied presence are identical with those of the universe. [Sep 2024, p.49]

The magic of demos is being able to discover well known songs anew. In this form, the yearning and invitation of “Colour Me In” takes on a more literal meaning (“I am grey still on the page… Just an outline, sketchy but fine…Somehow I feel that I’m just the idea”), but is somehow even more poignant, and a reminder of how songs that began so deceptively simply would be taken into so many hearts, coloured in with countless listeners’ emotions and experiences. [Oct 2024, p.69]