Daze's exhilarating intensity is tempered by an undercurrent of grim pleasure in physical discomfort, worming under your skin like Tri Angle labelmate Rabit's similarly caustic "Pandemic." [Feb 2016, p.53]

For all of its constant activity, [the album] feels stale. It does next to nothing new to build on previous releases, and from song to song there's so little variation that its ultimate effect is numbing. [Feb 2016, p.50]

This is a good record. It's probably the best record by a group named after a situationist art installation you'll hear all year. But I'd be surprised if it came [on] top of any other list. [Feb 2016, p.48]

M:FANS sounds way too much of its moment: it sounds just how you expect right now to sound. Worse, maybe: it actually sounds like a few years back. [Jan 2016, p.84]

The song ["Yonder Blue"] is as intricately tied into pop and soundtrack tradition as the rest of the album, but it carries an immediacy that otherwise eludes The Catastrophist. [Jan 2016, p.72]

It's a bit California slacker, a bit New York dive, a bit Delta blues, and so firs in well enough alongside Woodist alumni like Kurt Vile, Real Estate and Woods. [Jan 2016, p.71]

To Those of Earth & Other Worlds miss some of the cosmic darkness of Sun Ra. Instead it's a fulsome celebration of the most joyous heights of his work. [Nov 2015, p.66]

There's not much going on texturally. [Nov 2015, p.56]

It's a Mark McGuire record in the way he plunges into all his personal enthusiasms and arrives somewhere more interesting when he comes up for air. [Nov 2015, p.56]

His melody lines never go where they should; there is pattern here, but not he expected resolution. [Nov 2015, p.56]

The desire of the group to progress feels palpable here. [Nov 2015, p.55]

Every gesture feels bold and assured. [Nov 2015, p.53]

Garden Of Delete feels more like an audio showreel than a traditional album. [Nov 2015, p.51]

Nothing has afforded him unlimited space to recalibrate after a period of upheaval and loss. [Nov 2015, p.45]

Despite its recourse to sentimentality, this is appealing, historic and culturally important music. [Dec 2015, p.68]

It's a tribute to Dilla's imagination that every track here has at least a spark of some interest, but ultimately Dillatronic is, like so many exhaustive archival box sets, a dry reminder that brilliance is usually the result of a drafting process. [Dec 2015, p.66]

The album retains a taste for annihilation. [Dec 2015, p.56]

Melnyk could use a bit more genuine mystery and less self-importance. [Dec 2015, p.52]

Hallucinogen moulds diverse influences together into a perplexing whole. [Dec 2015, p.51]

The sonic immensity and detail of the album, an extended paean to the power of the imagination, with the feel of a dark fairy tale, rivals the most ostentatious of Bob Ezrin's productions for Alice Cooper, Kiss and Lou Reed. [Dec 2015, p.50]

DJ Paypal's take on footwork does to R&B, disco and 1980s adult contemporary smoothness what sometime collaborators AG Cook and SOPHIE of PC Music do to bubblegum ad teeny pop. [Dec 2015, p.47]

Invite The Light is determinedly adventurous. [Dec 2015, p.46]

Almost every track has a fearsome radiance to its high end and even in those parts without drums or squared off structures, the surges of sound recall collective dancefloor ecstasies. [Dec 2015, p.44]

There are moments when the insights of Newsom's improvised mythology fall into pseudo-profundity... But still it easily stands with this year's entrancing reinventions of song--Julia Holter's Have You In My Wilderness, Jim O'Rourke's Simple Songs--and the high points of her own catalogue so far. [Nov 2015, p.46]

Science Fiction Dancehall Classics is a more than serviceable as an On-U sound primer, yet may throw even those who think they know the label. [Oct 2015, p.70]

It carries with it the expressivity of darker electronic take on popular forms, and exchanges the cliches of this UK habit for new and complex alien intimacies. [Oct 2015, p.49]

While the intellectual territory is familiar, it's explored with similar playfulness and ear for inventive juxtaposition as Papaich's fellow city dwellers Matmos. [Oct 2015, p.50]

["f=(2.5)"] has a nice queasy seasick vibe, but feels over-egged, with too many ideas thrown at it too quickly. Other tracks repeat this formula with diminishing returns and cut 'n' paste fatigue sets in.... "f=(2.6)" is a lot more fun. [Oct 2015, p.48]