The barbershop harmonies are, as always, impeccable, while the blend of acoustic and electronic textures is subtle and unforced. [Mar 2011, p.58]

The songwriting is strong.

There's a great danger in finding beauty in suffering, but this album takes that risk and reaps great dividends. [Mar 2011, p.54]

Listening with a heart opened with affection kindled by Mascis's warm and defeated drawl, there's much to engage the latent Dinosaur fan looking for a still moment. [Mar 2011, p.52]

Better, Perhaps, to hear How To Dress Well as the latest in a lineage of lo-fi bedroom songwriting dating back to Sebadoh and Smog in the early 1990s, via Alexis Taylor, Antony Hegarty, Jamie Lidell even, and perhaps as far back as Green Gartside, and his would be soul diva falsetto. [Mar 2011, p.50]

Blue Songs nevertheless presents a level of poetic inventiveness that isn't easy to trace in the dance pantheon.

The album has almost Wagnerian scope and immersive power, and at just over 50 minutes it's well organised as a start-to-finish listen. [Mar 2011, p.50]

It feels crudely stitched together. [Mar 2011, p.49]

In the end, it's the aural equivalent of skyscrapers built out of wattle and daub. [Mar 2011, p.49]

It's clever stuff, but if it's sweat you want, you're probably better off going for a run. [Mar 2011, p.48]

The music is so devoid of anything to grab onto, listening to it is rather like plummeting at speed through the artificial landscape constructed for the film. [Mar 2011, p.48]

Like Portishead, this album may very well achieve background ubiquity, but that should not be allowed to obscure the strangeness and currency of this record. [Mar 2011, p.46]

The whole album feels like a coda, a soundtrack to the closing credits of a career that has taken them far beyond the exploratory punk of their roots. [Nov 2010, p.53]

The warm campfire feel to much of Bardo Pond indicates just how much the likes of MV&EE owes this outfit, but MV&EE seldom sound this convincingly elsewhere. [Dec 2010, p.58]

There's an ineffable quality to No Joy's music that truly works. [Dec 2010, p.51]

It's tempting to consider The Ex as Holland's The Fall, but that wouldn't be quite right--de Boer's pronouncements lack the gnomic bite of Mark E Smith. But these free thinkers are still taking more risks than Salford's finest have considered in years. [Dec 2010, p.46]

This may be the first solo Eno work that is entirely without interest. It is bafflingly below par. [Dec 2010, p.45]

The reason it all works is because with repetition and familiarity comes discipline and rigour--and Wire still have a lively and open relationship with both of them. [Feb 2011, p.57]

There's a sparse but fluid lyricism to Chasny's tumbling, post-Takoma guitar style. [Feb 2011, p.56]

There are many beautiful instants here, but their relentless abstraction also harbours a lingering sense of decorative indulgence. [Feb 2011, p.54]

Thankfully, Underneath The Pine burns brightly at both ends. [Feb 2011, p.51]

Earth may no longer startle, but against the odds Carlson survives, and this engaging dignified music is both testament and soundtrack to that survival. [Feb 2011, p.50]

There are several memorable songs here, but the offhand, one-take atmosphere makes the project slighter than it might have been. [Feb 2011, p.50]

This is crystalline and intoxicating: an album to return to repeatedly for inspiration. [Feb 2011, p.48]

[Wyatt's voice} is not the most technically 'correct' voice, but in the setting of Ros Stephen's arrangements for string quartet, with Gilad Atzmon adding alto saxophone, it is as though that uncertain crack, that flaw floating in the clear quaver of his voice is a precise match for the happysad ambiguities that haunt so many jazz standards. [Oct 2010, p.62]

Though he's lacking some in terms of identity and he'll probably never be a technical monster, he benefits from the same instinctive ability to ride a beat's pocket that rapping producer predecessors like Large Professor and, yes, Dilla himself possessed. [Nov. 2010, p. 66]

This extended incubation period has paid dividends. [Nov 2010, p.65]

The result is an improbably appealing melange of hyperslick R&B and musoid avant-Metal, where mid-1080s Radio Top Shop melodies nestle in the artful embrace of surgically enhanced riffola and soaring, pitchwheel punishing minimoog solos. [Nov 2010, p.65]