There are dark undertones--drug references mainly--but Lewis is no moper. [Apr 2019, p.32]

Sol. Hz feels skeltal, with saffron threads of treated guitar slicing through piston-pulse rhythms and reverberant bass. [Jun 2026, p.34]

Understated double set, the material meandering gently, but persuasive in the way its interlocking parts both ride the groove and smear lush textures across these four side-long live cuts. [Jan 2023, p.23]

Impressively, it achieves the feat of enghancing Pink's legend with out puncturing his mystique. [Jul 2010, p.105]

Blur have released three compilation albums, but none of them point up the band's engagingly contrary creativity and elastic pop nous quite like these two discs.

If the songwriting at times falls into cliche, the performances--passionate, eloquent, spilling over with regal harmonies--are anything but. [Jul 2015, p.72]

Thomas lurches from surrealist poetry to impressionistic short stories, like a hybrid of Captain Beefheart and Ernest Hemingway. [Jul 2019, p.33]

Leans heavily on the conceptual, but its 13 tracks can be enjoyed regardless of any familiarity with themes of Greek legends and seasonal cycles. [Dec 2020, p.30]

Smart stylistic detours mask something a little deeper. [Oct 2021, p.24]

12-song collection brings together four elders, three younger practitioners and original James Gang singer-guitarist Glenn Schwartz, along with The Black Keys in Deep-blues mode. [Sep 2023, p.37]

The duo show renewed confidence as they strike a balance between pristine electro=pop songcraft and the loopier inclinations that once fuelled Dazzle Ships. [Review of the Year 2023, p.30]

You could mount an argument that these are the definitive performances, although that probably isn’t the point – the idea is to view these time-honoured tunes from a surprising new vantage point. Whatever, you leave Mulatu Plays Mulatu in reverence. Astatke’s status – as gifted musician, visionary bandleader and eternal innovator – is forever assured. [Nov 2025, p.34]

A typically perverse decision to substitute a US remix for the standard version of album closer "Tomorrow" does little to deaden the impact of an album that owned its moment every bit as much as The Queen Is Dead. [Mar 2014, p.94]

A beautiful record. [Nov 2003, p.122]

Doves have delivered, with honesty and affection. All other guitar bands this year will seem like a scratchy sideshow. [Jun 2002, p.110]

Fever To Tell is, quite simply, magnificent.... This is as revitalising a debut as could be hoped for. [May 2003, p.92]

This is a very odd album. [Apr 2003, p.103]

Album opener "Garbage Dream House" is a scene-setter - somehow both ominous and joyful with its grinding, melodic riff, robotic bleeps and orchestral outro. [Sep 2025, p.37]

A family of songs that are strikingly evocative, but never overwrought. [Mar 2019, p.25]

A lyrical treasure trove, but the biggest surprise of the self-produced album is the richness of the sound. Nadler’s usual sparse, gothic folk style is emboldened by well-chosen collaborators from Simon Raymonde to Emma Ruth Rundle. [Dec 2021, p.31]

The result is a glorious, dizzy riot with no precursor. [Dec 2022, p.18]

As a State of the Union address, this bold and often brilliant record is less inclined towards optimism than, say, Springsteen’s admirable "Working On A Dream."

More of the same, only more so. [Apr 2002, p.94]

San Fermin proves Ludwig-Leone to be a fantastically ambitious songwriter on the way to finding a voice of his own. [Oct 2013, p.74]

Her most universal album yet. [Sep 2019, p.27

Shards of pure folk goodness poke through the ambitious, abstract arrangements on tracks like "Life's Work" and "Surviving You". [Nov 2025, p.33]

Mental Illness is as elegantly dark as a wrought iron gate. [May 2017, p.35]

Jenkins conveys his obsession with sound beautifully. [Apr 2016, p.71]

These diorama-songs of a Mayberry gone to seed don't sound to different from what you might hear on mainstream US radio--only much more lovingly observed and finely crafted. [Jul 2016, p.71]

A slight problem is that the London quintet are third-generation mimics: "You Are Not An Island" could be Broadcast, and "Magician's Success," complete with cartoon effects, occupies Stereolab's former territory. [Jul 2019, p.36]

Revitalising his finest work with unlikely guests performing unlikely roles. [Jan 2020, p.31]

Every note of this album is saturated with a very particular melancholy that keeps these spacey songs closely anchored to the earth. [Apr 2020, p.28]

The Flatlanders exude joy here. [Aug 2021, p.23]

Some of the best moments here are twitchy funk miniatures, driven by tuba basslines, distorted Fender Rhodes riffs and chant-based vocals, which leave you wanting more. [Aug 2021, p.35]

This record’s peers might be Astral Weeks, Starsailor, Music For A New Society, New Skin For The Old Ceremony and, in particular, Mary Margaret O’Hara’s Miss America. She’s not out of place among these ghosts either. If you’ve ever been spellbound by those songs of love, loss, wonder and despair, you need to listen to Lisa O’Neill. [Mar 2023, p.24]

"You Were The Ones I Had to Betray" is a heady opener, the title track is a rich stunner, while the brilliant, bittersweet "Yesterday's Hero" is a bold missive from a songwriter who is still producing some of his best work. [Apr 2025, p,39]

What may be lost slightly in translation is mitigated by the musicality of the vocal tones, with Cate Le Bon and H Hawkline H adding a plaintive backing chorus on "Pan Ddaw'r Haul I Fore". [Oct 2025, p.32]

Any compilation that roams from Chris Bell's "I Am The Cosmos" to Husker Du's Hardly Getting Over It" and The Cynics' "take Her Hand" will surely kickstart your day. [Mar 2026, p.49]

This full-bodied, all-star immersion into an insalubrious world inspired by late '70s/early-'80s continental disco is somehow more appealing than Matmos' recent foray into Polish mid-century avant-garde. [Dec 2022, p.35]

Introspective and tightly wound. [Sep 2020, p.26]

Violence, guilt, betrayal and despair assail singer-lyricist James Graham's protagonists, while Andy MacFarlane marshals something miasmic, sometimes glistening synth glides and doleful guitars, suggesting Johnny Marr's wilder Smiths experiments. [Feb 2019, p.37]

This 2Cd singles set shows them to be capable of more mainstream, dreamy pop. [Feb 2011, p.96]

Everything on Little Oblivions will make you feel, and it's the catharsis we all need. [Mar 2021, p.26]

The Radio Dept. recall that giddy moment before sounding like the Stones was considered revelatory. Only these Swedes re-tweak the formula, sounding, if anything, better than Ride, Slowdive, Lush, Boo Radleys et al. [Sep 2004, p.100]

The exceptionally well-curated material is all drawn from women singers--if not always women writers--and does a fine job of placing Giddens at the nexus of a multiplicity of traditions. [Mar 2015, p.79]

The result is unmistakeably LB. [Apr 2015, p.78]

The sound here is plastic, pliant, gentle--tonal driftwood punctuated by sun-dappled synths and ruminative piano, like Eno's Music For Airports gone miniature. [May 2019, p.37]

At 72 years of age, Crowell remains both a vital link to Van Zandt's classic sensibility and an enduring force whose vitality shows few signs of waning. [Jun 2023, p.28]

These songs should reach and endure far beyond their context, as they're extraordinary even by Isbell's standards. [Apr 2025, p.31]

If its redemptive poignancy often recalls Richter's masterful Sleep, Voices is more dynamic, instead provoking--not subduing-thought. [Sep 2020, p.35]

Her fourth album's dramatically sparser, its unconventional structures recalling Julia Holter. ... She's most compelling on "This Time," whose haunted spaces are gradually filled with flickering keyboards and ebow guitar. [Oct 2021, p.31]

Milk For Flowers is intimate, introspective and melancholic, yet peppered with moments of joy, elation and hope. His best album so far. [Apr 2023, p.29]

There are star turns from figures like the veteran tenor saxophonist Ari Brown. But this is a collective, community affair - never more so than on "Stigmergy", which sees multiple instruments feeding into a single, glowing master melody. [Jul 2023, p.30]

On their second outing, these three peripatetic musicians pick up more or less where they left off on their 2022 debut. This is no bad thing. [Jun 2024, p.27]

Bursting with symphonic goodness, musical adventure and dizzying levels of intensity. [Oct 2018, p.32]

A comeback album that feels vital rather than forced. [Apr 2021, p.25]

The arrangements are light and percussive, and Polwart's singing is bell-like. [Jan 2018, p.24]

It's a tender manifesto of self-doubt, a shout fading into a murmur. [Jan 2018, p.16]

Their voices just sound so good together. ... Maybe that's why this album ultimately sounds so generous and compassionate despite the many tensions it voices. [Jul 2019, p.35]

Naturally Catto's drums are exceptionally tight throughout, but this is about much more than just the funky breaks. [May 2020, p.27]

On Robert Burns' "Song Composed In August," the voices lend beautifully in a seasonal (temporary?) celebration of love. [Sep 2021, p.33]

It also might be the best album this consistently weird and interesting bunch have made. [Oct 2021, p.27]

It’s a unique performance, with a wealth of rarely played material. ... The Bottom Line bootleg was the kind of listening experience that turned casual fans into obsessives. Now remastered and officially part of Neil’s ongoing saga, its seductive power remains undimmed. [Jun 2022, p.43]

White Jesus Black Problems fizzes with indignation and exults in contradictions. [Aug 2022, p.25]

Throughout Taylor and Ralston draw from astral jazz, Alice Coltrane's meditation music and the expansive orchestral funk of David Axelrod to create something uniquely emotive over four lengthy and very different tracks. [Aug 2022, p.31]

On the first LP, the 60-piece Brussels Philharmonic adds top-heavy accompaniment to his melodic playing. .... On the second LP, however, the 11-member Umbria Jazz Orchestra sounds simultaneously nimbler and heavier. [May 2024, p.32]

Whether her anguish is existential or emotional is uncertain, but the song’s downbeat nature makes it an unusual album exit. What is abundantly clear is that Bock’s creative star is very much with her. [Nov 2024, p.38]

Bold and Breathtaking [Jul 2025, p.26]

This is one of those brakes-off country records you wish more people would have the guts to make. [Oct 2011, p.94]

Although this LA-based Chinese-Icelander gas woven a loose temporal theme through the loungey chamber pop of her third album, it's the waspish lyrical sting in the tail of these songs that sets her apart. [Oct 2025, p.29]

Light Up Gold packs 15 songs in 33 minutes, and most are great. [Jun 2013, p.78]

Superb third album. ... The album is beautifully structured like this, with narrative threads and recurring thoughts picked up and passed from song to song. It's also self-referential but, crucially, never arch. [May 2016, p.68]

It's a lovely record: McCartney is typically chipper, the song selection outstanding and the sound fabulous. [Jul 2024, p.52]

The musical palette, however, is wider this time round, emphasising the breadth of Helm’s interests rather than the stuff on which he was weaned--numbers by Muddy Waters and Nina Simone rub shoulders with works by Randy Newman and the Grateful Dead.

It's a short, ineluctably lovely set, light, bright and often dizzyingly joyful, but also thrillingly unpredictable, with complex, jazzy arrangements against which Walker's phasing gently pushes and pulls. [May 2021, p.16]

A self-titled collection that ranks among their very best. [Aug 2024, p.39]

One of the most intriguing walls of sound since My Bloody Valentine circa Isn't Anything. [Jul 2006, p.97]

The rich jangles of this fifth album [is] a notable career high. [Sep 2015, p.71]

An exhaustive audio souvenir of a momentous event, simply to remind us--and perhaps Bush, too-- that it really happen after all. [Jan 2017, p.16]

On Chaos For The Fly, Chatten is able to chase down a succession of personal demons, while broadening his emotional, musical and vocal range. [Aug 2023, p.24]

A substantive whomp on the butt to typical Nashville superficialities. [Dec 2014, p.83]

The Great Pretenders inhabits that dreamy lysergic terrain staked out by The Flaming Lips and early MGMT. [May 2015, p.77]

The mood is pensive, walking the line between downbeat and quietly uplifting, but this is among the best set of songs Finn has written. [Nov 2017, p.26]

While it lacks flashiness, the 11-song performance is both raw and cooking, reminder of the country-rock/swamp-blues power that's moved bands from The Black Keys to White Denim. [Oct 2019, p.45]

Some of the most effortlessly insightful songs in the modern country-folk canon. [Nov 2020, p.37]

The album successfully tackles the spectrum of human emotions experienced after trauma. [Apr 2021, p.23]

Brilliant though many of these musicians have been in numerous other contexts, this might be some of their finest work: a thrilling 90-minute voyage into the outer regionso f electric jazz. [Apr 2023, p.33]

Best of all might be the ecstatic, heavily orchestrated astral-jazz freak-out of "thank You God". [Oct 2023, p.23]

This is much more of an Esperanza Spalding album than a Milton Nascimento one. But what Spalding has been able to do successfully is subsume herself into the world that Nascimento has created over the last 50 years – a dreamlike realm of folkloric myth, plugged into nature’s heartbeat. [Aug 2024, p.28]

It’s all strong enough to hopefully attract listeners beyond Tindersticks’ hardy fanbase. [Oct 2024, p.43]

The beauty of Coltrane's work, and the way she could transform a personal system of belief into the highest accessible art, is striking. [Jun 2017, p.44]

The result is a meditative, wide-open form of celestial American folk music. [Feb 2014, p.78]

A set of songs about romantic love, self-love and self-actualisation whose confident arrangements sacrifice none of the intimacy of Duffy's earlier work. [Sep 2025, p.32]

The varied works of this Portland-born bassist and singer have suggested a giant talent that spills out of jazz into Brazil, R&B, music theatre and even thrash metal. This semi-autobiographical concept album pushes her deep into art-rock territory. [Apr 2016, p.79]

The results are an intense juxtaposition of the intimate and the universal framed in beguiling chamber-folk arrangements. [Feb 2023, p.26]

An open, compassionate record with a fierce spirit. [Sep 2023, p.33]

Better than simply a personal or a confessional album, The Ballad of Darren is clever in what it does and doesn't say about its creator's life. [Sep 2023, p.16]

It is quite simply stunning. [Apr 2022, p.30]