A set of limber, largely instrumental funk shot through with Asian, African and Middle Eastern melodies, each track sounds like it could have come off as jukebox single purchased from some dusty overseas record kiosk. [Feb 2018, p.29]

10 more melodic guitar songs expertly weighted between worldly and coltish. [Jun 2026, p.33]

A world of suffering and ribald survival breathes here. [Review of the Year 2024, p.34]

Listening to Daddy's Home brings a sense of exhalation, a filling out, an openness, that is as unexpected as it is wonderful. [Jun 2021, p.20]

It's a remarkably immersive and generous album, emotionally as well as musically. [Apr 2018, p.18]

Alice delivers his best album in decades. [Oct 2008, p.83]

It's a gorgeous and gutting return to Jurado's Rehearsals For Departure-era roots, wandering and bare, wielding only guitar and voice and recorded in one afternoon. [May 2019, p.30]

Sounds alarmingly authentic to boot. [Nov 2008, p.102]

As catchy as it is smart. [Jul 2017, p.28]

Stylistically promiscuous and consistently inventive, Martin remains a maestro of multiple mutant genres, many of his own making. [Oct 2021, p.25]

Elemental and menacing. [Feb 2024, p.35]

Here is transcendent refuge from the storm. [Aug 2018, p.26]

BPM works its vibrational magic with quietude and organic peace, and comes across more like a n ancient Zen ritual. [Apr 2012, p.71]

An immersive blend of the symphonic and electronic, this absorbing album taps into a noble lineage stretching from AR Kane's lysergic avant-pop to sci-fi jazz alchemist Flying Lotus. [Jun 2011, p.94]

Here's To Taking it Easy is a bold record steeped in the golden, rich sounds of classic rock and country. [Jun 2910, p.101]

Channel Pressure asks some complex questions about pop's obsession with nostalgia, although the likes of "Joey Rogers" and "The Voices"--with hints of Daft Punk's "Digital Love"--also functions as irresistible pop tunes on a more basic level. [Jul 2011, p.82]

This is one old timer who's still in his prime. [Aug 2014, p.72]

It's all so ancient that it becomes thrillingly modern. [Sep 2014, p.78]

Haunting late-career contemplation. [Nov 2018, p.37]

It is a cornucopia of delights for audiophiles and there are more than enough quirks and insights to make it invaluable to even the most causal Lennon fan. [Nov 2018, p.46]

Everything here roars. [May 2006, p.108]

Watford's Stavely-Taylor sisters and New York's chamber music sextet effortlessly bridge the divide between their chosen genres. [Feb 2018, p.35]

Opener "Ocean Mouth" is similarly enticing, as are the crystalline synth hooks of "Don't Believe It Now", as his singular approach to lo-fi dance pop continues to charm. [Sep 2023, p.28]

A little more forward in the use of bouncing rhythms. [Mar 2021, p.28]

It's all certainly a lot more complex, if a little less immediate, than anything they've done before. [May 2007, p.104]

It's their angriest, jitteriest and most aggressive album since their early-90s heyday, and on "Reagan Youth" and "All For You" Superchunk sound like a hardcore band half their age. [Mar 2018, p.32]

The fact that Time On Earth takes several listens to sink in practically ensures that it will be undervalued, if not ignored, which is a shame, because this taut album possesses the immersive qualities and cumulative impact of a good novel.

Temet manages to broaden their sound further, forging links to funk, soul and jazz. Crucially, though, they've retained the traditional rhythms that make them so captivating. [Mar 2018, p.26]

Bold, visionary and, in places, spine-tingling. [Mar 2014, p.78]

This two-hour epic very occasionally rests on its laurels by using sounds from past palettes, but is characteristically rich and adventurous. [Apr 2013, p.67]

Each track comes shrouded in glitchy systems noise and Eno-esque ambient drones. The best moments maintain Howard's way with a melody. [Aug 2018, p.28]

Sauser-Monnig's songs retain a sense of early-morning introspection that lingers. [Aug 2019, p.29]

Excellent news that Price has re-embraced the old-school virtues that got her noticed in the first place: the rowdy yet droll honky-tonk tear-up, heard here on such Southern soul-infused cuts as "Losing Streak" and "I Just Don't Give A Damn". [Oct 2025, p.31]

They mix wistful, hook-laden rock songs in the vein of Counting Crows, Five For Fighting, The Gin Blossoms, The Posies and Pete Yorn with the proto-emo sound of Sunny Day Real Estate. [Aug 2002, p.104]

He's gone full pastoral, the birdsong and countryside imagery matching the dreamy, sunny major-sevenths. [Sep 2017, p.30]

I Don't Live Here Anymore delivers even more of their characteristic questing wallop. [Nov 2021, p.22]

A couple of tame moments should have hit the cutting room floor, but this is otherwise flawless. [Jul 2011, p.88]

In an angry, impatient world it takes real dedication to carve out space for music this blissful. [Oct 2019, p.33]

Brawny, anthemic hard-rock chug remains their backbone. [Aug 2012, p.69]

L'Aventura could well be his best album. [Sep 2014, p.78]

If you're a fan, Where You Live is classic Chapman. [Oct 2005, p.94]

Album highlight "White Sands" is a soundtrack in miniature, the acoustic and electronic tones combining like a neon-streaked empty road. [Feb 2021, p.37]

As primers go, it's close to definitive. [Mar 2006, p.112]

While the length of the album is a little exhausting, there's no denying that this is the band's most accomplished and ambitious record to date. [Jul 2023, p.27]

This, bara clutch of mellow moments, has unclouded ambitions to pack the dancefloor. [Feb 2020, p.27]

Costello... sing[s] with the enthusiasm and fun of a true fan. [Jul 2006, p.110]

There's a kind of redemptive comfort even in the album's bleakest moments. [Sep 2006, p.91]

While these dozen faithfully and fabulously Soft Cell-ish songs do not stint on paranoid foreboding, they are buoyed by an undimmed pop instinct and Almond’s waspish wit. [Apr 2022, p.35]

Brimming with visceral rock'n'soul that channels the spirit of The Replacements, The E Street Band and Alabama Shakes, and mixes them into an irresistibly tasty gumbo. [Jan 2016, p.77]

Klaxons bristle with energy and ideas. [Feb 2007, p.77]

If you've ever swooned for the fading-light pastorals of Billie Ray Martin's 4 Ambient Tales, or the elliptical whispers of Stina Nordenstam, this album will feel very comfortable indeed. [Jan 2025, p.40]

Compared with the highly structured Ghosteen (a double album meditation on grief and spirituality, complete with intermission), Carnage is a more concise though no less ordered record. Much as the Bad Seeds’ songs now push into oceanic drift, Cave’s narratives move between worlds fictional and not, the horrific and the consoling. [Mar 2021, p.20]

A sugary feast for the senses. [May 2008, p.98]

Divided into meditation, lamentation, revelation, celebration, incantation, it is by turns curious, brittle, exquisite, and surely among the most accomplished and beautiful records of Stevens’ career. [Jul 2021, p.34]

The core sound is instrumental motorik rock with sweet licks. [Sep 2022, p.24]

A certain crispness is now prevalent, along with expanded horizons. [May 2016, p.82]

They manage to retain the gravel in their throat while subtly expanding their sound on this fifth album. [Jun 2020, p.33]

Records as bright and occasionally beautiful as Years Of Refusal make us forgive Morrissey (the artist) even his most juvenile foibles.

The blend of Owen Brinley's choirboy vocals and a raft of prog-tinged riffs is a source of promise, magic and drama. [Mar 2009, p.87]

Luther and Cody Dickinson strip it back on Prayer For Prayer, recording in a half-dozen American cities and viscerally capturing the widespread unease. [Jul 2017, p.35]

Like Bread produced by The Neptunes. [Jul 2004, p.110]

Frog Eyes' fifth album has been three years in the making and is every bit as much of an epic as its acclaimed predecessor "Tears Of The Valedictorian." [May 2010, p.90]

The album's eight supple, textured tunes suggest Cornelius stripped of his art-jazz awkwardness, or even the molten sugar rush of My Bloody Valentine slowed to a beatific calm. [Nov 2002, p.128]

These four compositions are not without precedent, but all push at conventions of melody, space, tonality, rhythm and timbre. [Jul 2011, p.90]

This unheard set, captured at Athens venue The Mad Hatter in 1983, shortly before the band's dissolution, confirms their two fine studio albums were no fluke. [Sep 2016, p.93]

Ana Kravanja, Iztok Koren and Samo Kutin plays sympathetically, but they're also careful enough not to homogenise, each voice finding its own space in which to speak. [Dec 2025, p.36]

Another superb venture. [Jan 2005, p.121]

Hebden's skill is to weave such ethnographic curiosities into the fabric of his own luminous electronica without it feeling like a dry curatorial exercise. [Dec 2017, p.27]

It's a deeply ambitious debut offering. Musically, it ducks and weaves like the shape-shifters that populate its world. [Feb 2021, p.30]

A mighty blend of doomy, Jansch-ish meander and sepulchral drones. [Jul 2006, p.92]

Sergio Mendes meets Sparks then plunders Charles Mingus? Could be. [Aug 2006, p.95]

A dozen young singers from Guinea, Ivory Coast, Benin, Algeria and beyond [lend] a youthfully purposive and fearless energy to songs about misogyny, sexual identity, force marriage and FGM. [Mar 2020, p.30]

The result is akin to walking in the woods alone at midnight--both spooky and compelling. [Nov 2006, p.104]

Parts of Myth Takes [are] as close to commercial... as !!! can get without combusting. [Apr 2007, p.92]

On his third LP he sounds closer to Smog's Bill Callahan, his forlorn baritone suffused with a world-weariness that suggests a singer twice his age and experience. [Feb 2016, p.77]

He's continuing his romp through totally unfashionable styles, armed with his endearingly earnest voice and a lot of flutes. [Feb 2013, p.77]

Welcome signs of movement after a lengthy stasis. [Mar 2014, p.80]

Fistfuls of dirty riff'n'rolll with a side order of voodoo and psych. [Jun 2017, p.30]

Shows off a rare side to Blunt: a soul-baring sincerity. [Sep 2021, p.25]

Their debut burns through 11 tracks in 27 minutes like acetylene torch burns through butter, as spin-on-a-dime tight as it is exhilaration unsubtle. But there's more to Amyl than visceral wallop--namely Amy Taylor. [Jun 2019, p.23]

Pokey LaFarge's seventh long-player echoes and expands his mastery of bygone styles. [May 2015, p.75]

It's quite lovely, and manages to be simultaneously mournful and innocent-sounding. [Oct 2009, p.106]

Exceeding his early promise, Vynehall has produced a richly original debut to rank alongside his musical heroes, from Gavin Bryars to My Bloody Valentine to Aphex Twin. [Jul 2018, p.37]

A frighteningly powerful record. [Jan 2003, p.124]

A fascinating and deeply rewarding journey through the ages. [Aug 2019, p.38]

Throughout the album, melodies stop and start like film scores: they change key, tempo, time signatures and even musical genres to suit the flow of the story. [Sep 2017, p.22]

Gelb's masterstroke is the inclusion of Brian Lopez, Gabriel Sullivan and Jon Villa, whose flourishes of Tex-Mex and cumbia accentuate Tuscon's feel of pan-cultural enchantment. [Jul 2012, p.70]

What sticks with Space 1.8 is the focus of its vision: precise like mathematics but imbued with a rich, cosmic breadth. [Nov 2021, p.32]

Despite its old-school roots, Lady Parts sounds sharp and invigorating. [Oct 2016, p.31]

The Rapture have picked themselves up with a third album packed with ragged romps every bit as joyous as "house Of Jealous Lovers," their 2002 breakthrough. [Oct 2011, p.95]

14 beautifully broken-hearted tunes about just what the album title says. [Dec 2017, p.33]

This is creating at its most creative as he thrillingly twists the blues into phantasmagorical new shapes with an almost Beefheartian sense of adventure. [Oct 2012, p.83]

All in all, another album of low-key brilliance. [Sep 2005, p.114]

[This LP] is rammed with coming-of-age songs masquerading as outlaw tales, driven by Smith's happy knack for finely chiseled narratives and a great blustery voice that roars through bluegrass shanties. [Nov 2012, p.85]

The gorgeous psychedelic soul of "Pineapple Skies," the Prince-like strut of "Told You" and the rubbery Latin funk of "Caramelo Duro" all reaffirm Miguel's status as the most versatile talent in R&B's avant-garde. [Feb 2018, p.30]

Magazine 13 flits between Art OF Noise preset chintz, serene Vangelis miniatures and serrated Knife-like techno primitivism with such aplomb that it's tempting to view this as either a very good inside joke or striking outsider art. [Jan 2015, p.67]

Old Yellow Moon is not, however, a sombre anticipation of mortality akin to the American Recordings series of Crowell's one-time father-in-law Johnny Cash. The general tone of Old Yellow Moon is of faintly rueful happiness at being here, doing this. [Apr 2013, p.68]

There's an equally brutal, pulverising mix of guitars and electronics elsewhere, but they surprise more often than not. [Jun 2019, p.34]