Clarke is both perpetuating and recontextualising the music of the mid-20th century. [Sep 2023, p.24]

Even a recreation of the harmonica sound from "When The Levee Breaks" on "The Falling Sky" and the same song's famous cavernous beat on "Sacred The Thread" can't help either song stick in the memory. [Sep 2023, p.27]

Had Lofgren trusted his considerable gifts to carry these earnest songs, Mountains would've been a more satisfying album. [Aug 2023, p.34]

80 minutes of astonishingly powerful and beautifully preserved music. [Sep 2023, p.43]

These nostalgic confessionals stray into navel-gazing at times, but in a way that feels authentically adolescent. [Sep 2023, p.34]

Singing in Spanish in a deep baritone over the ringing tones of his tres guitar, the Cuban rhythms sway as enticingly as you'd want. [Aug 2023, p.36]

Delivers intimately detailed tales set to hushed arrangements. [Sep 2023, p.37]

A hugely enjoyable, idiosyncratic ride. [Sep 2023, p.37]

POTR's most playful outing, Stick And Stones comes off like a bracing exhalation of post-pandemic relief. [Sep 2023, p.32]

Spanning just 32 minutes, The Art Of Pleasure feels slight and light. Even so, the warm glow of liberated self-love on sparkly standouts like "Float", "Phenomenal" and "Haute" is infectious. [Sep 2023, p.32]

A sumptuous feast. [Sep 2023, p.24]

Kate NV's urge to pixelate manically - see recent album Wow - is reined in by ex-dirty Projector Deradoorian's cool krautrocking. [Sep 2023, p.24]

90s alt.rock influences proudly displayed. [Sep 2023, p.24]

This is a ceaselessly unpredictable and eclectic record that manages to sound as traditional as it does experimental. [Sep 2023, p.23]

All expertly tied together by Tuttle's rare gift for nuance and colour. [Aug 2023, p.28]

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]

Kempner's lyrics are visceral and specific. [Aug 2023, p.36]

The material here moves in the jazzier vein of Zappa's early '70s LPs. [Aug 2023, p.51]

Great-uh. [Jun 2023, p.31]

An LP that's cluttered, incoherent and frequently quite brilliant. [Jul 2023, p.34]

Finds itself caught between emulating the original's enviable qualities and overhauling its almost four-decade habits. [Aug 2023, p.36]

In a single sitting it can tend toward the soporific, but there's unforced sweetness in this groovy drifting off. [Aug 2023, p.34]

Younge and his horn octet create some fine pastiche of Fela Kuti's Egypt 90 band around Allen's beats. [Aug 2023, p.23]

There's a sense these weren't quite good enough for the main event - alternate versions - but even off-cuts "Memory Leak" and "Math Of You" swirl and swoon with a euphoric giddiness that comes with discovering new zones of pleasure. [Aug 2023, p.25]

Just about every song's a banger, but pay particular attention to the jagged metal shredding of "Persuasion Architect"; then contrast with the outstanding country rocker "Twins". [Aug 2023, p.29]

Here are profound expressions of timeless love, nostalgic memories of relationships past, reflections on fulfillment, grief, desire, belonging and habitual non-belonging. [Aug 2023, p.35]

A stunning record. [Aug 2023, p.23]

His songs' unruffled, hushed intimacy is an effective tonic. [Aug 2023, p.26]

The result is consistently thrilling and uncompromising music. [Aug 2023, p.28]

It's this mix of songwriting voices as well as the tight thematic concept of The Dirty South that makes this such a strong LP, and the new songs don't diminish that. [Jul 2023, p.44]

Hark! I Inside the Old Year Dying is a singular thing. [Aug 2023, p.18]

Each song plays like a breath exhaled. Steve Shelley's production, too, is wonderfully sympathetic. [May 2023, p.36]

Ayers duets with Simonon in Spanish and English on a set of quirky compositions oozing the kind of playful charm her dad was so known for. [Jun 2023, p.29]

Entirely irresistible. [Aug 2023, p.33]

The more menacing "Fuzzbuster #09" could almost be an interlude on Sonic Youth's Confusion Is Sex. A few other discoveries are equally astonishing. [Jul 2023, p.48]

A fine album that suggests more pleasure to come. [Jul 2023, p.23]

Smartly enlisted esteemed producer Dave Fridmann, who illuminates their loose-limbed, self-assured character on kickass Stones-y opener "If I Try To Leave" and the cowbell-powered "Forgiving Ties," with its hooky Harrisonian central riff. [Aug 2023, p.28]

There's always been a hazy and reflective feel to her songs, but despite the title, her fourth is Power's most resolute set yet. [Jul 2023, p.22]

bdrmm have expanded their sound, retaining that youthful energy and combining it with ambition and impressive marshalling of dynamics that creates a strangely serene album. [Aug 2023, p.25]

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]

There's little on her 16th album to suggest it's anything other than business as usual. [Jul 2023, p.36]

He too, has become more of what he always was. And somehow he's achieved that by paring his music down t its rawest essence. [Jul 2023, p.26]

The set offers power-pop gems like "Darlin'", a prospective Strokes classic in "818", and the closing surprise "Alright Tomorrow" a disco burner sung by actress/vocalist Rainsford. [Jul 2023, p.27]

Ornery eloquence. [Aug 2023, p.34]

It's hard to begrudge the Boos this sunny, mellifluous midlife comeback. [Aug 2023, p.25]

Demonstrates that PSB are without peer as exponents of the pop single. [Aug 2023, p.50]

If Segovia had gone electric, one could imagine the results might have sounded something like this. [Aug 2023, p.34]

Pure musical alchemy. [Aug 2023, p.29]

Amiably gentle but uplifting follow-up. [Aug 2023, p.25]

Their sixth sees the band hitting a peak of airy, classic modernism, marked by elegant polyphony, smart dynamics and Kate Stables' thoughtful lyrics. [Aug 2023, p.38]

Setting out their stall with mannered glitch-pop and sardonic art-rock, both usually entangled. [Aug 2023, p.38]

Margaret's melodies are often submerged, but her approach is not entirely ambient. [Aug 2023, p.34]

The drama can recall Florence + The Machine more than their dream-pop origins, but the mood - lacerating self-doubt becoming decay-defying euphoria - is Lanterns On The Lake's own. [Aug 2023, p.33]

It takes up where 2019's Infest The Rats' Nest left off, though was pieced together from improv jams. [Aug 2023, p.33]

A potent, heavy distillation of everything the group have done. [Aug 2023, p.30]

The Foos album closest to Nirvana. [Aug 2023, p.29]

Infectious. [Aug 2023, p.26]

Hardly groundbreaking, but bursting with charm. [Aug 2023, p.26]

The songs' sense of drive and drama demonstrates RVG's growing confidence. [Jul 2023, p.33]

What sometimes seems like attrition - "Paradise Is Mine's" relentless hammering, "Ebbing's" pounding 11 minutes - can, nevertheless, deliver ritualistic euphoria. [Jul 2023, p.34]

LaVette remains at the peak of her considerable powers at the age of 77. [Jul 2023, p.37]

On first hearing it's a little underwhelming, but its subtle charms certainly grows. [Jul 2023, p.30]

As autobiographies go, it's fairly oblique but no less intriguing for it. [Jul 2023, p.36]

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]

The LP plays like the soundtrack to a pedal-to-the-metal road trip between Willaimson's LA base and her native Texas, desert air whipping through the open windows. [Jul 2023, p.36]

That Jarak Qaribak manages to combine that respect - for the songs, the singers and their various cultures - with a free-flowing, light sense of exploration that feels joyfully current, is its triumph. [Jul 2023, p.31]

Highlights include the distinctly Davis-ish "Apples And Oranges", the spectral soul of "Giddy Up", and the country trundle of "A Puppy & A truck". [Jul 2023, p.30]

Supremely satisfying comeback album. [Jul 2023, p.36]

O Monolith channels the shapeshifting patterns of Steve Reich and late-period Radiohead to fashion a kind of lush English pastoral that seethes and shimmers at every turn. [Jul 2023, p.34]

The Lemonheads' sixth album is looser and shaggier than its predecessor; his purpose beginning to waver, though essentially Dando is continually saved nu his songwriting gifts. [Jun 2023, p.47]

Ultimately it's a record that happily exists in something of a fog - wilfully embracing hazy, almost groggy textures. [Jul 2023, p.30]

Weathervanes is another imperious demonstration of Isbell's signature ability to simultaneously project confidence and vulnerability, both musically and lyrically. [Jul 2023, p.32]

It's indie rock like Mum used to make, and comfortingly invigorating as such. [Jul 2023, p.23]

Following the pattern of 2020's Ultimate Success Today, this is more expansive and less claustrophobic than previous Protomartyr releases, but no less intense. [Jul 2023, p.33]

Here “When I Paint My Masterpiece” has a lovely jug-band lurch, “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” loses its country lilt but sounds as if was always destined to be mated with the taut riff from Roy Head’s “Treat Her Right”, and “Queen Jane Approximately”, hung against a latticework of accordion and finger-picked guitars, is almost unbearably tender. [Aug 2023, p.46]

Every moment shimmers with atmosphere, as the rippling melodies and contoured choruses enclose Payseur's knotty ruminations in sun-dappled serenity. [Jul 2023, p.23]

A vibrant record that is a self-deprecating yet poignant reflection on a complicated and chaotic upbringing. [Jul 2023, p.27]

He puts a uniquely Rufus twist on the likes of "Shenandoah" and "Wild Mountain Thyme" of course, singing them in his best operatic tenor with a touch of John Jacob Niles. [Jul 2023, p.36]

Some of the group's most personal work. [Jul 2023, p.24]

Reaffirming his faith in rock as transformative thrill, and adding atmospheric detours recalling late-period Weller and Bowie. [Jul 2023, p.27]

Stills is dynamic vocally and instrumentally throughout, but the underutilised talent pool makes this document of what was incongruously dubbed The Memphis Horns Tour and odd curio that exemplifies the wigged-out extravagance of the era. [Jun 2023, p.49]

Deeply hermetic then, but catchy as hell, too. [Jul 2023, p.34]

Although the record is unlikely to convert any sceptics, the presence of wide-eyed improviser Alex Ward gives Thomas the perfect foil. [Jul 2023, p.33]

This album proves that Collins – if she so wishes – still has more to give. [Jun 2023, p.18]

While there's a groovy sweetness at work in "Clutch Pearlers", and "Bully" is anything but - a woozy, neon-pastel comforter with a head-nodding pulse. [Jun 2023, p.25]

She threads Lou Reed's vocal rhythm over the band's brisk skank on "Hangin' Round", while "Song To The Siren" and "The Man Who Sold The World" slip with similar ease into reggae mode. [Jul 2023, p.24]

Thrillingly pioneers its 21st century sound. [Jun 2023, p.26]

This middle ground between jazz and hip-hop is the crux of the record, ad while it's loaded with deft playing, rich production and complex compositions, the constant rotation of differing voices can often kill the flow and coherence of what is otherwise a meticulously crafted record. [Jul 2023, p.33]

Eyes may be on the US market, but the honesty of Parks' expression holds. [Jul 2023, p.33]

As always they are best when singing of brief encounters and regret. [Jun 2023, p.36]

In making work that continues to challenge oppressive systems and relay his tender feelings, it’s clear Nash is very much alive in the now. [Jun 2023, p.22]

Villagers' sleeve is telling: a pile of disparate old junk that somehow sites together as a piece. The remarkable thing is that this album achieves that so spectacularly. [Jul 2023, p.16]

Joan Of All rarely feels ordinary. ... As a whole, this is a work of strength and variety. [Jun 2023, p.24]

Her debut full-length retains the intimacy of those bedroom recordings [on Soundcloud] while making good on their promise, with cleaner melodies and production texture pulled from the pop, hip-hop and indie music. [Jun 2023, p.31]

An album heavy on moody atmospheres and dese riffs. ... There's also pleasing variety to this immersive and enveloping debut. [Jun 2023, p.36]

Playful wordplay and minor-chord ingenuity bound. [Jun 2023, p.23]

Lanois, along with other western guests, fits organically into Tinariwen's desert blues. The collaborations help even the most furious lyrics slip down nicely. [Jun 2023, p.30]

As much as the likes of "Injury Detail" and "Peach Fuzz" evoke Clock DVA and early Psychic TV at their most unnerving, the group nevertheless achieve a grimy grandeur that feels modern, too. [Jun 2023, p.32]