His strong, unfussy voice is endlessly empathetic and his guitar playing lithe and expressive. [Oct 2011, p.98]

Fanfare rummages through the past in a way that will provide aural comfort food for many Uncut readers and writers but Wilson has found a way of personalising and transforming these fragments into a very contemporary music. [Nov 2013, p.61]

Substantial tranches of the Matrix Tapes have already appeared elsewhere. [Jan 2016, p.89]

Overall, it's a long, strange ride, and Joshua judges ruefully. [May 2017, p.18]

This score suggests many of those Nine Inch Nails tricks hold good. [mar 2012, p.97]

If "The Liquid Hour" is restless over a longer stretch, its conclusion is nonetheless charming. [Apr 2025, p.39]

Kweller is a disarming presence and an unpretentious sonic architect. [Mar 2012, p.90]

On God’s Problem Child, he sounds a bit like a weathered harmonica: he might have lost some of his higher notes, but he can soar through all the ones that count. The arrangements, which skew more toward classic country and slower tempos than Band Of Brothers, also help highlight Willie’s strengths.

The many highlights on this big name covers album include Lily Allen--sounding like Kate Nash impersonating Lily Allen--locating the wobbly charm in Joe Strummer's 'Straight To Hell,' Elbow's adding a shabby grandeur to U2's 'Running To Stand Still,' and Rufus Wainwright bringing his heavenly voice to Brian Wilson's 'Wonderful.'

The sound they've fashioned is glossy and supersaturated while still exhibiting the subversive impulse that yielded the supremely catchy but subtly sinister smash "Pumped Up Kicks." [Apr 2014, p.74]

Take “Breakfast On The Train”, among the most involving songs this storied chronicler of the heart has ever penned. .... The other seven tracks on this self-contained album are no slouches either. [Jun 2025, p.32]

A series of folds, jump cuts and swarms, it's disorienting yet utterly gorgeous. [Jun 2016, p.79]

Nestled between krautrock clatter and art-school drones are tracks that feel like stadium-sized anthems, particularly the Coldplay-meets-MGMT chugger "He Falls To Me" and the Afro-pop singalong "Underage". [Dec 2009, p. 97]

Recalls the more amusing moments of Momus and Stereolab. [Nov 2002, p.116]

The emotional honesty displayed is equally effecting [as 2018's Warm]. [Jul 2019, p.37]

Silly and overblown, but wittily, brilliantly so. [Jul 2013, p.73]

Perhaps the richest and most varied of the trilogy. [Sep 2025, p.29]

Portico's rejuvenated quartet status brings with it more of the jazz-influenced stylings that first made their name, [Oct 2017, p.36]

The Toronto band maintain a formidable degree of power and velocity throughout their fourth album, yet songs like "The Mirror" and "Framed By The Comet's Tail" are well-served by their willingness to ease up on the gas pedal. [Nov 2020, p.33]

The Inheritors is a fiercely original feast of experimental sound. [Jul 2013, p.76]

The interplay between the two string players is as elegant as ever, but their new partners dramatically expand the range of flavours on offer. [May 2023, p.36]

This is the sound of celebration of life, and of music escaping confinement and coming to be freed. [Dec 2020, p.20]

It's a delicate balance, but the obvious sincerity of Campbell's performance overcomes any qualms about what could be an exploitative concept. [Sep 2011, p.90]

This is Cretan folk music played with a rock'n'roll intensity that is truly immersive. [Nov 2016, p.36]

An epic study of sand and celluloid. [Oct 2011, p.98]

With each track developing at an imperceptible pace, this is subtle but irresistibly compelling. [Nov 2013, p.69]

The trio are faithful to their ancient source material, while adding spacious arrangements, harmony choruses and subtle embellishments that amplify the songs' emotional punch. [Feb 2020, p.25]

Far from a series of intimidatingly empty spaces, Endless Rooms is more like RBCF’s shared mind palace, a place rich with experiences and emotion in which they’re stretching their creative legs, throwing open door after door and rushing eagerly through, to play. [Jun 2022, p.22]

While Hutchings' trademark, frantically circling sax figures are prominent, it's the album's sombre moments that prove the most powerful. [Apr 2020, p.35]

Tempers the sounds of traditional mountain music with a heady sense of experimentalism. [May 2021, p.28]

It the bits between the notes that rescue this from the status of pointless fidelity and make it so compelling. [Sep 2013, p.90]

It's the intoxicating instrumentals, "Boudica" and "In Motion Slow," that remind you of her capricious talent. [Feb 2012, p.91]

James Graham's ragged brogue remains deeply affecting, humanizing this unsettling music. [Mar 2012, p.101]

A remarkable accomplishment. [Jun 2016, p.79]

Brilliantly realised. [Oct 2021, p.31]

POTR are up to the challenge, delivering concise, dynamic performances a la Petty's Heartbreakers. [Aug 2019, p.35]

[A] feisty, psych-tinged hook up with Tim "White Fence" Presley. [May 2012, p.80]

Pelican don't look like metal kids - however, their ruminative riffology and ability to raise apocalyptic visions mark them out as practitioners of a new, reflective metallurgy alongside the likes of Sun0)))'s Stephen O' Malley. [Jan 2010, p. 123]

[Kozelek's] blend of technical excellence and emotional authority gives the album its strength. [Jul 2013, p.74]

A wealth of new material for diehard fans. [Aug 2017, p.46]

Subtle electronics and the creation of desolate, 3-D spaces is the icing on a seductively ruined cake. [Aug 2013, p.76]

The Civil Wars proves more than capable of producing its own dark drama. [Sep 2013, p.79]

A genuinely beautiful, expansive record. [Dec 2020, p.36]

Feeding The Machine operates in a bold and unorthodox way. [Apr 2022, p.34]

Thom Yorke's Suspiria might not be to everyone's taste--but it feel enough, for now. [Dec 2018, p.20]

Feels depends on a balancing act between brilliance and whimsy, and some may need convincing that a purposely childlike band... is not twee. [Nov 2005, p.110]

The Gris Gris are a challenging, intense proposition. [Jan 2006, p.113]

Lo-fi and understated, the twin vocals of Dylan Sharp and Carrie Keith are also strong throughout. [Nov 2015, p.76]

This 23-track release is even better than its Britpop-heavy 1995 predecessor. [Apr 2026, p.37]

The results are--as ever--compellingly inventive and seductively imagistic. [Oct 2011, p.100]

With Shine On, Jet manage to establish a common ground between Badfinger and AC/DC. [Nov 2006, p.110]

Monuments To An Elegy constitutes an unexpected return to form. [Jan 2015, p.66]

Laugh Track features a band free of some of their usual burden. [Dec 2023, p.34]

A graceful, distinctive album. [Mar 2012, p.101]

It's bolshy, uncompromising and demands to be played on repeat. [Aug 2020, p.36]

Humanworld is every bit as good as, and at points even better than, its predecessor, as though Parrett's finally, almost five decades in, found his true metier. [Jul 2019, p.32]

Music at its most passionate. [Sep 2002, p.112]

"George Jones Talkin' Cell Phone Blues" "The Great Car Dealer War", and covers of Tom Petty's "Rebels" and Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone" are among highlights of an album that many of the DBTs' peers would cheerfully claim as a career peak. [Jan 2010, p. 106]

A sustained soft explosion of hushed, aching indietronica. [June 2003, p.91]

El Khatib and Auerbach pull off their modest yet elusive goal--to make a kickass record from start to finish--with brutal elegance. [Jul 2013, p.75]

Between the orderly new overview. with its 15 previously unissued tracks, and McLagan's engagingly hodgepodge insider's portrait, we have as complete picture as we're likely to get. [Oct 2015, p.95]

Wilds will continue to content those eager to brandish their knowledge of Ennio Morricone, Os Mutantes or Jacques Dutronc, but it nonetheless cries out for attention from those looking for more primal, immediate pleasures: beauty, bliss and release. [Feb 2022, p.24]

While nowadays one might be tempted instead to call this ‘post-jazz’. Nonetheless, perhaps the best way to think of Butterss’ work is as simply ‘jazz plus’. It’s suitably inclusive and ultimately most reflective of her sweeping ambitions. [Nov 2024, p.32]

While these are thrillingly alive with Scott's undaunted belief in rock's majestic possibilities, he reminds himself to have fun as well. [Oct 2011, p.105]

A slight tendency to clutter is in evidence, but when the band pare it back, it's magical. [Nov 2013, p.81]

The xx have expanded their horizons without sacrificing any of the emotional intimacy that makes them one of the most compelling acts around. [Feb 2017, p.22]

Pleasingly, Segall's root wildness is enhanced by their [Ben Boye, Mikal Cronin, Emmett Kelly, and Charles Moothart's] jamming virtuosity. [Feb 2017, p.37]

There are echoes of Jenny Lewis or perhaps the Swedish pop of Hello Saferide, but the mix of sass and vulnerability adds a melancholy air to the understated twang of "It's Our Time." [Nov 2011, p.94]

His is a personal, emotive take, and it proves very effective. [Dec 2012, p.72]

It’s a brave, bonkers, often beautiful, sometimes haunting and occasionally ridiculous album.

Joe Henry coaxes out his pithy, hard-bitten wisdom with unfussy production. [Oct 2008, p.98]

Suuns have never been slouches in the mutant kosmische department, but the John Congleton-produced Hold/Still blasts them into a new dimension. [Jun 2016, p.81]

Plenty of musicians have subsequently tried to channel that weirdness. Rose, though, always seemed to explore ancient territory with vigour and good humour on his records - and Luck In The Valley, his last, is one of the best.

CO's fifth album clothes Campbell's vignettes of thwarted romance in increasingly sophisticated arrangements. [Jul 2013, p.72]

Kleyn's songs sung to a rugged, vaguely Celtic harp accompaniment with electric piano, bridge the gap between Judy Collins and Joanna Newsom. [Sep 2011, p.88]

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]

Noisy but thoughtful, and frenzied but melodic. [Feb 2018, p.32]

An album that appears to be all about mood and texture transforms over time into a fully realised collection of beautiful songs from an artist determined to keep moving forward, however stealthily. [Jan 2018, p.19]

An audaciously original album - a bedroom-laptop fever dream from a parallel universe. [Apr 2020, p.33]

Bewitching. [May 2017, p.30]

This blend of Sabbath-inspired riffing, windswept chug and songs called things like 'Fire Lances of the Ancient Hyperzephyrians' has a neat shtick, no particularly awkward edges, and a vague sense of nostalgia for an adolescence maybe you never lived the first time out. [May 2008, p.107]

Boo! has plenty of highpoints. [May 2008, p.113]

If you fell for Real Estate and their peers, here's the root. [Mar 2012, p.81]

Little Honey is a heartening and humble album, sufficiently smart and aware to be an expression of thanks for the journey as well as the destination.

Jeffes has safeguarded the Orchestra's broad, eccentric range of instruments, and shifts effortlessly from the drones of "Control 1 (Interlude)" to the good-natured, pastoral pleasures of "Ricercar." [Jun 2017, p.37]

The band's smarts and muscle come together with a resounding whomp on the new LP. [Apr 2012, p.75]

Recorded partially outdoors, Resin Pockets' sometimes rough and rustic nature belies the grace and beauty in Jones' deceptively causal songs. [Jul 2017, p.26]

One trick ponies, yes, but it's a good trick. [Jun 2009, p.83]

When it's glorious, it really is glorious. [Jul 2018, p.18]

An album that, on first listen, glides by doing nothing wrong. Second time around, you realise that, more accurately, it's doing everything right, and you're spellbound. [Jun 2003, p.92]

It's all acoustic guitars, rich jangling melodies and heavenly harmonies. [May 2003, p.102]

To get the measure of Jagger's contribution you have to turn to the five new songs on disc two, which are also the meat of the DVD offering.

It might not be the best Hold Steady Album, but it might be their most purely enjoyable. [Sep 2019, p.35]

It's like Belle & Sebastian slopping sorbet with early Jonathan Richman. [Feb 2004, p.82]

While tracks like "Cherokee" take a gently pulsing and melodic groove and expand it into something quietly euphoric, before dipping happily back into quieter, odder moments. [Mar 2022, p.25]

Lush, lightly electronic chamber-pop arrangements dominate. [Oct 2015, p.84]

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]

The darkness of his vision remains unmatched. [Oct 2024, p.36]