Her elegantly emotive voice locates the dark matter in these songs about the complexities of love, lighten by sweet melodies and a stirring concoction of pop-country and honky-tonk. [Dec 2015, p.75]

Much of Broken Boy Soldiers is fired by the same liberated, intuitive spirit that drives the Stripes. [Jun 2006, p.86]

It's a mixed bag in the best, revelatory sense. [Jan 2016, p.91]

The intense grandeur... is still quite a shock. [Feb 2007, p.73]

Meek and producer Mat Davidson took the band to Sonic Ranch in Texas and gave the record a much more expansive, full-sounding presentation, a resounding and confident tone that matches these optimistic and often unfiltered emotions. [Oct 2023, p.33]

BRMC seem invincible; or back to their searing best, at any rate. [May 2007, p.87]

The vibe is darkly grandiose. [Feb 2016, p.83]

At its best, in its stoned funk and stewed grooves, there’s enough to suggests they could even fulfill their early ambition to be the "Sly and the Family Stone of Salford." Double double good.

{The album] bears many of the assured and lyrically deft hallmarks of Basher's own work. [Mar 2014, p.79]

The deep, pulled-back grooves of Critical Equation reveal the harnessed intensity of the songs and performances so deliberately that their myriad pleasures and embedded hooks will sneak up on you. [Jun 2018, p.27]

It's almost disturbingly accomplished. [Jul 2002, p.103]

Nothing too shocking, then, but their old magic surges through: you won't be disappointed. [Sep 2003, p.112]

Broad in scope, and naturally playful, this is a spectacular, fresh as the proverbial, triumph. [Sep 2016, p.73]

Though Abyss' quieter moments are plenty chilling,m Wolfe's brand of anguish best suceeds when she's out to do serious damage. [Sep 2015, p.83]

Tobin's virtuoso collaging of alien sounds is bracingly vivid in small doses, but a little chilly and disorienting over the long haul. [Jun 2011, p.96]

The result is the friskiest, most rock'n'roll album of his career. [Nov 2020, p.37]

It’s their most reflective and measured set yet, a record of personal experiences with broad-spectrum resonance for our peculiar times, still charged with the thrill of creativity. [Aug 2024, p.33]

[Haxan] presents the Stockholm quartet at the top of its game. [Jan 2017, p.23]

This is another set of brilliant, beautiful, occasionally frustrating songs themed around ideas of ending and death. [Review of the Year 2024, p.24]

Their second album manages to be full of surprises, while never straying too far from what you'd expect. [Mar 2007, p.80]

He's the kind of singer whose voice you instinctively trust. It's a resource that brings continuity to a fifth album touching on greed, death and dogs. [Feb 2015, p.72]

More often wispy and whispery in her earlier work, her voice assumes new strength and vividness here as Trappes dives deep into torch-song mode for “Red Yellow” and multitracks herself into a celestial choir for “Blood Moon”. [Jul 2021, p.34]

The standard violin-mandolin-accordian corduroy rusticity is shoved aside here and there with musical and emotional ferocity. [Jun 2017, p.34]

If nothing can quite replicate the excitement of hearing these songs for the first time, the first disc of this double-CD set makes a good job of restating the importance of The Smiths as a singles band.

Uncharacteristic moves brings an intriguing dimension to Berninger's inward-peering persona. [Jul 2025, p.26]

They continue the template of their superb I Have Lost All Desire For Feeling cassette last year. [Apr 2014, p.78]

We'll be lucky if the year yields another headphone album as sumptuous as this one. [Jul 2017, p.30]

This terrific second album from the ex-jazz singer Shah carries with it a clear air of assurance. [May 2015, p.81]

Embryonic is certainly as exciting as anything produced by the psych rock underground this year. [Nov 2009, p.78]

This is rebel music as passive resistance, blissfully embodying change. [Dec 2022, p.29]

On Tomorrow, In A Year, The Knife have reinforced everything that makes them such a brilliant, endearing group. [Apr 2010, p.93]

As with its predecessor, the album cherry-picks from the past, but comes with a contemporary sheen. It's hard to imagine her bettering this. [Aug 2016, p.80]

Day To Day's fusions feel accomplished and natural. [Aug 2016, p.77]

“Stock Horror” offering aghostly absence, its additional sepulchral weight midway through welcoming what could be ameteor shower, while the amorphous “Dim Hopes” ultimately brings brighter skies too. Similarly, “We Were Vaporised” effects alanguid transubstantiation. [Jun 2024, p.39]

The lasting impression is of a record whose most tangible identity is that of a band on the verge of change contemplating their own back pages. [Dec 2021, p.47]

In this lunar setting, Oldham's visionary, spooked words are lit up with renewed clarity. [Feb 2005, p.78]

The sheer velocity with which they throw ideas out makes this a mighty exhilarating record. [Nov 2012, p.77]

If A Different Ship was the soundtrack to a road trip, the new record is designed for a summer afternoon. [Dec 2015, p.73]

Fans get their money's worth with this particular Broderick. [Jan 2018, p.35]

Rather than act like temporary caretakers tiptoeing around WWI's vast, eternally resonant themes, Field Music have sensibly moved in and made them their own. Not a memorial, then, so much as a remix of history. [Feb 2020, p.24]

The result: gorgeous, unpretentious post-folk melancholy. [Jan 2017, p.32]

It's an entertainingly disruptive blast of a record with a mirrorball lure, refracting everything from Motown to early-'80s disco and funk, boom bap, '90s piano house and contemporary R&B Yet nothing is stripped of its oddness or playfulness. [Feb 2018, p.33]

While the tempo and patterns vary, with “I” featuring Christer Bothén on the six-string donso n’goni, the vibe is pleasingly uniform, with a boundless feel akin to Neu!’s “Hallogallo”. [Jun 2022, p.23]

The musical richness and genre-blending confidence adds up to a quietly great album. [Mar 2016, p.82]

If you can forgive Condon’s mannered delivery and overabundance of drunken waltz rhythms, this is an audacious experiment in cultural appropriation, an enchanting musical holiday in someone else’s misery.

A blurring of fictionalised murder ballads and heartfelt break-up songs, Feed The Fire clothes breathy, emotive vocals in weeping strings, tremolo guitar twangs and ethereal electronica. [Mar 2016, p.78]

The album's musical tone is well judged, with Hiatt equally versed in flinty roots-rock and urban country songs. [May 2020, p.26]

A familiarity with the back-story is not necessary to enjoy this potted indie-rock opera: as always with Darnielle's work, an appreciation of droll storytelling and deadpan melodies will do. [Dec 2023, p.34]

This collection is ample testament to one of the last great English avant-pop careers. [Mar 2012, p.84]

His debut for Thurston Moore's label is another walk in the forest of heavy psych rock and avant folk, that blurs the boundaries between the timeless and traditional and the tres moderne. [Nov 2008, p.100]

A Kind Revolution shows that Weller's Indian summer of creativity--one that started with 2008's 22 Dreams--shows no sign of ending. [Jun 2017, p.20]

Potato Hole proves as extraordinary, delirious and laugh-out-loud weird as anyone might dare hope.

The results may lack the stamp of originality, but the likes of "Silver Living," "Giving Out," and "I Know It's You" are vibrant, brimful of melody and lots and lots of fun. [May 2013, p.71]

An immersive, gently hypnotic and sporadically sublime album. [Dec 2022, p.29]

Volume 3 is terrific when M. Ward's heavier production subsides and Deschanel's voice freely suggest swinging from lampposts in a romantic swoon. [Jun 2013, p.78]

There's rich melodies buried in many of these tracks. [Aug 2015, p.73]

The Derbyshire trio bring a pleasing experimentalism to their second LP. [Aug 2015, p.75]

It's not exactly transformed into a classic... but the new Let It Be is punchy, full of presence and powerfully involving. [Dec 2003, p.136]

Adopting Franz Ferdinand's arty edginess and the raw energy of the Pistols, Art Brut tilt at everything from the ephemeral nature of popular culture to erectile dysfunction. [Jun 2005, p.100]

The third suffers from a bit of improv cliche in its fox-sex vocals, but the central melodic theme is robust enough to return for a warm-hearted final track. [Sep 2014, p.73]

The most straightforward of Oldham's catalogue, and yet still rich with the oneiric and mysterious qualities that drew so many listeners to his art. [Apr 2026, p.20]

Simultaneously rooted and rootless, we might call the results Otherworld Music. [Feb 2018, p.35]

A blast. [Sep 2010, p.92]

A first half of pop-punk nuggets.... The second half, though, is more reflective and psychedelic although still in thrall to Big Star and Teenage Fanclub. [Jan 2015, p.75]

Not an easy listen, but an accomplished one. [Dec 2013, p.67]

A seriously strong debut. [Mar 2016, p.80]

Ives Sepulveda's vocals can be a little puny, but the music is full of clever twists and suddenly blossoming choruses. [Mar 2013, p.73]

An immersive and texturally rich listen. [Jun 2017, p.37]

There are no retrospective documentaries or scholarly essays to help unpack one of U2's most conceptually rich works. This cautious, conservative repackage may not diminish the greatness of the original album, but it does sell it short. [Jul 2017, p.46]

Glitter And Doom Live is an admirable document of yet another stage in his continually engrossing career.

Night Music, the debut solo LP from Zombie-Zombie's Etienne Jaumet offers proof that there's more to analogue synth than kitsch retro-futurist appeal. [Jan 2010, p. 124]

Gelb's semi-surreal observations lace things together. [Jun 2015, p.77]

Real Life... is a triumphant return to the dancefloor. [Feb 2010, p.90]

Difficult to pin down, Hidden is even harder to forget. [Feb 2010, p.104]

You could praise individual moments... but it's the overall weave, the daydreamy drift, that impresses. A 40-minute swoon of a record. [Jul 2004, p.112]

Tough, yet seductive. [Oct 2016, p.40]

It's solemn stuff. [Oct 2016, p.39]

Stevens' strumming often has an unworldly quality that transcends folk archetypes. [Apr 2004, p.92]

This is bold, imaginative, and, on occasion, deliciously strange. [Nov 2016, p.32]

Trouble is a typically tender, casually contemplative, occasionally tearful goodbye. [Nov 2014, p.72]

It's her first record that could be a classic rather than just name-checking a bunch of them. [Dec 2015, p.70]

Everything now seems as worn out and used up as Lytle's subjects, along with the imagery that brings them to life. [Jun 2006, p.108]

That [the innocence of an idyllic childhood] was suddenly shattered when Lynne's father shot her mother and then himself, referenced with unsettling dispassion in "Heaven's Only Days Down The Road," renders the album's surrounding tender moments all the more heart-wrenching. [Nov 2011, p.91]

Some of Deerhunter's prettiest songs to date. [Feb 2019, p.13]

Big Boi's absurd--and absurdly dextrous--verbiage knits it all together handsomely. [Sep 2010, p.85]

Worth catching. [Jun 2007, p.87]

Her most orthodox album, perhaps, and by some distance her best. [Dec 2013, p.68]

There's another side to the jaunty guitars and multi-tracked choruses that sometimes make Tunstall sound like she's singing an orange juice advert.... 'Beauty of Uncertainty' and the closer 'Paper Aeroplane' are stark and moody etudes as far removed from, say, Dido as it's possible to get.

The result is a varied, disjointed, entirely unpredictable yet utterly singular record. [Oct 2023, p.29]

It's an absolute belter if you like your R'n'B raw, red-blooded and defiantly vintage. [Mar 2016, p.75]

Girls In Peacetime Want To Dance feels like a creative rebirth for a band who were beginning to feel like nothing more than the day job. [Feb 2015, p.70]

A powerful and accomplished album. [Feb 2014, p.78]

Subtract [a couple of stinkers] and you have something of a minor masterpiece--and easily Weller’s finest solo album to date.

Even when the mood turns slow and swampy on "Chain Of Keys" and "River Anacostia," the intensity never wavers. [May 2016, p.74]

At Saint Thomas The Apostle Harlem proves she's become just as expressive as a pianist as she is with her bloodcurdling wails. [May 2017, p.30]

Together they make smart but unstudied pop music, as invigoratingly weird as it is instantly winning, stuffed with gleefully incompatible styles and with a broad emotional range. [Oct 2022, p.31]

The only danger of such an exercise being the risk of tarnishing the legend. But there's no problem here. [dec 2008, p.100]