An album of wistful majesty. [Jul 2019, p.30]

Warm Heart Of Africa works best when Radioclit subtly build on the rhythms of Mwamwaya's native kwassa kwassa. [Oct 2009, p.119]

Black Encyclopedia... is less abrasive but no less urgently meaningful [than 2016's Fetish Bones], a fusion of experimental hip-hop, soul, poetry and jazz-etched beatscapes that ebbs and flows around the concept of an Afrofuturist universe. [Oct 2021, p.29]

A sweltering sun-baked quality. Lyrically, meanwhile, the concept--of discomfort with technology--comes a little more into focus here. [Aug 2017, p.31]

Undeniably, they are a dance band first and foremost, but fans of Tinariwen will find plenty to love in raw soulful numbers like "Koana" and Farila." [Jun 2015, p.83]

Pohorylle is classic Americana - mostly carried by piano, guitar and strings - awash with gracem wisdom and allusive wordplay. [Dec 2021, p.26]

Glacial electronic-first compositions like "Vessel" ape the atmospheric intensity of Julia Holter, but even in her exile, Ballentine finds something pretty to latch onto in every song. [Review of the Year 2025, p.28]

West's rhymes are wry, witty, warm and unswervingly self-aware. [May 2004, p.106]

Brun continues to confound expectations on a set of sonically adventurous songs. [Oct 2015, p.73]

Explores themes of mental derailment and the black arts against a backdrop of the heaviest psychobilly, grunge-metal and stoner rock. [Nov 2004, p.106]

Opulent, perverse and reassuringly other-worldly. [Oct 2019, p.30]

It’s a decent primer on the culture, but the real treasures are the deep cuts, namely some radical dub remixes of punk also-rans (Generation X’s “Wild Dub”, Angelic Upstarts’ “Different Dub”) and a string of projects from Dennis ‘Blackbeard’ Bovell, including the gloomy skank of 4th Street Orchestra’s “Za-Lon” and Matumbi’s sunny, horn-powered “Point Of View”. [Aug 2024, p.53]

Six albums in and The Icarus Line remain terrifying, riding a tsunami of malevolent noise, sweat and havoc while producing some of the most intense and exceptional rock music around. [Oct 2013, p.70]

Seun Kuti leaves no doubt as to who wears the crown on six songs that exude enormous confidence. [Oct 2024, p.37]

[It] sees them break out of the subculture in spectacular style. [Nov 2006, p.123]

As devil worshiping goes, this is pretty funky stuff, with a tight and bouncy tone throughout. [Mar 2017, p.35]

If these [tracks] feel like throwbacks, they're no more so than Norah Jones' best work, and there's nonetheless something timeless about the breezy "While You Were Sleeping" and, with its chugging guitars, "Lovesick". [Oct 2023, p.29]

Canada's Quin twins fairly blaze through The Con's 14 compact, supercharged tracks. [Oct 2007, p.109]

As a reminder that music is fundamentally there for our pleasure, The Jazz Age is splendid. [Jan 2013, p.68]

A confident take on sleek, horn-powered Philly soul with a hunt of garage muscle. [Feb 2015, p.78]

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

Now in his forties, Lakeman may no longer be the great white hope of English folk music - but he's never sounded more compelling. [Feb 2025, p.36]

In The Pink Of Condition is very much Evans' own. [Mar 2015, p.77]

Conquistador plays out against a cavalcade of dark, intense, downward thrusts that linger and fold back on themselves, each time getting slightly deeper and more daunting. [Jun 2018, p.24]

Technicolor Health amply delivers on the promis of their 2007 EP, "Burning Birthdays." [Apr 2009, p.86]

A sort of desolate twang predominates. [May 2015, p.76]

Antidepressants is the most unhinged, intoxicating Suede album since Coming Up, and boasts the best first side of a goth album since the Banshees' Juju. [Oct 2025, p.22]

There's plenty here to startle, to catch you looking. ... It's consummate.[Nov 2021, p.32]

Hinson's latest is a tear-soaked concept album that's distinguished by the sheer magnetic beauty of the music. [Oct 2017, p.30]

He has produced his most sonically consistent album in years. [Oct 2018, p.35]

It's a big, satisfying holistic record modelled with great finesse, mixing dread with Technicolor synth dazzlement and operating on a newly ambitious scale. [Dec 2020, p.25]

Blessed by an amiably husky voice, Jurvanen unfurls elegant melodies and intelligent economical arrangements. [Sep 2014, p.67]

Unlike their many imitators, Autechre's music refuses to relax, ensuring them a longer radioactive half-life. [May 2005, p.106]

Weitz shreds and manipulates the instrument [hurdy gurdy] so it becomes the record's distinctive voice. the nine-minute dubs "Compact Mirror/Last Names" and "Sonora" are especially spellbinding. [Feb 2026, p.33]

Here, informed by the BLM movement, the lyrics on his third Black Radio LP are often mournful. ... Sometimes the mournfulness is sublime. [Apr 2022, p.32]

Blitzen Trapper's rock-solid eigth boasts a pair of instant grabbers. [Dec 2015, p.69]

A lovely record. [Jan 2018, p.22]

What their debut lacks in innovation it makes up for with emotional eloquence. [Nov 2014, p.76]

Their lack of artifice is a godsend. [Feb 2007, p.81]

They stew in the rich absurdity of it all, and offer a collection that rings of the band’s tendency toward Southern-gothic neo-noir, but with frequent punctuations of light. [July 2022, p.32]

Here he takes four songs from each album and adds a trio of covers to demonstrate their strengths, recasting them as campfire acoustic ditties. This allows some of their lyrical directness to shine through. [Jan 2015, p.76]

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

Though the sonic palette, beautiful and immersive, warm like a hot mug in the frost, the dubstep-derived hints of double-time, perpetually held in reserve, create the ominous feeling of an attack dog straining at the leash. [Apr 2016, p.69]

Royal Trux's '80s junk aesthetic has since been appropriated by James Ferraro et al, but Herrema does it with a sneer that's hard to resist. [Feb 2012, p.81]

For all its diverting technical backstory, for all our attempts to manoeuvre Tim Hecker into various neat genre boxes, ancient and modern, his music is ultimately ravishing in a way that transcends method and contest, [May 2016, p.83]

The follow-up to 2010's Innundir Skinni is an even more intimate affair. [Feb 2013, p.67]

Running at 33 fat-free minutes, With Tramped By Turtles is immediate evidence of their comfort as ensemble players. .... The sense is of both parties yielding to the moment, guided by instinct and decades of fluency in their respective practices. [Jul 2025, p.24]

American is seldom better than its title track, searing swamp-punk that recalls Grinderman in its diabolic abandon. [Apr 2013, p.78]

Boz and co get under the skin of consistently evocative songs from the likes of Curtis Mayfield, Bobby Charles, Al Green and Bobby Charles. [May 2015, p.80]

Dr. Dee is the most compelling record Albarn has made since Blur's 13; his first proper solo record, with all the emotional engagement that implies. [Jun 2012, p.63]

Demolished thoughts is his strongest solo collection to date. [Jun 2011, p.91]

Their ninth album might be their best this millennium; a triangulation of mature soppiness, mitigated contentment and indelible tuneage. [Oct 2016, p.39]

The pair navigate a procession of deep, massaging drones, crashing waves of pink noise and shimmering tone clusters that shift between tranquil calm and coruscating melody. [Sep 2016, p.79]

Muse redeem high-camp absurdity with a genius for sumptuous arrangements, mighty pop hooks and irresistible melodrama. [Nov 2012, p.79]

Thunderbitch does a far better job of capturing Howard as a performer than either of the Alabama Shakes albums have; here, her inimitable, flamboyant voice is given free rein, ably supported by her fellow Thunderbitches. [Dec 2015, p.68]

There is a gentle healing touch to Angel In Plainclothes. [May 2026, p.29]

Great stuff. More please. [May 2021, p.27]

Mostly, on Friar Tuck, that leads to an exhilarating 40 minutes. It doesn’t have the madcap range of 1991’s Peggy Suicide or the following year’s Jehovahkill, records on which Cope explored the rough and ready, first-take ethos he’d discovered on 1989’s Skellington and 1990’s Droolian, but these 12 songs are brimming with a breezy vitality that’s not always been present on Cope’s epic releases over the last couple of decades. [Jan 2025, p.28]

Though former folk musician Jiha employs electronic means to embellish her pieces, its' her yanggeum, a hammered dulcimer, teasing out "Grounding"'s gentle melodies and hypnotising ius with a metallic tapping throughout "Breathe Again"'s gentle breeze. [Mar 2025, p.37]

Klara and Johanna Soderberg have crafted a remarkably mature work. [Feb 2012, p.84]

Clear-eyed, warm and stylish. [Jul 2020, p.20]

The Nashville-based songwriter's toughness and tenacity soars through her brand of showstopper 1970s country. [Jul 2020, p.39]

The relentless mid-tempos at times make this epic 16-track album drag, but on the devastating "Not In Kansas" and the frantic "Where Is Her Head" Berninger once again proves himself rock's most astute and humane chronicler of everyday crises of faith. [Jun 2019, p.32]

There's soulful opulence to "Sister Goodbye," a sultry tribute to Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the deathless country-soul of "No 5 Hurricane" reeks with old-school Southern charm, and the sweltering funk of "Sunrise" and the title track sound like lost Muscle Shoals gems. [Jun 2017, p.23]

The group allows O'Rourke to indulge his songwriter instincts and Tweedy to exert an often-suppressed experimental imperative. [Feb 2003, p.82]

An invigorating debut. [May 2014, p.78]

A communicable joy in weird noise. [Sep 2018, p.35]

Rickety in construction, it holds up as a work of single-minded, lunatic conviction. [Aug 2013, p.61]

[Producer Blake Mills] deftly applied his gift for song-serving ornamentation and transformed sluggish Dawes into an aggressively inventive band. [Nov 2016, p.26]

Hilariously frenetic, perpetually distracted. [Jun 2005, p.116]

Avatar... feels like the work of a band bursting with ideas, and with the confidence to realise them. [Sep 2006, p.96]

One of Hitchcock's very best. [Nov 2006, p.114]

Open Here is another prog-pop masterclass from a band reflecting our times while remaining stubbornly out of step with them. [Feb 2018, p.23]

The Inevitable End is a bittersweet triumph. [Jan 2015, p.76]

This album pushes and pulls in so many directions, it should fall apart; remarkably, it doesn't. [Apr 2016, p.72]

Old Fears is entirely worth your concentration. [Apr 2014, p.81]

Dense and challenging, with an unmistakable humanist undertow, ...Snow is a riveting trip. [Nov 2009, p.90]

Sure, it flags here and there, but Skull Ring is Iggy's most sustained assault since the Instinct/Brick By Brick double whammy. [Nov 2003, p.118]

They’re back in the studio together, finding profundity in the commonplace, from a cheap cup of coffee to watching an infant’s first steps, on nine songs which range from the acoustic balladry of “Never Apart”, with its banjo and folk harmonies, to the scorching cowpunk of “Love Of AGirl”, via the classic country-rock of “Country Kid” and the plaintive melancholia of “2020 Regret”. [Jun 2024, p.29]

The sound is brighter and bolder. [Nov 2016, p.26]

Drunk Tank Pink triumphs. No less do-or-die in their commitment, these songs are less determinedly dense. [Feb 2021, p.35]

More than a specific era, Real Estate conjure a sense of place and experience as vividly as any US indie film of the past five years. [Nov 2011, p.97]

With members of Master Musicians Of Bukkake and Invisible Hands joining in, it's no surprise everything gets wilder as it goes along. [Jan 2018, p.17]

Injects [Viva Voce's] cosmic American visiion with a creeping paranoia and, in places, a much heavier rockist edge. [Sep 2006, p.106]

Mastodon mostly veer clear of the slick atmospherics that turn other technical metal bands into post-rock wallpaper. [Oct 2006, p.117]

We’ve Been Going... is above all an incredible sounding record. Across its 10 tracks, it incorporates the Jupiter synths and saturnine beats of Remind Me Tomorrow and the stark, swooning strum of her early records to create truly a cosmic dynamic range, from the softest whisper to the most desolate scream. [Jun 2022, p.18]

Deliluh are more economical on their third album, even if they regularly expand on its mix of Kyle Knapp’s intimidatingly recited, enigmatic lyrics and angular post-punk. [Jul 2022, p.25]

The acid test of any recorded OST is its ability to stand independent of image and dialogue and on that count, Hill's latest as Umberto more than measures up. [Dec 2012, p.78]

Haunting songs rooted in old-time country, Southern Gothic and humming electric ambience. [Mar 2016, p.72]

Lage switches to electric on Modern Lore, playing in a style that's acrobatic but never ostentatious as he mixes rangy jazz with early rock'n'roll. [Mar 2018, p.28]

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]

She's in fine eloquent fettle, sinking her heart into the ever-resilient material. [May 2014, p.71]

What becomes clearest from listening to Live At The 12 Bar is the way Jansch's playing manifests a very particular physicality, working to its own internal logic, voice, and six strings running in refined tandem. [Sep 2015, p.92]

A mini-masterpiece. [Jun 2012, p.82]

The sprawling haziness still lingers, but the songs are sharper and studded with guests. [Nov 2016, p.24]

This album will appeal equally to hard house and handbag crowds alike. [May 2002, p.113]

There is a luscious warmth to this collection. [May 2023, p.28]

Rarely has an anachronism sounded so revolutionary. [Mar 2005, p.92]