It’s always going to be tough to unequivocally celebrate your hometown when the everyday reality is poverty and disenfranchisement. But as Sadam says, Imarhan’s music aims to bring those issues to wider attention while simultaneously representing the richness of their culture – a feat that Aboogi pulls off with passion, skill and no little style. [Feb 2022, p.30]

It's a cryptic approach, to say the least. [Mar 2022, p.31]

Made for uncertain times, Optimism is funny, clever and elegant, but it’s not a record that seeks approval or constructs a tidy narrative.

Bloodlines and geography figure into every NMAs album, but on Set Sail, Luther and Cody Dickinson make family and setting the conjoined theme. [Mar 2022, p.32]

Songs such as "Don't Want Move" and "Making The Most of It" compellingly frame the narrative, while "First Drum Set" and "Teenage Sequencer" joyously chronicle his escape route out of the alienation. [Mar 2022, p.35]

Amid all this weirdness, the sleek disco banger "The last Dance" stands out like a beacon in a cave, lighting the way towards a more sustainable reinvention. [Feb 2022, p.34]

Mayall enthusiastically opens the door to funk and soul elements. [Feb 2022, p.32]

Sonically, the album has a muted palette, an approach that suits the colourised introversion of Mitchell's writing. even so, there are occasional flashes of illumination. [Mar 2022, p.24]

While her new, synth-led turn can feel a little awkward - the keyboards on "Guardian Angel" overwhelm the tenderness of the song - there are moments, such as the sparks of synth noise on "Hum Menina", that fire her folk songs into another dimension. [Mar 2022, p.28]

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]

Cobb gives them his distinctively sweltering Southern soul treatment - drenching "In The Garden" with humid electric piano, reimagining "Are You Washed In The Blood?" as the Allman Brothers might have played it. [Mar 2022, p.26]

Extreme Witchcraft snaps and snarls more than usual, but wit, tunes and third-degree self-awareness continue to serve the post-grunge Randy Newman well. [Feb 2022, p.28]

Nothing about their sixth album sounds like business as usual. Refreshed by time spent independently exploring their own musical interests (Ansell electronica and production work; Carter an Americana-inspired solo album) and inspired by true crime documentaries and podcasts, the duo sought to explore the darker side of the human psyche, leaning into haunted house synth lines and gothic horror bass. [Feb 2022, p.25]

Her solo works have generally furnished her extraordinary voice with more obviously congruent vehicles, and Age Of Apathy is no exception. [Feb 2022, p.34]

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]

Pulverising noise is not entirely absent – the sludgy riffs of “The Fallen” growl ominously – but they are largely replaced with more atmospheric explorations, Wata’s gentle vocals and tracks that slow and quieten down to reveal a tender exploration of texture. [Feb 2022, p.26]

The deviations from the general upbeat mood vary - "Louder" is a clunky if well-meaning protest song, but the melancholy piano-led ballad "Marvelous To Me" is a thing of downbeat beauty. [Mar 2022, p.32]

Too often, though, good-not-great tunes can't quite make up for generic song structures and performances that seem to have lost a certain charismatic shine during the downsizing operation. [Feb 2022, p.37]

Kane has now made what he has called a "grand, souly album". And at times his bold move pays off. [Feb 2022, p.31]

From the electrifying first few minutes of Things Are Great, it's evident that Bridwell is revitalised. [Feb 2022, p.25]

While this second album adds a layer or two of extra accompaniment, the emotional core remains a formidably magnetic force. [Mar 2022, p.26]

A debut album bursting with character. [Feb 2022, p.37]

It feels slightly too long but there's much to like. [Mar 2022, p.36]

This is a lovely addition to an organic, forest-themed catalogue that works on the macro and micro levels. [Mar 2022, p.29]

The Boy Named if is a thunderous, furious reconnection with the more splenetic chapters of his catalogue - though if there's a difference between this and Blood 7 chocolate or This Year's Model, it's that Costello here sounds like he's thoroughly enjoying himself. [Mar 2022, p.26]

He may have worked alone, but in doing so he has created an entire sonic world, a welcoming garden for all to tread. [Mar 2022, p.37]

The 24-track album is a considered work, avoiding the trappings and tropes of string-heavy bombast and cheap urgency, instead allowing woodwind, strings and ambient textures to coalesce and build slowly. [Feb 2022, p.25]

The potency of Adams' guitar-playing is familiar enough, but he also emerges for the first time s a fine singer, with a deep nd bluesy growl which bears the influence of his years backing Plant. [Dec 2021, p.23]

At under 34 minutes, it necessarily swerves dense improv passages, instead highlighting the nimble, airy interplay of multiple guitars. [Feb 2022, p.29]

It's taut urban blues business as usual. [Dec 2021, p.26]

Where the haunted vocals and atmospheric production remain, it's in service of something bolder, more dynamic. [Jan 2022, p.22]

The project's success can be measured by the extent to which the tunes have been transformed. [Jan 2022, p.21]

Fragments could have been made any time in the last 25 [years], yet the down-tempo warmth, tasteful orchestrations and immaculate production are still a winning combination. [Feb 2022, p.26]

There is a dreamy, unconscious quality to the way Marshall inhabits a song. The covers sessions were big on spontaneity. [Feb 2022, p.22]

Boland’s previous releases (stretching back over 20 years) have only hinted at such levels of ambition, but The Light Saw Me is expertly realised, as playful as it is metaphysical.

Good vibes are much in abundance. [Dec 2021, p.31]

This is a thoughtful, empathetic showcase of his interests, of intense feelings translated into a dreamy sonic atmosphere. It’s an album that meets the world in its moment, where global issues and far-flung international voices are more amplified and connected than ever.

Still groovy, but these voyagers might want to plot a new course. [Feb 2022, p.37]

The vocals feel a bit hammily gothic at times but it’s a small complaint compared with the album’s intoxicating density. [Jul 2021, p.33]

This score to the latest in the Halloween franchise sees his sonic hallmarks - repeating piano motifs, desolate synthesisers and sudden moments of gut-wrenching tension - intact. [Dec 2021, p.25]

So well-crafted is his music, so fleshed out are his concepts, that you can perhaps see why he’s chosen not to hitch his sounds to another’s vision. An album like Entangled Routes doesn’t need to be tied to moving images to reach its potential. Press play and it works its magic, imprinting its strange and fantastic visions direct onto your mind’s eye.

Acoustic English folk is central here, dipped in a thin electronic glaze and layered with gentle washes of psychedelia and shoegazey pop. [Jan 2022, p.31]

Springtime isn’t some hopeful calling card made inside the industry machine. More infernal than vernal, it’s a document – of the coming together of three old hands and kindred spirits at a time when everything around them (and us) was coming apart. [Jan 2022, p.18]

It's an interesting academic exercise that has resulted in a gently beautiful and coherent recording. [Dec 2021, p.25]

It's silly in parts ("Little Things"), deranged in others ("Keep An Eye On Dan") but the "ah-ha ah-ha" chorus on "Just A Notion" comfortably makes up for a multitude of sins. [Feb 2022, p.23]

Admonitions remains a fiery testament to Endless Boogie’s creative rejuvenation. And while this instalment of the saga may end with that imaginary action hero looking like a far cry from his usual condor self, don’t be fooled – he’s just saving it for the sequel. [Dec 2021, p.28]

A crawling, paranoiac jazz-funk odyssey. It might be the best of these Dwyer & Co records to date. [Feb 2022, p.28]

Elegiac and otherworldly. [Jan 2022. p.25]

What's surprising is how structured it is, even if little will have been recognisable to devotees. The pleasures lie not only in lengthy stretches where they lock together instinctively. ... It's also in the tension leading to these moments. [Jan 2022, p.38]

Spans Essiebons' output between 1973-84 and gives some indication of its profile as both a prime mover of modern highlife and promoter of Afrobeat and funk. [Jan 2022, p.44]

Robbie Robertson has enlisted Bob Clearmountain to provide a new mix in order to give the recordings more "space" and clarity, and it especially reaps rewards on the woozy duet between Richard Manual and co-writer Van Morrison, "4% Pantomime", and Allen Toussaint's New Orleans brass arrangement on "Life Is A Carnival". [Feb 2022, p.43]

You can’t fault the songcraft , though, as “Dreams”’ romantic reverie and hooky freeway anthems such as “Can’t Stop The Rain” transcend Francis’ rather detached delivery. [Dec 2021, p.27]

These shimmery reworkings of Cave classics including "The Ship Song" and "Red Right Hand" are pleasingly free of both solemn reverence and ironic kitsch. [Feb 2022, p.33]

Amplifying the convivial otherworldliness of his music by grabbing hold of mythic melodies like "Outer Spaceways Incorporated" and "We Travel The Spaceways" and filling them with their analogue fantasia, alien chants going intergalactic in gently fried circuit boards. [Dec 2021, p.25]

From the yearning opener “Hold On” through to the life-affirming ruckus of “Queens” and “Better Love” and to the final epiphanies in “Alpine Drive”, Observatory is a triumphant expression of resilience in the face of all the hard knocks and harder lessons that fill a life.

This is a coherent set of transformative reveries by an older, less angry man. [Jan 2022, p.31]

Artists from Phil Lesh, Bob Weir and Steve Earle, to J Mascis and Aaron Lee Tasjan, whose "Travelling After Dark" is a strong cut - interpret Casal's lifetime of work, fittingly as radio staples. [Feb 2022, p.37]

It's the sound of two people deeply interlocked. [Feb 2022, p.25]

old Friends... flows as a set piece but there are standouts. [Feb 2022, p.25]

The most thrilling moments are those in which you catch a glimpse of the band jamming away amid the aural wreckage. [Feb 2022, p.25]

"Things You Learn The Hard Way" is a droll litany of wry advice evocative of Jason Isbell's "Outfit", and "Hometown Here" and "Let 'Em Burn" display a commendable facility for the deftly sketched potted soap opera. [Feb 2022, p.34]

Few tracks aside, this Volume 2 contains very little trace of the jazz pivot her music would take later in the decade. The outtakes covering that period are going to make fascinating listening. Meanwhile, this feels like a completist’s dream –because even Joni Mitchell’s storeroom sweepings are spangled with diamond dust.

Barn is a stronger effort than its predecessor [2019's Colorado], with this particular lineup finding its footing. [Jan 2022, p.20]

The warm homeliness drifts into untethered territory. [Dec 2021, p.31]

Another batch of weapons-grade psychedelic reggaeton that buckles and grooves with sinuous grace. ... The sole clanger is "Born Yesterday." [Jan 2022, p.21]

Sardonic opener “Down From London” showcases Caravan’s pop smarts, while they make complex fun on the title track, exploding into Steve Hillage-style Euro-rock around the nine-minute mark. [Dec 2021, p.25]

The results are radical without losing sight of Garcia's original vision. [Dec 2021, p.27]

Intimacy is still her trump card. [Dec 2021, p.26]

The pick of the bunch are the two recordings made in 2000. The first is a live set recorded shortly after Glastonbury at the BC Radio Theatre featuring Bowie's well-drilled band on a post-Glasto high, working through the hits. The second is Toy. [Jan 2022, p.38]

Dawson is able to soar gloriously over Circle’s layers of sound, while the group are stronger with his mighty voice and melodies elevating their tumult. The rest of us are just lucky to be able to dive into these seven songs, as heavy as Redwood trunks and as complex as cladoxylopsids. Cue thunderclap.

It's not always on the right side of cliché but, when it works, it's glorious. [Nov 2021, p.29]

This is chamber music taken into a different dimension. [Jan 2022, p.30]

Exquisitely crafted, lightly experimental chamber-folk album. [Jan 2022, p.21]

Many of these songs also feel like polite recital pieces, stripped of high drama, so that Wilson often sounds like a shadow of himself. [Dec 2021, p.35]

Driven by beats and rhythmic synth, the songs are meticulously constructed yet warm and intimate, if low on distinguishing characteristics. [Jan 2022, p.22]

This boxset – beautiful, thorough, a labour of love, offers an opportunity for many more of us to hear and to reconsider Nyro’s music; to sit there, like Alice Cooper, and go, “That’s songwriting.”

The accent firmly on the spiritual. The stately "Family Bible" touches base with Willie's early career. ... There's a jubilant hoedown vibe to Hank Williams' "I Saw The Light," bettered only by offspring Lukas's plaintive lead vocal on George Harrison's "All Things Must Pass." [Jan 2022, p.27]

Slothrust demonstrate a melodic elegance that belies their grunge-punk roots. [Jan 2022, p.29]

McCraven's label debut deploys his own musicians with Horace Silver and the rest, giving a steamy hip-hop stutter to Blakey beats already halfway there, and letting the aching melody of Kenny Burrell's "Autumn In New York" simmer under new rhythmic cross-winds. [Dec 2021, p.31]

You need a surfeit of great songs to justify a double album in these attention deficit times, but Malin seems to have them by the bucketful. [Jan 2022, p.27]

It's the kind of listen whose rich but unfussy loveliness belies its deeply personal lyrics. [Dec 2021, p.24]

The LP's sonic cocoon bursts apart with the horn blasts and slashing guitar of the Lennon-like rocker "Easy To Love," rescuing the record from suffocating in whimsy. [Jan 2022, p.22]

There's a gorgeously somnambulant yet softly romantic feel to these 10 songs. ... And it benefits from masterfully subtle arrangement touches. [Dec 2021, p.27]

It stands apart, a kaleidoscopic yet subtle take on eclectic ’60s sounds. With a little help from Younge, La Luz may have made their first great record. [Nov 2021, p.24]

Nothing wildly new here, yet Cutler's full-time escapist fantasy is pretty persuasive. [Jan 2022, p.30]

The sense is of a band confirming their place as among the most enterprising in the genre. [Jan 2022, p.27]

A set of drifting piano ballads that allow her rich and profane lyrics to hit home. [Jan 2022, p.22]

Songs come bathed in sparkling synths and warming strings, but melodies are unpredictable and unsettling, bearing repeat listens. [Jan 2022, p.29]

The predominantly Celtic hues of Stewart's 31st album tend towards the cosy and coffee-table, robustly structured rather than wildly inspired. [Jan 2022, p.31]

This is actually a solid and adventurous collection. [Jan 2022, p.25]

She's now made another quantum leap with A Beautiful Life. [Jan 2022, p.25]

His choices suit not only his rich, resonant baritone but also rich Machin's soul-and-gospel-heavy treatments. [Jan 2022, p.24]

Lands as another Technicolor blast. [Jan 2022, p.22]

If Time Clocks stays largely true to his love of power-trio blues-rock, he adds an inventive prog seasoning to "Mind's Eye" and "Curtain Call," and his determination to keep moving forward is commendable. [Jan 2022, p.21]

Each song seems subtle, even sparse, but with repeated listens the complexity of the arrangements starts to astound. [Jan 2022, p.14]

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]

It sometimes feels here like Perry's slight contributions are being stretched a little thinly. [Dec 2021, p.31]

While Fagen and co show no interest in wholly reinventing Steely Dan’s most beloved songs, the live setting does add a vital spark to them.