Iechyd Da feels a culmination of all he set out to do. It’s a record that beckons you over and invites you in, that rewards your faith and careful listening with moments of extraordinary beauty, unflinching honesty, a sonic exchange of love. [Review Of The Year 2023, p.16]

Teems with compelling, trademark narratives full of vivid characters. .... There's a weight to his voice that lends these tales even more authority. [Jul 2025, p.31]

The best-kept secret in the Coltrane archive seems to leap between every stage of his career, like a greatest-hits sampler being improvised in real time. [Sep 2018, p.45]

The official line on In Utero is that it's a raw uncomfortable document of a band in turmoil and a songwriter on the edge. That's partly true, but it's also cathartic, invigorating, full of terrific, scabrous pop songs, and a good laugh to boot. [Nov 2013, p.86]

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

Untrue is altogether warmer than its predecessor. [Jan 2008, p.87]

It's a great illustration of how the trio are even more than the sum of their considerable parts. [Jun 2023, p.25]

Their battery-acid sharp Dransfields harmonies and uilleann pipe drones ensure their second album is powerfully strange. [Dec 2017, p.28]

Uplifting and upbeat; it's the sharp-suit Saturday night to Buena Vista Social Club's Sunday Morning. [May 2018, p.33]

A previously unreleased version of Dylan’s “She Belongs To Me” mesmerisingly set to the narcotic pulse of The Velvet Underground’s “All Tomorrow’s Parties”, a take on country tearjerker “Oh Lonesome Me”, weirdly reminiscent of Leonard Cohen. .... The set ends with Ferry’s first new song in a decade ["Star"]. .... Its smouldering brilliance sounds less a postscript to everything it follows than a new beginning, Ferry nearing 80, still alert to the sound of tomorrow calling. [Dec 2024, p.90]

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]

This ensemble, particularly the dynamic front line of Henderson and Shaw, didn't last very long, making this impeccable-sounding set of stone-cold Silver classics an even more crucial addition to the historic record. [Review of the Year 2025, p.44]

Indispensable, but that’s no surprise.

This release overcompensates handsomely, delivering 48 sharp, gorgeous-sounding missives that document ensemble brilliance and Petty’s chiming, hook-happy American-everykid songwriting.

Comes awfully close to the masterwork he so clearly gunning to make. [Jun 2020, p.38]

Ultraviolet... demonstrates both purpose and renewed vigour. [Jul 2022, p.25]

Despite remarkable playing and energy that charges through much of this record, it’s also contemplative, varied and tender at times, with the gentle sway of tracks like “Takoba” hitting as hard as the noise and fury of “Sousoume Tamachek”. [May 2024, p.38]

These 11 tracks, recorded at various locations, also confirm he's more than a neo-classical specialist. [Dec 2013, p.68]

LSD features some of Smith's finest writing. .... You couldn't ask for much better. [Nov 2025, p.31]

Savage Young Du stands as some testament to his [Grant Hart's] wild creativity, and the protean energy of the band that first brought his songs to the world. [Dec 2017, p.34]

Klaus Dinger’s Apache beat and Michael Rother’s steel reels of guitar still have elemental power. ... The National, and Stephen Morris (of New Order) and Gabe Gurnsey, acquit themselves adequately, but Neu!’s music is so singular, there’s next to no point trying to take the material on, even in tribute form. [Oct 2022, p.46]

[A] triumphant resurrection. [Nov 2005, p.96]

While the full deluxe treatment might not life Don't Tell A Soul all the way to "lost classic" status, it at least fleshes out an underappreciated chapter of The Replacements' messy saga. [Nov 2019, p.42]

What strikes you, above all, is the innocence and affection in their breezy blues, at odds with the heavy weather White has made of his post-Stripes career. [Feb 2021, p.49]

Darkly entertaining, thoughtful and a little threatening, St. Vincent fizzes with enthusiasm and the uncontrollable strangeness of life. [Mar 2014, p.74]

It's the freshest, most exciting and far-reaching left-field album in years. [Jun 2003, p.102]

Neon Golden often comes on like a radical update of New Order's Lowlife period, where mournful guitar songs are integrated into a mesh of clicks, pops, glitches and samples. [Mar 2003, p.96]

Kiwanuka is loaded with memorable songs, but the best way to experience them is by listening to the album from start to finish. [Nov 2019, p.26]

As bootlegs from the period have shown, there's a good three hours of stuff out there from these and the so-called "Brown Star Sessions" for Clear Spot. On the fourth disc here, you can find the pick of it. [Dec 2014, p.85]

Love And Theft was quite unlike any other pop album--apart, that is, from Modern Times, its direct and audacious sequel. [Sep 2006, p.72]

In every respect, the performance captured here is as raw and un-redacted as the original record. ... What times. [Jun 2018, p.42]

Exhaustive in the best way possible, emphasising the logistical nightmares of hosting such a big event but also putting listeners right there in the stadium. [Apr 2023, p.41]

Remarkably, the world they create together never curdles into sentimentality. ... Wednesday turn that stabbing pain into triumphant rock'n'roll. [May 2023, p.39]

Serves as both a potent primer on the traumas and triumphs of life in a not-so-racial America and an enthralling demonstration of her playful musical sensibility. [Jun 2019, p.37]

It is music whose scope, erudition and vitriol makes everything else in this year of exceptional musical timidity seem puny. [Nov 2003, p.106]

Includes an epic live show at the Montreux Jazz Festival, where Bowie played songs from Heathen alongside strong selection of hits followed by Low in its atmospheric entirety. [Oct 2025, p.41]

Ana Kravanja, Iztok Koren and Samo Kutin plays sympathetically, but they're also careful enough not to homogenise, each voice finding its own space in which to speak. [Dec 2025, p.36]

Crackles with a wisecracking energy. [Aug 2020, p.36]

When Nevermind rocks, it does so extremely. [Oct 2011, p.101]

Reunited with his band, orchestrated and multiplied, Cave surfs a swelling tide of preposterous proportions. He is the wild god, a wearied charismatic presence, flitting between the songs. Nobody else sounds like this. [Oct 2024, p.26]

The curveballs keep flying through the climactic triptych - the Kid A-evoking eruption "Bow Down", the incantatory "Taxes" and the hallucinogenic "Long Island City Here I Come". [Oct 2025, p.27]

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]

All Mirrors is her boldest reinvention yet. [Nov 2019, p.30]

Natural Brown Prom Queen revels in ear-catching beats and hooks while still maintaining Parks’ mile-a-minute rate of musical ideas. [Oct 2022, p.34]

Anglo-Saxon sextet Sweet Sweet Lies dress nasty themes in sweet acoustic melodies and sharp suits. [Mar 2012, p.98]

Yes, it’s fascinating at times to be a witness to the meticulous construction of great music, but the contents of this boxset feel a mite desperate, rather than generous, and the flabbiness of its 11-minute jams is entirely inappropriate for an album that famously doesn’t contain an ounce of fat.

In short--a monumental album.

For all the ideas and juxtapositions that illuminate these songs, none feel jarring or tokenistic. [Apr 2015, p.79]

Over two decades on, in remastered form, these tracks have aged well, retaining their multi-layered, bass-heavy eclecticism, and moving back and forth between gentle melancholia and hands-in-the-air euphoria. [Jun 2017, p.49]

It’s an odd sort of idea: a trio paying tribute to themselves. But even if no new ground is being broken exactly, there’s a pleasure in hearing the old space cadets out on manoeuvres. The music of Apollo is meditative and benign, yet strangely inscrutable; a reminder that while you might be able to visit space, it will never be home.

They sound as Zappa seldom does: not over-thinking it, and guilelessly lost in the moment and in the exuberant joy of the playing. [Feb 2020, p.40]

A heroic, controlled crash landing. [May 2020, p.25]

Grief, memory and friendship billow up throughout the nine tracks. [Mar 2021, 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]

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

Recalls both Erykah Badu and Arlo Parks, but there's no heavy shadowing here. [Apr 2023, p.32]

Black Bayou is a showcase for Finley the storyteller, an artist who can convincingly inhabit narratives that may not be entirely based on his own experiences, lifestyle or even beliefs. [Nov 2023, p.27]

Ranging from explosive Afro-funk workouts by Petelo Vicka et Son Nzazi and Les Bantous de la Capitale to more psych-influenced stunners by Abeti et Les Redoutables and Zaiko Langa Langa, these rediscoveries are thrilling enough for Congo Funk! to deserve a place next to African Scream Contest among Analog Africa’s most indispensable collections. [May 2024, p.53]

Kim Deal’s solo debut is sonically wide-reaching yet still intimate, exemplified by one of its best tracks, “Are You Mine”. Pensively dreamy, the tune pairs Lynchian doo-wop with an alt.country twang. .... The title track is a stunner too, all swelling strings and booming brass that brings to mind Scott Walker’s avant-pop. [Dec 2024, p.33]

Paradise... brims with life and imagination, humming with the brilliant paradox of a communal spirit imbued with Ahmed’s creative imprint over every note. [Feb 2025, p.32]

Their full engagement in the creative task was never in doubt, and more than 40 years later the result compels close listening. [Apr 2014, p.88]

Down-home majesty. [Sep 2024, p.29]

Four crisply recorded shows.... A super-funky artefact. [Aug 2015, p.94]

The thoughtful intimacies of Wendy Eisenberg make for some of their potent artistic statements yet. [Jun 2026, p.29]

The title, which translates as “breeze”, is a neat metaphor for these eight tracks’ lightness of touch and calm enrichment, whether that’s shivering exquisitely in “Namopi” or tilting at Alice Coltrane’s Kirtan: Turiya Sings with “Rana”, the luminous and trippy, epic closer. [Review of the Year 2024, p.34]

Richer textures, but no luxury-studio sheen or indulgence: the expanded resources are deployed with the care and rigour that characterised her previous use of humbler tools. Her voice is so distinctive and her writing so personal that a strutting backbeat and a flying hi-hat don't affect the essential character of the music. ... Perfect. [Mar 2021, p.36]

Fed is beautifully excessive, ornamented with dazzling soul/pop arrangements. [Sep 2008, p.114]

A vivid storyteller, June approaches traditional music with a similar mix of irreverence and affection. [Apr 2017, p.30]

Golden Hour doesn't carry quite the same bite as either 2015 predecessor Pageant Material or 2013's Sam Trailer Different Park, preferring a more loved-up vibe that favours pillowy sophisti-pop over bittersweet country. [May 2018, p.30]

It's a lean, thrillingly muscular set from a genuinely distinctive talent. [Oct 2018, p.26]

While Waxahatchee has never sounded more suited for mass approval, Crutchfield has never seemed truer to herself. [Apr 2024, p.30]

It's hard to believe there will be a better record than Last Exit released this year. [Jul 2004, p.102]

Her songs feel so neatly woven that they deny all attempts to tease them apart. Listening to Night Reign, you mostly find yourself focusing on Aftab’s voice – a rich and smoky thing, gentle and open-hearted on “Whiskey”, reaching back through the centuries on “Na Gul”. But it also shows she has a keen eye for a collaborator. [Jul 2024, p.29]

They're rich articulations of home, longing and identity, the denuded production allowing a shivering vulnerability to pierce their core. [May 2019, p.32]

It's Apple's refinement as a writer that makes this harrowing psychodrama so gripping. [Aug 2012, p.69]

It feels like one of the landmark American albums of the century so far. [Jan 2008, p.86]

Lankum have found a convincing way to keep the damn hulk going, stoking the engines of folk tradition and setting course to who knows when. [May 2023, p.24]

[A] breathtaking, virtually flawless album. [Sep 2002, p.104]

A bold debut that continues their frenetic explorations of post-punk kraut-jazz but also moves into more electronic and soundscape-like worlds. [Jun 2021, p.33]

Finds Muller reviving a lush disco spirit he once discretely discarded. [Jul 2005, p.92]

It's a extended mediation on the expat experience, with yearningly hymnal renditions. [May 2021, p.27]

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]

Another radical musical/ psychological metamorphosis. [Jun 2024, p.39]

Some of the rather quizzical couplets here, all of them set to heart-wrenching chord sequences that hark back to the band's favorite 1970s guilty pleasures. It set SFA apart from the world of Britpop in the mid-'90s. [Dec 2016, p.51]

The early US albums are particularly punchy, while Beatles ’65 makes an interesting counterpoint to its corresponding European release Beatles For Sale, and this version of A Hard Day’s Night includes four George Martin instrumentals. [Review of the Year 2024, p.43]

Concise at 12 tracks, the stylistic coherence seldom fails to engage. [Feb 2007, p.73]

It is arguably, the Replacements album that best balances the tension between the snotty punk rockers they began as, and the crossover success they were terrified of becoming ... [The included demos and mixes] will find favour with adherents of the rougher, readier Replacements, who around now were struggling with whether or not to blossom into something bigger. [Nov 2020, p.52]

What an incredible head-spinning trip this album is. [Aug 2025, p.26]

It feels as though the band have carved out a new sonic space for them to operate in while still retaining their own identity. [Sep 2024, p.32]

Even by Head's own lofty standards, this represents a late-career masterpiece. [Jun 2022, p.29]

This is Tinariwen as deep and darkly compelling as we've ever heard them. [Apr 2026, p.32]

[A] set of lean, characteristically nuanced, folk-edged songs. [Aug 2022, p.30]

We find all sorts of intriguing experiments. [Aug 2020, p.30]

Anthology is no means definitive, but it remains a comprehensive overview of a terrific and influential band. [Aug 2014, p.89]

through his efforts to convey a profound experience of loss in a long-gone summer, these songs offer an uncommonly generous wealth of grace and beauty. [Aug 2023, p.32]

Live At The Fillmore 1997 stands as both an outstanding document of a great rock'n'roll band at full throttle - and as good a live album as has been made by anybody. [Jan 2023, p.32]

Opening up the album to new ideas and interpretations without obscuring the man himself. [Mar 2020, p.35]

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.