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.

The result is a dynamic and punchy record that finds the band sounding comfortable yet unpredictable as they immerse themselves more in electronic sounds. [Dec 2021, p.29]

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

Punk-rock and post-punk templates are smashed as needed by guitarist Mark Bowen and co-producer Kenny Beats. [Dec 2021, p.29]

While its New Age themes may dissuade some, Hopkins affirms his genius for fashioning unparalleled landscapes from sound. [Dec 2021, p.28]

An all-instrumental set of improvised studio performances as lyrical and soulful as they are virtuosic and energised. [Nov 2021, p.25]

Nearer The Fountain, More Pure The Stream Flows is soaked in a peculiar English melancholy. ... Best of all is the closer “Particles”, one of Albarn’s finest melodies, a woozy, drumless ballad based around a pretty Wurlitzer electric piano riff and a creepy electronic drone that gives the song a hymn-like quality. [Dec 2021, p.22]

While some results can feel incomplete, it's riveting to hear the structures Allen creates even for Wasser's most sinuous compositions, the elastic almost-funk of "enter The Dragon" being the strongest evidence of this collaboration's viability. [Dec 2021, p.29]

Worth waiting for, waiting for. [Dec 2021, p.23]

You Get It All shows no dip in quality. [Nov 2021, p.26]

Mann's striking vocals, empathetic and emotional, weave through anxiety and depression, crisis and loss. Melodic arrangements abound. [Dec 2021, p.29]

The frontman and his septet sculpt grooves and hooks that immediately grab hold. [Dec 2021, p.33]

Extra disc Kid Amnesiae mostly puts a fresh spin on pre-existing material, with just a handful of previously unheard compositions. Hearing them again two decade later, the shock of the new has faded, but the sonic richness and meticulous attention to detail endures. Behind the fizz and crunch and crackle lies a surprisingly lush, soulful beauty. [Dec 2021, p.40]

Bovell's take doesn't suggest new approaches, so much as reinforce and highlight what was already there. [Dec 2021, p.45]

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]

As with her best material, it's an album to lip-synch for your life to. [Oct 2021, p.31]

On this generous and kaleidoscopic soul album, Harding holds nothing back. [Dec 2021, p.30]

While themes of race and gender are woven into this richly sensual second, notably the defiant spoken-word piece “Changes”, they do not define her kaleidoscopic work overall. [Dec 2021, p.29]

Sweeping strings and sparse piano merge deftly with Jordan’s melancholic voice on “Light Blue”, while the fingerpicked “c. et al.” is bare-bones heartache wrapped up in tender beauty. [Dec 2021, p.33]

A lyrical treasure trove, but the biggest surprise of the self-produced album is the richness of the sound. Nadler’s usual sparse, gothic folk style is emboldened by well-chosen collaborators from Simon Raymonde to Emma Ruth Rundle. [Dec 2021, p.31]

He's honest about uncertainties both personal and political. [Nov 2021, p.25]

His second album is a rich, meaty fusion of jazz, grime, hip-hop, dancehall and reggae. [Dec 2021, p.26]

A heavily disguised break-up album, which secretes its sorrow beneath waves of gushing pop. [Dec 2021, p.29]

Giske spins the likes of “Cruising” and “Void” into bold extended pieces that are gripping in their poignancy and intensity. [Dec 2021, p.27]

I Don't Live Here Anymore delivers even more of their characteristic questing wallop. [Nov 2021, p.22]

Their second studio album of 2021 has its own idiosyncratic mood board: mariachi horns on “The Bell Gets Out Of The Way”, a string section on “High In The Rain”, unsettling séance speak on “Razor Bug”. Triumphant closer “My (Limited) Engagement”, meanwhile, sounds like (yet another) outsider art tour de force for the primary school-turned-lo-fi visionary. Never indifferent, never quite the same. [Dec 2021, p.27]

Shouty Japanese pop-punk quartet Chai guest on wonderfully bleepy “More Joy!”, Giorgio Moroder assists with the thrilling digital disco of “Beautiful Lies”, Bowie’s pianist Mike Garson guests on the elegant ballad “Falling”, while producer Erol Alkan adds a dancefloor-friendly sheen to proceedings. [Dec 2021, p.27]

This is still music with a lot of virtuosity, and a great many notes, but it and its players are living its adaptability, as the evidence reveals all we have previously believed this composition to be, a confluence of free improvisation and what later became “spiritual jazz”. [Dec 2021, p.43]

The faithful arrangements deprive the collection of any real edge – "Elle Et Moi" should be sexier – but this is not the place for surprises. [Dec 2021, p.25]

He tells a sad story but one enlivened by his skills as a guitarist, his expressiveness as a singer and his insights as a lyricist. ... Every song has at least one line that will stop you in your tracks, some songs two or three. [Nov 2021, p.18]

It's Fohr's stunning vocal that drives the album. [Nov 2021, p.27]

The retro-futurist fun peaks with the bopping space-disco of the title track and the irresistible "Refractions (In The Rain)," while loungey sax and self-help guides to meditation smooth "On The Other Side..."'s journey to the stars. [Nov 2021, p.27]

Harris makes the most of the means available to her and allows her songs to land the way they need to land. [Nov 2021, p.34]

Tim Showalter has channelled his grief after losing loved ones and the agony he endured getting straight into a set of nakedly emotional songs, while producer Kevin Ratterman has erected a reverberant wall of sound to match the scale of his outpourings. [Dec 2021, p.35]

Texis sounds like a band having more fun than they have had in years. [Dec 2021, p.33

These are recorded almost as demos, in a more intimate and lo-fi way than usual, bringing him even closer in sound as well as spirit to the likes of Townes Van Zandt and Ron Sexsmith. [Dec 2021, p.33]

The sinister slow-burn of "Application Apparatus" and Tom Tom Club-worthy quirk of "Trullo" are further indications of their rude state of health. [Dec 2021, p.31]

Unpredictability is its greatest asset. [Dec 2021, p.31]

A captivating set, aided by a full band that shift is between artful, countryish ballads ("Simple," "Ride") and cabin-fever rockers ("Face," the abstract "Gem"). [Dec 2021, p.27]

Their most collaborative but also most pointedly personal, reckoning with loss, queerness and self-actualisation through music that is as adventurous as it is immediate. [Dec 2021, p.27]