With each track the listener sinks deeper into their world, and though the punchier rap numbers like "B£E" cut through, these scruffily celestial miniatures add up to present a compelling picture. [Dec 2021, p.33]

They waltz from space-jazz ("In Cucina") to disco-dub ("Phase One Million") and library scat-funk ("Tub Erupt"), the whole thing tied together by Cathy Lucas's dusky delivery. [Dec 2021, p.35]

“Move”, featuring Thomas, is a thrilling mix of swaggering pop hooks and sweltering Latin grooves and the album’s undoubted highlight. Yet, elsewhere, you can’t help wondering if Santana’s fluid guitar playing really needs “help” from such a ragbag of heavy friends. [Dec 2021, p.33]

It's a slightly exhausting but often thrilling sonic voyage. [Nov 2021, p.32]

It's still deeply strange. ... Crucial to its success is its keen rhythmic sense. [Oct 2021, p.25]

Two years on, her sound is equally ambitious but more committed: here are modern, maximalist pop songs with top notes of R&B, Trap and Afrobeat, plus experimental detailing. As ever, Taylor's lyrics convince. [Nov 2021, p.32]

Frequently thrilling, and its pilfering from America's classic rock catalogue - including The Allman Brothers, The Doobie Brothers, Creedence clearwater Revival, The Band and Crazy Horse - is affectionate and celebratory. [Nov 2021, p.33]

Some songs are mere fragments and there's an early version of standalone single "U.S. Mail" in place of Sundowner's stunner "Jamie," but this is otherwise a beautiful and raw selection still bearing the scars and charms of creative birth. [Oct 2021, p.29]

Thorpe achieves a balance of high-shine electro-pop, gauzy ambient flow and jazzier acoustic elements that couldn't be more attuned to his formidable skillset. [Nov 2021, p.35]

Smart stylistic detours mask something a little deeper. [Oct 2021, p.24]

if Shannon Lay's solo expression has been a steady blooming across three albums, Geist represents its full-blown folkish splendour. [Nov 2021, p.29]

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

As peculiar as "The Doll" and "Blue Tits" are, at heart this is thrilling, possibly visionary pop. [Nov 2021, p.25]

Blake's fragmented post-dubstep has always had an air of bleak melancholy, but nothing he's done has been quite as self-consciously miserable as this. [Nov 2021, p.25]

The Dharma Wheel channels the Allman Brothers, Grateful Dead, Crazy Horse and more in its generous spirit. [Nov 2021, p.29]

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

After reaching for Bowie-esque grandeur on the opening "Song For Agnes," they lock into an INXS-style chromium-funk groove on "America's Cup" and reimagine The Clash as a synth-punk band on the speed-burner "Human Touch." [Nov 2021, p.32]

Carnegie Hall has its own distinctive vibe, with the songwriter coming to terms in real time with his burgeoning, sometimes over-enthusiastic fanbase. [Nov 2021, p.49]

While these sonic smudges sometimes feels scrappy, there are sublime interludes here too. [Nov 2021, p.35]

CDs 3 and 4 offer Infidels tracks blessedly stripped of producer Mark Knopfler's digital trickery and overdubs. ... With deft elimination of Arthur Baker's era-specific production effects, "I Remember You" becomes a ravishing thing, the gospel lilt of "Emotionally Yours" a gorgeous highlight. [Nov 2021, p.40]

His sixth solo album has some decent uptempo moments. ... Less compelling are the albums world-weary ballads, but one old downtempo number, "Foreign Sand," benefits from a stripped-back acoustic treatment. [Nov 2021, p.35]

The songs are introspective, reflective and fretful. ... It's best moments are its quieter ones. [Nov 2021, p.26]

With her voice sounding more like a cross between Nico and Patti Smith than ever, she laments division and bigotry on songs such as "Queasy" and "Overblown," while musically she spans pedal-steel-laden country rock, punk menace and string-driven Velvets drones. [Oct 2021, p.35]

The stripped-back production adds a sense of immediacy and places focus on the fine vocals of hall and Golding, plus guest vocalist Hannah Hu. [Oct 2021, p.33]

The tracks range from the wiry and infectious to the outright transcendental, while some of the vocal effects evoke the sound of those early krautrock pioneer. [Oct 2021, p.31]

The result is a delightful mix of new-wave-influenced pop and synth-laden Eno-style instrumentals. [Nov 2021, p.30]

Woodland concepts aside, the band are most arresting when knocking out groove-locked rhythms with bursts of spluttering electronics. [Oct 2021, p.33]

Their shimmering, somnolent ambience is irrefutably palliative. [Oct 2021, p.25]

It's another perfectly good Ty Segall album, full of perfectly good Ty Segall songs. [Nov 2021, p.32]

It's when the band marry this discordance with melody that they really shine. [Nov 2021, p.35]

The duo take their movie-fuelled visions in directions that are continually surprising. [Nov 2021, p.35]

It begins with Michael Stipe's stunning interpretation of "Sunday Morning." ... The tracks that fly highest here are in fact the least faithful, more subversive. [Oct 2021, p.22]

Levy's lo-fi sonic palette and dreamy, speak-sung vocals hint at intimacy, her creative use of sound effects and electronics the mark of an archivist. [Oct 2021, p.29]

It still possesses a certain screwball charm, particularly the curdled croon of "I Don't Mind The Wait," but too often sounds like smug pastiche. [Nov 2021, p.30]

Musgraves' superpower is her ability to convey complex emotions via concise phrasing, which means quieter songs such as "Good Wife" and "If This Was A Movie" hit especially hard. [Nov 2021, p.30]

Local Valley is positive, engaged, almost rousing. [Oct 2021, p.32]

Invigorating results. [Oct 2021, p.27]

He uses digital means to deepen, layer, smear, distend and otherwise tweak the emotive piano figures that remain discernable. ... As is often the case for Tiersen's music, the effect is mesmerising. [Oct 2021, p.35]

Self-reflection is twinned with a rueful survey of the current state of the nation. [Oct 2021, p.25]

It also might be the best album this consistently weird and interesting bunch have made. [Oct 2021, p.27]

Stasis Taylor enriches with resonant atmosphere. [Oct 2021, p.33]

Atmospheric soundscapes. ... Awash with an adventurousness some might find surprising in a 71-year-old. [Oct 2021, p.25]

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]

She immerses listeners in the remarkably wide range of textures and timbres she explores on chamber organ, Mellotron, oboe and other instruments rarely combined in such fashion since prog's golden era. [Oct 2021, p.27]

Though occasionally guilty of easy-listening tastefulness, the Haikus rarely sound less than gorgeous. [Oct 2021, p.28]

fter the snarling insensitivity that once defined The Stranglers, it’s reflective and poignant. Even if you strip away the late touches acknowledging Greenfield’s loss, the mood is suddenly grave and inevitably valedictory. [Oct 2021, p.20]

The real revelation here is 25-year old James Francies, who plays Jimmy Smith-style Hammond on "Timeline," heavy rock organ on the Hendrix-inspired "Lodger" and mischievous Monk-style piano on a version of Ornette Coleman's "Turnaround." [Oct 2021, p.29]

I've Been Trying to Tell You is immediate and soulful. [Oct 2021, p.26]

K Bay probes the Richmond, VA-based artist's teeming psyche while advancing his anything-does record-making style. [Oct 2021, p.34]

The Sniffers sometimes sound limited by their studiously low-brow, lo-fi aesthetic. Even so, Comfort To Me offers a mostly exhilarating mix of headbanging riffs, profane wit and gutter-punk attitude. [Oct 2021, p.24]

It is easy to make music that is difficult and it is easy to make music that is beautiful. But it is quite the trick to be both at the same time, and on Hey What, Low mark themselves out as masters of the art. [Oct 2021, p.16]

Diaz deftly carries the torch, fusing stripped-down, bleeding-heart acoustic meditations with bursts of fiery instrumentation, her glossy voice at once tender and insistent, rhythmically narrating her loveworn journey with precise, clever turns of phrase. [Sep 2021, p.27]

It's a set as vast as it is remarkable. [Sep 2021, p.36]

It's clear we're in for an introspective ride, though the more major-key, upbeat nature of many of the record's arrangements belie these melancholy undertones. [Oct 2021, p.29]

An even more ambitious conceptual album that finds her sharing her insecurities, praising her heroes and going on a fairytale voyage over 19 tracks. [Oct 2021, p.30]

The body of the album is given over to gorgeous, baroque instrumentals. ... But there is variety here. [Sep 2021, p.24]

Her fourth album's dramatically sparser, its unconventional structures recalling Julia Holter. ... She's most compelling on "This Time," whose haunted spaces are gradually filled with flickering keyboards and ebow guitar. [Oct 2021, p.31]

Brilliantly realised. [Oct 2021, p.31]

His brightest and most vivid record. ... Here he finds new dimensions, rethinking his phrasing, tone and cadence. [Sep 2021, p.16]

Stylistically promiscuous and consistently inventive, Martin remains a maestro of multiple mutant genres, many of his own making. [Oct 2021, p.25]

On Robert Burns' "Song Composed In August," the voices lend beautifully in a seasonal (temporary?) celebration of love. [Sep 2021, p.33]

This is a nourishing and deeply meditative record. [Oct 2021, p.27]

She tears into bilious rockers "Big Baby" and "Two Shots" like the wildcat of yesteryear. ... But Jackson really comes into her own on a heart-rendering cover of Johnny Tillotson's "It Keeps Right On A Hurtin'" and co-written country ballad "That's What Love Is." [Oct 2021, p.28]

De Souza's ability to balance the brute force of "Real Pain" and "Bad Dream" with something as sunny as "Hold U" is another reason to look forward to more of her shapeshifting. [Sep 2021, p.27]

BRM's second is a dazzling stylistic display. [Oct 2021, p.25]

Screen Violence is a punchy and determined effort, full of big hooks ands awash with glittering synth textures. [Sep 2021, p.27]

The "before" is fractious, two-chord Velvet Underground cool - the sultry "August," the minute-and-a-half burst of "Time Walk" - the "after" like eavesdropping on something private. [Sep 2021, p.25]

Fizzing creativity is audible across the whole record. [Aug 2021, p.35]

Taken together, the music of Year Of The Spider is anything but stuck in the past. Its novel sonic alloys, and punk rock spirit, very much ring of right now. [Sep 2021, p.20]

McMurtry's latest lifts storytelling-in-song to meticulous new levels. [Sep 2021, p.29]

At its best here, this produces minor masterpieces like the shimmering romance of "The First Day" or "Circles In The Firing Line," a lithe and bristling combination of John Grant and John Misty. [Sep 2021, p.35]

The chiming and charming likes of "Scratching At The Lid" and "Wanderlust" are typical of the second effort. [Sep 2021, p.31]

A spare and seductively lonesome pooling of bluesy folk and electronics that eschews "folktronica" and nods to Martyn, Hollis, Crosby and Jason Molina. [Sep 2021, p.25]

Nile's title track offers up celebration and togetherness, with disease and idiocracy pushed into the back mirror, and guitars and organs to the fore.[Sep 2021, p.31]

While tunes like "Honeymoon" and "Trick Mirror" have a graceful Fleetwood Mac-style charm, they lack the lyrical bite that was one of her early USPs, and the vocal rasp heard on live performances seems smoothed off. [Sep 2021, p.25]

Jungle's well trusted blend of neo-R&B, French Touch and retro-disco gains new zest on the duo's third album thanks to stylistic detours into acid-jazz classiness and David Axelrod-style psych splendour. elsewhere the formula wears a little thinner . [Sep 2021, p.28]

He finds a Teenage Fanclub-style melancholic charm on songs like "America," "How Can I Love You" and the excellent "Palindromes," while "All The Same" and "Twenty-Two" head into heavier territory. [Sep 2021, p.25]

The result is an exquisitely polished music that sometimes strays a little into fromage. [Sep 2021, p.24]

Shows off a rare side to Blunt: a soul-baring sincerity. [Sep 2021, p.25]

He's clearly referring to something much broader and deeper than artistic definition but Andrew's mercurial mindset is again the key to Liars' singularity. If The Apple Drop is more, in light of their history, a considered experiential teaser than a synapse frazzler, it's his choice. Once more, expectation can go to hell. [Sep 2021, p.32]

Classy but underpowered. [Aug 2021, p.24]

Attains orchestral grandeur on intricate set pieces. [Sep 2021, p.28]

A rich, impassioned set of songs. [Sep 2021, p.24]

It's weird and enticing, hypnotic and jarring. In a word: it's Chasny. [Sep 2021, p.33]

There's no denying the smooth grooves of Willie Mitchel and Al Green is a template for several cute here. [Sep 2021, p.33]

The malevolent, Stooges-and-Suicide-styled noise of their definitive Blood Red River is less apparent, but attitudinal chops and unpredictability abound. [Sep 2021, p.33]

In the space of an economical 40 minutes, crystallise everything that makes Crosby such an alluring, vital and still relevant force. [Sep 2021, p.22]

The fuzz-heavy pop-punk he was making back then still echoes loudly here but by connecting with producer Dave Sitek, the material also sounds crisper. [Sep 2021, p.35]

His vocals--as exuberant in his seventies as half a century ago. [Sep 2021, p.35]

Nelson's paeans to familial bonds form a loose song cycle that frequently surprises and is capable of effortlessly lifting the listener's spirits. [Sep 2021, p.29]

Though not everything here works, Spiral remains consistently intriguing throughout. [Sep 2021, p.27]

There are barely any duff Sault tracks. [Sep 2021, p.26]

More style than substance at times, maybe, but invariably rich in promise. [Sep 2021, p.27]

They have not deviated from their core virtues: drolly mordant lyrics, instinctive tunefulness and the lo-fi new-wave sensibility that carries it all. [Sep 2021, p.27]

Wherever you care to drop the needle or let the shuffle button take you, the essence of this collaboration and the velocity of its execution somehow hoovers you up and brings you along. [Aug 2021, p.20]

Scott's ability to weave between monster guitar eruptions, refined pop and stripped-back moments that allow her voice to soar is a constant. [Sep 2021, p.35]

The band showcase their wide range on this imaginative and timely covers album. [Aug 2021, p.29]

Stand For Myself is a headphones album, lovingly written, arranged and produced. [Aug 2021, p.32]