Four albums in, feels like Marr is finally settled into the business of a solo career. [Mar 2022, p.31]

Louis O'Bryen and Asha Lorenz paint a drunker, more heartbroken picture of twentysomething romance on this downbeat sequel. [Nov 2022, p.36]

The result is a rich, expansive yet considered album of indie rock meets shoegaze. [Aug 2025, p.32]

They're still a little too in thrall to the obvious precursors to take flight, but there are some great, clanging pop songs here, too. [May 2016, p.78]

His finest album yet. [Nov 2015, p.70]

A glowering inferno. [Mar 2019, p.24]

For the most part, this Stockholm outfit's sun-streaked, clever-white-boy pop-funk catches a season as expusitely as Air did circa Moon Safari, or as Hot Chip have more recently. [Aug 2006, p.104]

Their music is accruing more bewitching, dramatic layers. [Jul 2016, p.71]

Despite the sombre circumstances, J.T. is a celebratory affair, the elder man bringing a hymnal ruggedness "Far Away In Another Town" and a hearty hoedown spirit to "I Don't Care." [Feb 2021, p.27]

The 51-year-old family man's struggles with depression and anxiety bring unrelenting urgency to the album. [Jan 2023, p.15]

Respect is due--such is their musical vigor, PJ make it sound like it all really matters. [Sep 2009, p.90]

It is a remarkably assured piece of work, gracefully furnished and artfully wrought. [Feb 2017, p.36]

At times, it's like an architectural drawing. But the repetitions soothe and tease, and then you start to hear the leaves. [Aug 2013, p.78]

It's hard, then, not to view My Days Of 58 as among his most transparently autobiographical works, as brimming with self-scrutiny and pontification as it is elegant wordplay. [Mar 2026, p.26]

His strong, unfussy voice is endlessly empathetic and his guitar playing lithe and expressive. [Oct 2011, p.98]

Calling this Wells' pop album does a disservice to its cheerfully experimental tone. [Aug 2014, p.76]

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

This careful layering of old and new, east and west, has something of the forensic deliberation of post-rock experimentation about it, but songs like "For Everything That You Lost" and "They Keep Silence," which evokes Killing Joke, are thrilling in their intensity. [Aug 2016, p.77]

Simpson and Ferguson keep the country stylings fresh, and Childers delivers the songs with the melodic urgent of early Steve Earle. [Feb 2018, p.34]

Both their most straightforward album and their most elusive. [Mar 2018, p.34]

It's a warm, beguiling set that tips its hat to roots music interpreters as disparate as Hoyt Axton, Fairport Convention, Dolly Parton, The Byrds and Bobbie Gentry, wile also tapping Cajun fiddle music and the work of Ralph Mooney. [Nov 2019, p.23]

There's an appealingly alien quality to Joyfultalk's third album, a sound that drifts beyond familiar reference points. [Apr 2020, p.28]

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]

It captures the core of what Jones does. His compositions are always assured, and his playing is never overwrought. [Jul 2022, p.29]

The group's most unabashedly pop-forward and irresistibly buoyant effort since 1996's Dizzy Heights. [Nov 2022, p.32]

Auerbach's stoic, close-mic'd vocals and gnarled tendrils of distorted guitar bring a devastating immediacy to an album that contemplates the death of love and, by extension, mortality itself, seeking closure. [Mar 2023, p.25]

This is a ceaselessly unpredictable and eclectic record that manages to sound as traditional as it does experimental. [Sep 2023, p.23]

“Trago notícias de uma nova geração,” he sings reassuringly, “Com certeza o mundo é bom” (“I bring the next generation’s news / That the world is surely good”). The music on Pequena Vertigem De Amor is so wonderfully seductive, so convincingly utopian, that you almost believe him. [Dec 2025, p.32]

Even by his prolific standards, Sojourner is impressive. [Oct 2007, p.99]

Something's happening wherever you turn on tracks that are dense with detail and brilliant accumulations of incident, but never overwrought or too busy, sheer grace their common link. [Sep 2011, p.80]

Earle also seems acutely aware that it’s impossible to forage deeper under the skin of these songs than Van Zandt did himself. But he’s able to summon the same air of desolation and disquiet by other means.

The production has opened up enormously. [Feb 2017, p.32]

Listeners anticipating some sort of shoegaze supergroup will be neither entirely wrong nor remotely disappointed. "A Different Girl" and "8th Deadly Sin" especially demonstrate that Berenyi retains her knack for wrapping languid melodies around waspish lyrics. [May 2025, p.28]

The music is so lovely, and the lyrics so smart, you're reassured that all hope is not lost. [Sep 2025, p.38]

Some songs don't quite live up to the arrangements, but the sonic ambition here shames nearly every other major-label release of 2016. [Jul 2016, p.78]

There's a less scrappy approach on this album, a glossier production with more realised and experimental offerings. [Jun 2017, p.28]

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

Silent Alarm's innovation, sense of urgency and sleek production are enough to comfortably elevate Bloc Party above the post-punk rabble. [Mar 2005, p.106]

Oldham's rustic configurations have been replaced by the fine Chicago kosmische act Bitchin Bajas, who provide authentic relaxation tape vibes and stretch the parameters of Oldham's songcraft. [May 2016, p.69]

It's clever, surprisingly enjoyable and utterly insane. [Apr 2025, p.39]

Categorisable, but mostly excellent. [Oct 2017, p.35]

Mid Air amounts to 14 enigmatic variations on this mood, just piano, voice, the occasional pale moonbeam of orchestration, which miraculously never feels monotonous or morose.

10 taut, white-knuckle songs. [Feb 2016, p.72]

For all that Ghosts Of West Virginia is a serious work contemplating a serious subject, there are moments where Earle sounds like he's having more fun than any time since The Mountain. [Jun 2020, p.32]

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

It's an album of songs beautiful on the surface, but with darkness nibbling on all sides. [Sep 2017, p.18]

Wells adds waves of beauty, and flurries of click-track neurosis to Moffat's dispatches from the fringes of self-disgust. [Jun 2011, p.91]

The Ghosts Within typifies the uniqueness of Wyatt's oeuvre, though on this occasion it's not just his. [Nov 2010, p.95]

Exceeding his early promise, Vynehall has produced a richly original debut to rank alongside his musical heroes, from Gavin Bryars to My Bloody Valentine to Aphex Twin. [Jul 2018, p.37]

A typically assured piece of work. [Jun 2020, p.30]

It's clear that Brown is still capable of being sonically adventurous even while pausing to take stock. [Jan 2024, p.27]

The Kid is a hugely satisfying example of Smith';s wholesome and harmonious vision, one that manages to enmesh the wonders of music, memory and nature via analogue synthesis with out explicit reference to the healing properties of crystals. [Nov 2017, p.38]

Imagine a jam session between King Crimson, Fugazi and '70s Miles. Now imagine it working. That's the Mars Volta. [Aug 2003, p.98]

The band's love of jamming bears fruit when they find a real groove on "Bulldozer Love." [Feb 2014, p.71]

It's every bit as immediate and listenable as it is confident, and more buoyant overall than the sombre Modern Vampires.... It's also flighty and so wide-ranging, at times it reads like a future compilation rather than the next step from a band now into their imperial phase. [June 2019, p.35]

It might just be the best record of this year, and the best of Rowland's career. [Jul 2012, p.66]

There's nothing profound about Electric Version. But classic pop has seldom sounded so much fun. [Jun 2003, p.98]

Point is a quietly beautiful, low-slung beach house record, a chill-out soundtrack to the distant sunrise over Tokyo bay. [Feb 2002, p. 120]

Despite his recent move to a major label, these songs do retain the malicious edge that made its predecessor so enjoyable. [Sep 2016, p.75]

It is, in fact, a portrait of life’s triumphs and travails, its joys and sorrows rendered in wholly compelling detail.

While Prass's gossamer tone is still light and distinctive. The moods, textures and themes, however, have evolved. [Jul 2018, p.35]

Highlights are the playfully bobbing rhythms of "Geruhsam" and epic closer "Aus Weiter Ferne," a masterful interplay of harmonic sweetness and menacing drone. [May 2020, p.32]

Not a disaster = almost a triumph. [Jul 2020, p.39]

If at times it's a little too knowing for its own good, the music itself is less claustrophobic than before. [Nov 2007, p.121]

This LP captures him very much on the up. ... A delightful heaviness to songs like "Irrational Poison" and "Sin King" that gives the whole thing real heft and drive, protecting it from whimsy. [Mar 2019, p.32]

In his communions with nature, Elverum continues the American tradition of Whitman, Thoreau or Emerson, immersing himself in hymns to the land. [Mar 2015, p.78]

Always confident in his ability, here he conjures sublime moments with "Retrograde" and ""digital Lion" before violating each with curdled klaxons, his voice throughout pitched persuasively somewhere between Antony Hegarty and Jeff Buckley. [May 2013, p.67]

A disappointing triumph of retro-goth style over substance. [Jul 2013, p.80]

Their last LP, 2014's Gamel, was their best for yonks and Nijimusi maintains that strong form. [Feb 2020, p.26]

City of Refuge finds her back in Appalachian mode though, the songs shaded with fiddle, banjo and dulcimer and borne aloft by Washburn's airy voice. [Mar 2011, p.92]

Thile is in a different class to the aspirational dabbling of contemporary music's most famous interpreter of Dowland, Sting. [Nov 2013, p.79]

The extent of [Caleb Scofield's] bandmates' shock and grief is palpable throughout the eight songs they built up from the demos recorded with Scofield. All that sadness and fury adds further turbulence both to the more melodic likes of "Winter Window" as well as "Led To The Wolves." [Jul 2019, p.26]

The third outstanding album of his career. [Mar 2007, p.103]

Mutilator is very much in the vein of a 2013's career-topping Floating Coffin. [Jun 2015, p.83]

Raw in texture but ambitious in scope. [May 2011, p.86]

A powerful example of how songs reverberate through the years to accrue contemporary meaning. [Jun 2006, p.92]

Volume 2 contains more talk than its predecessor, and by linking the 39 songs on these two discs with snippets of dialogue, the compilers attempt to replicate the mood and flow of those shows, showing us how the group broke through the barriers of formality hitherto erected between performers and audience. [Dec 2013, p.77]

This cosmic suite evokes a steamy union between Vangelis and Santana, and is Lindstrom's strongest work by far. [Oct 2008, p.96]

It's their first masterpiece. [Album of the Month, May 2005, p.94]

She has, it seems, reached an accommodation with herself, with her doubts and her strengths. The two worlds co-exist beautifully here, the soft Power and the raw.

Tempers the sounds of traditional mountain music with a heady sense of experimentalism. [May 2021, p.28]

Some of Deerhunter's prettiest songs to date. [Feb 2019, p.13]

The excellent military beat of "The Aphorist" and almost genteel "Worm In Heaven" are fine point of entry, even if the cacophonous likes of "Michigan Hammers," "Modern Business Hymns" and "I Am You Now" are more typical representations of the band's disorienting sound. [Aug 2020, p.36]

Unexpected and quietly ambitious. [Aug 2019, p.32]

This is as riveting and beautiful a valedictory address as you could hope for from these underground heroes. [Jan 2011, p.95]

Cut The World blow Hegarty's songs to grander scales. [Sep 2012, p.73]

It features tracks recorded with rock outfits like The Flying Hearts which recall Jonathan Richman and Lou Reed; minimal, folksy miniatures that sound a ltttle like John Martyn or James Taylor; and a string of delicious, whimsical synth-pop songs that are as good as anything in the early-'80s canon. [Dec 2008, p.115]

It invokes countless familiar sources--The Byrds, Ennio Morricone, The La's, The Doors, Joe Meek--but reassembles them in such an unexpected way that 500-year-old songs sound utterly fresh. [Feb 2010, p.88]

The wonder of it all lies not so much on the amount of ground she covers but the way she inhabits her material so convincingly. [Oct 2011, p.94]

It's packed with diverse performances. [Mar 2012, p.104]

Distance takes the intensity of 29013's Blindspot, and doubles it. [Sep 2014, p.77]

The results are by turns atmospheric, deeply odd, funky and wistful, but never less than superb. [Nov 2014, p.84]

Michael Nyman's elegant, pulsing scores are evoked on "Requiem" and "Black Madonna," while "Coat Of Arms," with soft vocals and mournful oboe, moves with quiet dignity. [Apr 2015, p.72]

Although What If's nine instrumental tracks are heavily rhythmic, this is a refreshingly gridless and affecting music, with serrated clicks and muted arpeggios wandering organically in and out of time. [Apr 2017, p.30]

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

The pair's dialogue on SpiderBeetleBee move fluidly between unison harmonics and point-counterpoint. [Nov 2017, p.32]

A thing of gentle and radiant wonder. [Mar 2018, p.24]

Watson's snarky humour prevents anything from feeling too weighty. [Aug 2018, p.35]