The DNA strands tying bop, Afrobeat, jungle and funk mean Allen’s steady, minimal jitter philosophically and rhythmically fi ts with a dozen resistant voices, 40 years asfter Fela, flickering beneath Sampa The Great’s taunting slur and, on rubbery highlight “Cosmosis”, Ben Okri, Damon Albarn and Skepta, Allen engaged and inherent in the present ’til the last beat. [Jun 2021, p.21]

Sixty Summers sees the kitten-voiced Julia take even bolder steps into uncharted territory. [Mar 2021, p.37]

Eventually, the unrelenting aggressiveness of Typhoons becomes exhausting; better to ignite a playlist by tossing in one of these potent cherry bombs. [Jun 2021, p.31]

The deliciously tense opener, “Make Worry For Me”, proves their close chemistry persists, but it’s the quieter, more solemn back half of this long album – in particular the delicate “You Can Regret What You Have Done” – that fi nds them leaning on each other like best unbeaten brothers. [May 2021, p.32]

Layered with cryptic clues, poetic quotes and fragmentary vocal loops, this lush electronic jazz odyssey is an unorthodox curio but consistently rewarding. [May 2021, p.33]

The Breeders are a popular choice, covered by Bradford Cox, Big Thief and Tune-Yards (whose "Cannonball" is almost as fun as the original. [Jun 2021, p.33]

Bold, sunless and fabulously unsettling. [Jun 2021, p.47]

d'Ecco has become marvellously proficient at channelling the spirits of Bowie, Bolan and Jobriath into riff-forward dance-rock numbers, and In Standard Definition is irresistible trash for anyone so inclined. [May 2021, p.23]

What lingers is that vivid voice. [Jun 2021, p.25]

The prevailing mood is one of stately elegance but there are flashes of wit, too. [Jun 2021, p.25]

An occasional change of pace might be welcome, but the craftsmanship is beyond reproach; swings, yes, but those roundabouts. [May 2021, p.24]

Too often, however, he's overshadowed by the phlegmatic vocals of pub rocker Roger C Reale, which means the most revelatory tracks here are the instrumentals. [May 2021, p.24]

Pete Townshend’s songwriting reaches deeper and wider with the unveiling of left field gem “Sunrise”, celebrated pocket opera “Rael” and the mighty “I Can See For Miles”. The band’s playful spirit also means it carries its conceptual weight lightly. [May 2021, p.46]

Oddly calming, even if it chills. [May 2021, p.24]

Great stuff. More please. [May 2021, p.27]

They’ve smuggled in sobering thoughts of isolation, loneliness and optimism’s perpetual challenge. But hope wins through with the sprightly funk and handclaps of closer “You Get Better”. [May 2021, p.25]

Highlights include Idles’ explosive “Peace Signs”; St Panther unlocking the irresistible pop heart of “One Day”; and “Love More” given a rhythmic, world-weary makeover by Fiona Apple. [Jun 2021, p.46]

Shake The Foundations is an accurate representation of its field, taking in both its achievements and its many foibles – a smart but patchy collection. [Jun 2021, p.47]

The likes of Khruangbin, St Vincent, fhoebe Bridgers and Josh Homme spice up Macca’s songs in their idiosyncratic fashion, while a few improve the originals. [Jun 2021, p.28]

It finds its sound in glowing electric waltzes, piled high with massed guitars and sawing fiddles, that take up a riff and grind it into extinction. Not to be missed, though, is their skill for softer atmospheres. [Jun 2021, p.27]

It’s hard to resist the sensory impact of these songs. Chemtrails picks up the nostalgic thread of 2019’s Norman Fucking Rockwell!, though here she’s mostly Midwest and more melodic. [Jun 2021, p.25]

Hanson has imbued this LP with a thematic and musical cohesiveness that makes it the finest record of his career to date.

It's excellent, with enchanting melodies, emotional depth and a few unexpected evolutions. [May 2021, p.26]

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

As familiar as a hug from an old friend. Yet the band's knack for colliding pop melodies with thrashing drums, pummelling bass and screeching guitars is as effective as ever. [May 2021, p.25]

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

Off-kilter chamber pop telling ear-pricking tales: worth staying in for. [May 2021, p.31]

On "The Thing Itself" the pair are at their most graceful, rising airborne and serene above the disorder. [Apr 2021, p.27]

GVF strut and swagger through a sweeping hard-rock extravaganza that propels them from emulators to inheritors of a rich legacy. [May 2021, p.27]

First Farewell is wistful as well as smart and engaged. [May 2021, p.32]

White's material feels freer than usual, full of spirals of organ and keys, collapsing new rhythms and delirious jazz-funk riffs; Holley's one-take improvisation edge towards visionary incantations. [May 2021, p.35]

On This Is Really Going To Hurt, singer Will Taylor's characteristic black humour still cloaks the West Coast harmonies of "Everyone's A Winner," but the emotions cuts deep. [May 2021, p.27]

Once again transforms himself from a nerdy Clark Kent to a kickass retro-soul man, shapeshifting through Promenade Blue's 11 period-piece originals. [May 2021, p.35]

The result is an album of glorious hybridity, rooted in ancient griot tradition but serendipitously transformed into an audaciously cosmopolitan melting pot. [Apr 2021, p.28]

Offers the kind of transcendental electronics that burrow into your brain. [Mar 2021, p.37]

This ingenious successor to Computer World is enough to almost make one look forward to the coming robot wars. [Mar 2021, p.35]

The music is similarly diverse [as his guests], combining orchestral strings and beats, flamenco guitars and rap, and an array of other global styles. [May 2021, p.32]

As usual where Cheap Trick are concerned, the fast ones are much better than the slow ones. [May 2021, p.24]

A slice of life in all its messy, complicated and ultimately doomed glory. [May 2021, p.25]

It's a short, ineluctably lovely set, light, bright and often dizzyingly joyful, but also thrillingly unpredictable, with complex, jazzy arrangements against which Walker's phasing gently pushes and pulls. [May 2021, p.16]

The spine is provided by Smith's gentle, unforced voice and virtuosic fingerpicking but piano, subtle splashes of percussion and guest appearances recorded remotely by the milk Carton Kids, Bill Frisell and Lisa Hannigan add extra texture. [May 2021, p.32]

Strummer sounds mostly like he's having a blast. [May 2021, p.44]

Pleasingly grubby debut LP. [May 2021, p.25]

This multilayered and multigenre approach results in an album that is as deeply introspective as it is creatively bold and ambitious. [May 2021, p.25]

A potent techno-pagan tapestry of intertwined voices, church bells, liturgical chants and occult spells. [May 2021, p.27]

Menneskekollektivet's foibles – and the sense that it’s incomplete – are what make it so compelling. [May 2021, p.34]

Rose channels longing and romantic despair via expansive songs that owe much to the feel of classic country from the '60s and '70s. [Apr 2021, p.26]

A welcome return. [Apr 2021, p.27]

A more stripped=down approach. [May 2021, p.28]

Most impressive is Peel's ability to take the source material and make it her own. [May 2021, p.31]

Watkins' judicious arrangements and less-is-more approach throw different shades onto these songs she fell in love with a child. [May 2021, p.35]

One for Cornell completists only. [Apr 2021, p.27]

Clarke may not have the tools to open you up emotionally to quite the same degree [as Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds' Ghosteen], but he's found an elegant and absorbing mood of despair like few have managed so far. [Apr 2021, p.24]

More often than not, it seems like the Technicolor electronic sheen is masking tepid songwriting. [Apr 2021, p.30]

It feels deft and thoughtfully constructed. A deeply warm record. [May 2021, p.23]

Grief, memory and friendship billow up throughout the nine tracks. [Mar 2021, p.31]

[Kids] sees her punching through with aplomb, via 13 lean, attitudinal songs with a bass music and hip-hop/trap chassis, fitted out with pop hooks and featuring her fine, versatile voice. [May 2021, p.25]

The record itself isn’t angry, fizzing instead with a creative fire. There’s a looseness and joy to songs like “Make It Right” and “Homewrecker”, rooted in the extended jam sessions in which Garbus and bassist Nate Brenner birthed the record, the bold lyrics an extension of that passion. [May 2021, p.32]

Promises is an impressive collision of talents, and sublimely lovely in places, but also frustratingly slight. A minor addition to the canon of its two main authors, it earns the double-edged compliment of all half-great albums: it leaves you craving more. [May 2021, p.30]

While the LP reaches its darkwave apotheosis with a Neubauten-like cover of The Cure’s “One Hundred Years”, glimmers of lightness and tenderness make for a surprisingly rich listening experience, one that’s closer in spirit to Scott Walker’s Bish Bosch than Xiu Xiu’s past provocations. [May 2021, p.35]

It’s the pair’s 25-year relationship that most radiantly shines through here, adding a relaxed and comfortable tone, as though you’ve walked in on their private back porch session. [May 2021, p.23]

Compared with the highly structured Ghosteen (a double album meditation on grief and spirituality, complete with intermission), Carnage is a more concise though no less ordered record. Much as the Bad Seeds’ songs now push into oceanic drift, Cave’s narratives move between worlds fictional and not, the horrific and the consoling. [Mar 2021, p.20]

A little more forward in the use of bouncing rhythms. [Mar 2021, p.28]

Today We're The Greatest boasts a gentler nature than Lost Friends. [May 2021, p.31]

Transfigures smoothly from one hallucinatory half-style to another. ... The playing is both adventurous and textural, and the surprising, soothing result would have made a fine release on Eno's '70s Obscure label. [May 2021, p.31]

Peter Silberman's half-whispered vocal melodies are more accessible than ever. [Apr 2021, p.25]

A delight. [Mar 2021, p.25]

Putting perfectionism aside hasn't lessen his knack for melody and texture. [Apr 2021, p.27]

Feels like one of his least fussed-over releases. [Apr 2021, p.37]

A fine racket it is. [Apr 2021, p.32]

Does the reissue/repacking thing properly. Forty years after they kicked-off post-punk in a blaze of punk, funk and revolutionary praxis, Gang of Four bow out with a box that deserves a place in the history books. [Apr 2021, p.38]

There's no showboating and every classically nuanced arpeggio oozes with an elegant, crystalline beauty. [Apr 2021, p.32]

It's an elegant yet earthy hybrid of jazz, UK soul and highlife. [Mar 2021, p.35]

This scintillating set pulls and pushes extant studio ideas into wonderfully weird new shapes. [Apr 2021, p.32]

Still Woman Enough may be sustained by her memories, but it's not overshadowed by them. [Apr 2021, p.22]

A record that is dreamy and introspective yet teeming with ambition. [Apr 2021, p.37]

Tracks such as "Chester" ad "Moody" deliver more than mere retro pastiche, adding dreampop haze and lightly glitched effects to the nostalgic signifiers, bathing featherlight sunset reveries in a more contemporary vaporware glow. [Apr 2021, p.25]

Quiet Life enabled Japan to get from B to C, and from D to E, and from there to wherever they went next. ... A third disc, recorded live at Japan's Budokan, captures the band at full tilt. [Apr 2021, p.45]

The album successfully tackles the spectrum of human emotions experienced after trauma. [Apr 2021, p.23]

June has given us an album that is powerfully, elegantly subversive. [April 2021, p.20]

The result is a deeply humane record, perhaps the most vivid in Johnson's long career. [Apr 2021, p.29]

On The Cinder Grove he has a simple, yet profoundly effective modus operandi - setting streams of notes afloat and listening for the way their resonances commingle with strings and piano. [Mar 2021, p.31]

The title of her new album describes its woozy pull. [Mar 2021, p.39]

A fabulous treat it is too. [Apr 2021, p.37]

[The title track's] foreboding gothic folk finds equally despondent bedfellows in the more musically upbeat "Judgement Day" and the bucolic jangle of "Each Manner of Man." [Apr 2021, p.34]

Feels like the first step in a viable third chapter for a band that has rediscovered its identity. [Apr 2021, p.30]

A comeback album that feels vital rather than forced. [Apr 2021, p.25]

They range from isolated fragments to several absorbing takes of a song - "Went To See The Gypsy" - on its way to near-greatness. [Apr 2021, p.42]

Devotees of the 2000-era indie-pop of the Clientele and Marry's former employers in Camera Obscura will be charmed by the pretty likes of "Julie: and "Gold & Lips," though Banane Bleu could've benefited from more darker hes that enriched Fleurs Du Mal. [Apr 2021, p.29]

It features a stellar setlist built around tracks from that album, liberally peppered with Horse classics and deep cuts. In all this, the Horse prove themselves dependably elastic. [Apr 2021, p.49]

The constant frenzied back and forth between power-pop hooks and furious noise, while fun, begins to feel a little repetitive. [Apr 2021, p.27]

Departures from the mean include jazzier ventures with Ren Harvieu and octogenarian soul singer Ural Thomas, plus forays into baroque-pop balladry that get the best out of Laura Groves and Marissa Nadler. [Apr 2021, p.30]

Parenthood proves just another phase in Maximo Park's stubborn stand for empathy and learning through rock'n'roll. [Apr 2021, p.32]

Packing 14 tracks into 38 minutes, it's very much a sprint, the breathlessness part of its impact, despite this intensity, mainman Jack McEwan steers SHYGA!... clear of excess and keeps his ear on melody throughout. [Apr 2021, p.34]

Returns to the more familiar detuned space of their debut LP Taste, thundercloud guitar squall and all. [Apr 2021, p.34]

For intimacy and authenticity, less musical architecture often proves better. [Apr 2021, p.35]

This subtle score to Italo Calvino's 1972 experimental novel still boasts quietly echoing melodies on "The Divided City" and on "Desires Are already Memories," hazy Stars Of The Lids atmospherics, but an underlying tension threatens "Every Solstice And Equinox's" tranquil air and "Total Perspective Vortex's" climax is terrifying. [Apr 2021, p.37]

The cumulative effect is melancholy, generally compelling and often beautiful, a haunted dancehall of memory and loss. [Apr 2021, p.25]