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]

Sparke emphasises the intimacy and immediacy of her performances on this debut, which sounds like you've walked into her rehearsal space. [Feb 2021, p.35]

It's business as usual with sludgy riffs marrying metal and punk. [Mar 2021, p.32]

More Nugent than Stooges, Detroit Stories recalls his wild '70s heyday, especially on lighters-up "Social Debris" and the gloriously goofy "Independence Dave." Too Often though, it sounds slick and perfunctory. [Mar 2021, p.28]

The true spiritual kin to Neal's spectral fragility is Mazzy Star's. [Mar 2021, p.35]

A bold step into more contentious terrain. [Feb 2021, p.34]

Everything on Little Oblivions will make you feel, and it's the catharsis we all need. [Mar 2021, p.26]

"Hard Drive," meanwhile adds spoken word and Bogie's swirling saxophone to a touching tale of psychic recovery, before "The Ramble" concludes with pretty pastel drones. [Mar 2021, p.31]

In many ways, Distractions is an enigma. In years to come, we may look back on this record as transitional, or a product of its times. But to hear a band of this vintage still listening – and responding – to their instincts is a joy in itself.

Lyrical references to stargazing, sprawling jasmine and the passage of time paint a picture of the infinite, and our small place in it, that is heightened by the band's soaring melodies. [Mar 2021, p.39]

The result is a quietly moving hymn to home and humanity. [Mar 2021, p.29]

Bristles with the unruly energies that enlivened their younger incarnations. [Mar 2021, p.32]

A confident reiteration of this singular group's virtues. [Mar 2021, p.38]

It's more memorable than Mush's debut, simultaneously weirder and more melodic: and the peak of the record, and of this mix of the the strange and the infectious, comes right at the end. [Mar 2021, p.30]

New Fragility is emotionally fraught but musically generous. [Mar 2021, p.28]

While Django Django have spent much of the last decade assembling art-pop collages from eclectic grab-bags of styles, this fourth studio set seems to pull off the trick more seamlessly than ever. [Mar 2021, p.29]

It's when Slowthai turns the lens inward on the soulful "NHS" and loved-up "Feel Away" - featuring James Blake and Mount Kimbie - that he proves himself something of an original. [Mar 2021, p.37]

Start Walkin’ emphasises the team’s many deviations from the mean, demonstrating how inventive and subversive Sinatra’s music could be even before her music with Hazlewood took a more avidly idiosyncratic direction with Nancy & Lee. ... 23 concise chapters that are thrilling, surprising and sometimes sublime.

His joyous fourth album proper leaves behind the folksy stylings of his earlier solo work and instead builds on 2018's glitter-strewn Karma For Cheap. [Mar 2021, p.39]

Picks up where 2015's Justin Vernon-helmed If I Was Left Off, as their three-part blood harmonies form the shimmering centre of an elaborate, album-long soundscape. [Mar 2021, p.37]

Thankfully, there's more than just wannabe Fall stuff here, offering up a variety of teeth-rattling noises. [Jan 2021, p.32]

Conjures worlds of chilly, pulsing synths and waspish guitar. [Mar 2021, p.27]

You'll be hard pushed to find a more adventurously self-assured debut this year. [Mar 2021, p.27]

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]

This follow-up is mightily impressive too, the band ramping up their sound into something approaching classic rock. [Feb 2021, p.30]

Giraffe applies a drowsy charm to a wide variety of characters on songs that tap into the traditions of Harry Nilsson and Van Dyke Parks. [Feb 2021, p.30]

Vertigo Days does not deviate far from the established Notwist formula of soft-focused indie-folk electronica, which can feel too tastefully non-committal at times. But there are vivid beauties here too. [Mar 2021, p.34]

Rats On Rafts are shooting for something bold on their third LP. They land their shot too. [Mar 2021, p.35]

These songs feel as if they were written on the fly (which most of them were), their sense of immediacy reflected in the use of skittery acoustic guitar, banjo, and rattling piano. Slim's voice is geared to match. [Feb 2021, p.26]

Their conceptual hinterland is sometimes more interesting than their clobbering racket, but both are exhilarating in places. [Mar 2021, p.29]

Blended with earnest acoustic guitar picking and rattling electronic production, the young songwriter reveals a bright future at the end of personal agony. [Feb 2021, p.35]

Taken as a whole, On All Fours is an impressive balancing act, creating something fresh from the group's diverse influences. [Feb 2021, p.28]

This is pulverising cacophonic stuff but it's also considered and atmospheric. [Feb 2021, p.25]

Four vignettes offer reminders of Brian Eno's early ambient outings. ... But the slower evolution of three longer pieces, which nonetheless maintain this aesthetic, make them more potent. [Mar 2021, p.37]

An astonishing return, up there with their best records to date. [Feb 2021, p.18]

They may have opened out their map a little more for Medicine At Midnight, but the Foos' territory remains reassuringly familiar. [Mar 2021, p.38]

It's uneven in places, but "OMW" - a twinkly 10-minute closer written with Vampire Weekend's Ezra Koenig - is a low-key delight. [Mar 2021, p.25]

There's a loose lyrical theme of branding and consumer culture inspiring the maverick meta-pop of "Personal Shopper." ... The Sparks-y spriteliness of "Follower" also stands out, thanks to beautifully falsetto-iced vocal hooks, which further grace the gorgeously forlorn synth-pop of "King Ghost." [Feb 2021, p.37]

The 20-year-old punctuates beautifully languid, trip-hoppy vignettes with a voice redolent of Martina Topley-Bird and a neat line in spoken word poetic musings. [Feb 2021, p.32]

The immediacy is obvious, and the band stretch Yorkston's reassuring vulnerability in new directions. [Feb 2021, p.37]

For the most part, Milosh goes for mood over hooks, but the sultry "Helpless" seductively sports both. [Feb 2021, p.32]

Album highlight "White Sands" is a soundtrack in miniature, the acoustic and electronic tones combining like a neon-streaked empty road. [Feb 2021, p.37]

Jeremy Gaudet's Jonathan Richman-esque speak-sung tones breathe life into protagonists widescreen-daydreaming their way out of drudgery. [Feb 2021, p.29]

It may have been assembled as a lockdown stopgap, but Songs From An Old Guitar is overall glorious, a career highlight in a career full of them. [Feb 2021, p.47]

Humble back-porch jams to relieve the monotony of lockdown. [Jan 2021, p.27]

This handsome sequel stays mostly within their comfort zone of melodic, propulsive dance-pop tailored both to clubs and home listening, an impressive balancing act even if the formula sometimes feels over-polished. [Feb 2021, p.25]

These songs often sound like Broadway-style miniatures tilted at strange angles. [Feb 2021, p.30]

He remains a precise craftsman with a bottomless trove of '60s pop hooks and dreamy melodies, but he upends them with acute-angle riffs and scribbled punctuations. [Feb 2021, p.37]

It's a fine country record refracted through a DIY folk-rock lens. [Feb 2021, p.30]

No major revelations, but plenty of pleasant surprises. [Jan 2021, p.47]

It's a deeply ambitious debut offering. Musically, it ducks and weaves like the shape-shifters that populate its world. [Feb 2021, p.30]

He sings in a hushed, fragile whisper that is a;most unbearably personal. [Mar 2021, p.35]

It is without question a wintering record, but out of this muted musical landscape songs of great and complex beauty emerge. [Mar 2021, p.34]

Skyway Man's fantasy realm is absorbing enough that he can pull off increasingly audacious musical combinations. [Dec 2020, p.38]

The Sleaford Mods we hear on Spare Ribs sound more comfortable in their own skin, relaxed enough to explore their eccentricities. A tart, sometimes topical edge remains. [Feb 2021, p.35]

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

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]

A quality love letter to the music he committed to early on. At times, it's hard not to wish he'd been bolder and a little less faithful. [Feb 2021, p.36]

Bittersweet pop songs are the order of the day, gently psychedelicised. [Jan 2021, p.27]

The Dirty Nil relive those innocent times when callow rock'n'rollers made noise designed to drive grown-ups batshit. [Feb 2021, p.27]

It's a very fine thing when a writer and craftsman of Gibb's standing embraces his own legacy and finds such persuasive ways of embellishing it. [Feb 2021, p. 24]

Dangerous Visions is a curious half-and-half. Side One collects raucous new material. ... Side Two, meanwhile, rests on an exhumed Peel session from 1989. [Feb 2021, p.30]