Certainly a claustrophobic listen, and not for the faint-hearted. [Feb 2021, p.25]

A rich, absorbing listen. [Apr 2020, p.33]

Either of Dwyer's bands would be a fine fit for Yonkers' primitive but inventive garage rock - best examples are the pummelling "sold America" and "The Thunder Speaks," both hyped-up takes on Yonkers' originals - but Damaged Bug are better equipped to tackle his more tender moments. [May 2020, p.26]

Along with her interest in free jazz and expressive, improvisatory styles of music, it’s possible to see these seven songs as a type of painting with sound, a messy, wild process of distillation and curation, until only sparse daubs of bright colour remain on the canvas. Limited elements, but a giant impact. It’s been worth the wait.

These blown-out and clanking loops, atmospheric drones and jump-cut textures are more like the product of electronic collage than free-guitar improv, and all the more fascinating for it. [Jun 2020, p.34]

On older Bartx compositions "Uhuru Sasa" and "Dr Follows Dance" they sound like a Herbie Hancock-less Headhunters; while "The Stank" is a jaunty boogaloo. [Jul 2020, p.27]

The Bats still trade in sparse, self-effacing indie rock, and retain a talent for wringing the most sumptuous melodies from the most utilitarian of ingredients. [Dec 2020, p.27]

Ad hoc, anything goes is the mood of what follows. Much is accomplished and playful. ... When he allows himself to forget who he is and just remember what it is that he does, he can still come up with songs to surprise you. More impressively, maybe even surprise himself.

A rich, dense, cinematic journey into inner space. [Dec 2020, p.30]

The fifth season might be more art piece than album, but is no less intriguing because of it. [Oct 2020, p.32]

Several tracks sound like ruminative 1970s jazz breakbeats that have been sampled by hip-hop DJs. [Nov 2020, p.33]

What strikes you, above all, is the innocence and affection in their breezy blues, at odds with the heavy weather White has made of his post-Stripes career. [Feb 2021, p.49]

Lyrically on "Men" they come for the jugular of the patriarchy. ... It's not all tension and frantic energy, however. [Feb 2021, p.33]

The twin voices of Jonsi and Andersen make for an eerie contrast at times, with "Stendur aeva" a ravishing, multi-faceted highlight. [Feb 2021, p.35]

The band's pleasure in playing and connecting with fans shines throughout. [Feb 2021, p.25]

Through its adventuresome twists and well-considered combinations, this record acts a a necessary treat amid a turbulent and uncertain climate. [Feb 2021, p.22]

This is a leftfield party album bursting with personality, wonky charm and random sonic mischief. [Feb 2021, p.29]

It's a rich ensemble sound, full and complex, but not overly dense. [Feb 2021, p.30]

Each of these three artists brings out something new in the others, prodding them slightly out of their comfort zones. [Jan 2021, p.16]

This swift reimagining of the Protean Threat tapes launches into greater psychedelic flights. [Jan 2021, p.31]

Musically, it can get a little one-note but there are some terrific moments. [Nov 2020, p.37]

While Ward's phrasing is very much his own at times, the gambit yields the most compelling results when he best approximates Holiday's silvery delivery and weary air. [Jan 2021, p.33]

Curiously nonconformist to the last. [Jan 2021, p.27]

Fans of Steve Reich - an admirer of Perich's 2009 1-Bit Symphony, whose release required listeners to plug headphones into a CD case - will revel in his latest, as will those who've tired of "New Classical's" limited palette. [Jan 2021, p.31]

Eerily beautiful record. [Jan 2021, p.30]

Cuttin' Grass Vol 1 is Simpson's warmest, most life-affirming record by a country mile. [Jan 2021, p.26]

Skelton's music has an ascetic quality that gives these tracks the sense of little rituals, pagan prayers brought blinking into the present. [Jan 2021, p.32]

A genuinely beautiful, expansive record. [Dec 2020, p.36]

A spirited album that runs the gamut from pop to pop-punk to punk. Not everything works. [Jan 2021, p.23]

True, there are covers of Tom Petty's "Christmas All Over Again" and Lennon's "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)," but it's informed by the general spirit of seasonal holidays, which is as much reflective as celebratory. [Jan 2021, p.23]

Wreckless Abandon is great fun, infused with the characteristic boogie and swagger of Campbell's guitar, and heavily in hock to his obvious formative influences. [Apr 2020, p.27]

Beguiling if familiar thanks to the many echoes of Jessie Ware and Goldfrapp at their most forlorn. [Jan 2021, p.23]

The sparer treatments on How Beauty Holds the Hand of Sorrow make for something more enthralling, partially because of how much the largely piano-and-vocal arrangements evoke the crystalline beauty of Brun's early albums. [Jan 2021, p.23]

Surviving on the present, these songs infer, may be hard. To process this, he uses expansive, hypnotic arrangements: winding guitars, jazzy undertones, sturdy melodies sent into the ether. [Jan 2021, p.23]

Metal-tinged stadium rockers like "The Machine," "Stand And Fight" and the Sabbathy "The Alchemist" still offer their strongest moments. [Dec 2020, p.27]

If 2020 confirms anything, it's the breadth of what Magik Markers can do, within what might read like constraints. [Nov 2020, p.36]

When they succeed, it's on more traditional Pumpkins territory. ... Otherwise, Cyr sounds like an underwhelming misadventure. [Jan 2021, p.32]

It's a big, satisfying holistic record modelled with great finesse, mixing dread with Technicolor synth dazzlement and operating on a newly ambitious scale. [Dec 2020, p.25]

What Archives II does, then, is not just celebrate a wealth of great music - but those who helped make it. [Jan 2021, p.34]

Authoritatively cements the status of Granduciel's Philadelphia-based sextet as the best American rock band to emerge in the 2010s. [Jan 2021, p.33]

The performance of a lifetime. [Dec 2020, p.27]

A brash and confident rebirth. [Dec 2020, p.31]

Dreamy found-sound interludes weave the whole thing together, demanding headphones and space. [Jan 2021, p.23]

Its songs run more freely and push at greater abstraction, without losing melodic strength. [Jan 2021, p.27]

A more concise affair [than II], with only one of its six tracks over eight minutes. It's also more laid-back. [Jan 2021, p.28]

There’s no brave new frontier here – and perhaps in these strange times many of us don’t really want to be challenged. Rather, these simple pleasures, full of reassurance and a satisfying indulgence, will keep us warm while we adjust to the ‘new normal’ – whatever that may eventually turn out to be.

They're breaking no new personal ground, then but. ... Their enthusiasm and wayward energy carry them. [Jan 2021, p.27]

This is the sound of celebration of life, and of music escaping confinement and coming to be freed. [Dec 2020, p.20]

A gorgeous melding of taut psychedelics, hazy Americana and a drop of the dreamier fringes of Britpop. [Dec 2020, p.36]

Attempts several tasks at once - and pretty much delivers on all of them. [Jan 2021, p.47]

Prophet's approach is tailored to suit, exploring modern and antique mythology through the vernacular of folk music. Despite the stylistic departure, The Land That Time Forgot is busy enough to accommodate trace elements of the roots-rock that made his reputation. [Jul 2020, p.28]

Play loud, and be transported. [Jan 2021, p.32]

It's a deeply personal and poignant exploration of loss. [Jan 2021, p.27]

The band's most orchestral album yet. [Jan 2021, p.25]

The likes of "Gadigal Land" and "First Nation" evoke an earlier Oils, circa the seething post-punk of "Head Injuries" - though the show is stolen by Alice Skye, who takes lead on the poised protest ballad "Terror Australia." [Jan 2021, p.28]

They sound positively in-your-face rather than isolated on garagey, throbbing stomps. [Jan 2021, p.27]

It's a nuanced handling of some of her recent song obsessions. [Jan 2021, p.27]

As ever, it's as unpredictable as it is beguiling. [Jan 2021, p.31]

Disco is too much of a safe, shiny, frictionless crowd-pleaser to deliver much more than mildly entertaining retro pastiche. [Jan 2021, p.31]

Certainly it is a record of two halves, its first batch of corroded box jams smothered in hiss, including two listless cuts with Sampha. [Jan 2021, p.21]

A set of well-crafted songs that resemble PJ Harvey's collaborations with John Parish, but which mainly recall various stages of David Bowie's career. [Oct 2020, p.29]

Leans heavily on the conceptual, but its 13 tracks can be enjoyed regardless of any familiarity with themes of Greek legends and seasonal cycles. [Dec 2020, p.30]

It's the smoother, almost surfy, tones of tracks like "Deep Infatuation" and "Earl & Duke" that offer a pleasing change of tone from the familiar indie racket. [Dec 2020, p.29]

Lamentations furthers Basinski's reputation as an empathetic conduit of tragedy, mirroring societal tribulation as a necessary act of communal release. [Dec 2020, p.27]

It's a solid second-tier AC/DC record. ... And the best individual songs are well worthy of the AC/DC marque. [Jan 2021, p.20]

Chris Stapleton rides roughshod over country music formulas on Starting Over, with assistance from a pair of Heartbreakers. [Dec 2020, p.39]

The Pylon Box is filled with moments that are equally exhilarating; evidently, what was feasible for Pylon was extraordinary by anyone else’s measure.

As odd and beautiful as it is thoughtful and contemplative. [Dec 2020, p.39]

Summerteeth captures the band as they shed the last vestiges of their alt-country beginnings and introduce the ingredients that would catch fire on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. [Dec 2020, p.53]

Nothing like previous portentous epics. This reissue comes with a bunch of interesting outtakes. [Dec 2020, p.47]

Plenty of liturgic rumbling, but it really works when she aims for something greater. [Dec 2020, p.39]

Through its grooves she invites the listener inside her world without the glow of a screen, a much needed respite from Zoom. [Dec 2020, p.27]

There's a surprising warmth to his work here as he gradually fills and empties out these eight immaculately sculpted soundscapes. [Dec 2020, p.36]

Most of the radical reinterpretations land wide of T-Rextasy. [Oct 2020, p.39]

The result is the friskiest, most rock'n'roll album of his career. [Nov 2020, p.37]

There's a wistful tone to tracks like "Cherry Cola," the folky "I Was Alone" and fine single, "Love Comes In Waves," which attaches an invasive melody to the soft one of surrounding fuzz. [Nov 2020, p.27]

There are moments of real beauty, like the tenderly plucked "Of Unsent Letters," but what might be comfort via familiarity for some may well be lacking in evolution for others. [Dec 2020, p.29]

It holds together remarkably well, and has an atmosphere at least as distinctive and beguiling as that of, say, Punch The Clock or The Juliet Letters. It isn't typical Elvis Costello album, but then they never are. [Dec 2020, p.24]

Overall, this is a lavish, well-produced affair that still finds room for the kinks and chaos of the Arkestra. [Nov 2020, p.34]

Amidon's spry banjo and sky-blue voice give this music a gentle centre, light on ego or affection. [Dec 2020, p.27]

Droning brass, atmospheric melodies and Cross's otherworldly vocals blend to absorbing effect on the lush, wild "Ocotillo," while on "Breaking Waves Like A Stone," the vocals lift the melody out of frantic, piano-driven chaos. [Nov 2020, p.33]

Eight relatively streamlined stoner-rock cuts. ... But Fuzz are best when they embrace ridiculousness. [Nov 2020, p.29]

Delights and distresses, packed with musical flourishes and finely drawn lyrics. [Nov 2020, p.33]

This albums marries Tweedy's mature emotional outlook to the workaday manners of Uncle Tupelo or the Woody Guthrue project, Mermaid Avenue. [Dec 2020, p.34]

The 10 tracks eventually sliced from Wildflowers don’t seem to have been culled for any coherent rhyme or reason: the virtues of the original album are abundant among the omitted tracks. ... Of the three further discs available for big spenders, the home demos and alternate versions are – as is usually the way of these things – mostly likely to be listened to once, out of curiosity. But there are charming moments among the demos.

Their most multi-layered yet subtle work so far. ... The result is unshowily spectacular. [Nov 2020, p.34]

Her lyrics and voice remain major draws. ... Soothing balms following the drama of Songs. [Nov 2020, p.26]

Some of the most effortlessly insightful songs in the modern country-folk canon. [Nov 2020, p.37]

At times it hits harder and heavier than anything they've attempted before. [Nov 2020, p.32]

The new album is singular in its conception and an impressive leap forward in terms of execution. [Nov 2020, p.20]

If the duo seem unfocused, their adventurous variety is beguiling. [Dec 2020, p.29]

What You Gonna Do When the Grid Goes Down? is no return to the glory days, it is a credible reprise of their old-school rolling and one-two punch, spiked with heavy psychedelic guitar. [Dec 2020, p.36]

It's lo-fi ambience sometimes sound submerged, suiting a report from deep in life's wreckage. [Dec 2020, p.35]

Throughout, she pulls no punches, her razor-sharp lyrics demonstrating a singular wit and vulnerability. [Dec 2020, p.35]

Electric guitars crackle at the edge of the mix like Caribbean lightning, Jay Gonzalez's "Oliver's Army" piano glittering in the gathering storm. "Tough To Go" is from the Memphis sessions. Doom-laden drumbeats, gloomy organ and blasts of wracked guitars punctuate a song about disenchantment, lost opportunities, stacked odds. [Dec 2020, p.32]

Fear Of Death plays mortality for dark laughs, while The Lemon Twigs and Foxygen's Jonathan Rado help Heidecker to whip up a note-perfect Randy Newman sound. [Dec 2020, p.30]

All in all, it’s a beautiful record – and one that bears repeated plays. I’ve been playing it for around 10 days now, mostly on headphones, and it’s still revealing new details with each listen.

It's at times crushingly heavy, but there's a cerebral knottiness to the arrangements, and Chino Moreno's vocal boasts a windswept melancholy harking back to the new romantics. [Dec 2020, p.29]