The album is a fantastic ride along well-travelled spaceways, balancing Ra compositions with an eclectic mix of early 20th-century American music. [Jan 2025, p.30]

The key is a rhythmic edge--be it tribal drumming or waves of sound--that trip these rainbow drones into full-on euphoria. [Apr 2008, p.94]

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]

Lie Down In The Light is his most coherent LP since the bleak masterpiece "I See A Darkness." [Aug 2008, p.85]

Stephen McBean's merry bunch have toned down the heavier impulses of 2010's Wilderness Heart on this fourth album, plumping instead for a collision of gruff psychedelia, trippy space-folk and pulsing electronica. [May 2016, p.69]

I Be Trying sounds as stark and untamed as a field recording, belying the perfectionism with which it was made. [Aug 2021, p.24]

The morning moods are more immediately engaging, with Eno-ish rhyme schemes and country stylings. [Jun 2017, p.23]

A thrillingly inventive blend of alt.rock, fingerpicking folk, Latin flavours and--new this--electronic pop. [Apr 2013, p.67]

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]

[Tim Burgess'] boyish voice sounds warmer than ever, too, while Johnny Marr and Paul Weller are among guests fortifying his band's fluid grooves. [Jul 2017, p.26]

It's rich in moods and textures, variously lean and percussive, euphoric, foreboding and melodically vibrant. [Jun 2025, p.31]

In melding ethereal production with clarion narratives, Korkejian has created a beautifully dynamic work. [Jun 2019, p.24]

At two hours, it could use pruning, but Belomancie has a visionary quality. [May 2014, p.80]

This fifth album is an abstract fuzz of Floydian oddness and gothic not-quite-country. [Nov 2009, p.102]

The Replacements-inspired tattered intensity of the band's first two LPs is still present, but working with multiple producers has brought enough variety to keep the surprises coming. [Apr 2010, p.109]

Rarely has the deep past sounded so stirring, or so modern. [Oct 2009, p.94]

This is a very fine album... even if it's surprisingly business as usual in many respects. [Oct 2002, p.108]

"Ishadlak Ya Khey," featuring Doueh's son Hamdan Bamaar on full drum kit, and pops busting out some flange-soaked solos, is a pleasingly noisy, impolite fusion. [Aug 2011, p.87]

A 25-track bonus disc of rarities makes this a feast for Barlow heads. [May 2011, p.94]

Intermezzo is one of Sir Richard Bishop's most welcoming collections. [Aug 2012, p.79]

The latest from the three siblings plus mate chews gleefully through genres. [Oct 2015, p.73]

The most heart-wrenching selection are a ravaged take on Nirvana's "Stay Away" in which Bradley intuitively taps into Kurt Cobain's roiling anguish, a tonsil-shredding full-band rendition of "Victim Of Love" and the instrumental "Black Velvet," which Brenneck had earmarked for a Bradley vocal he was too weak to sing. [Dec 2018, p.23]

Recalls Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra in the way it mingles dark and light, hard and soft, innocence and experience. [Feb 2006, p.80]

Singer-guitarist Taylor Goldsmith and his drumming brother Griffin laid down Oh Brother’s basic tracks by themselves, and the foregrounding of their live-off-the-floor parts adds to the immediacy of Taylor’s narratives. [Nov 2024, p.33]

In his own way, Swift is as vivid a newcomer as Joanna Newsom or early Rufus Wainwright. [Mar 2007, p.84]

Living With The Living finds them at their most assured. [Apr 2007, p.113]

Condition sits somewhere between the two [previous albums Dying and Dead], obscuring lovely melodies with disjointed electronica on deliberately self-destructive tracks like "Dissolve," the willowy "Colour Me Out" and "Coping Mechanism." [Apr 2017, p.39]

"Daddy Pop" has a Queen-like Break; "Jughead", post-Bomb Squad production. "Money Don't Matter 2 Night" is more subtly impressive. .... B-Sides plus intinerant sessions yielding 33 unreleased tracks. [Dec 2023, p.51]

With flurries of old-time whimsy, The Beatles gone gothic and vaudevillian storytelling, it's dense and sometimes obscure. [Nov 2010, p.84]

Although the album was written and recorded at a time of severe international strife, Taylor maintains an aura of studied and reassuring calm on “It Will If We Let It”, “Glory Strums” and outstanding closer “Sanctuary”. [Jul 2021, p.27]

Constantly questing without ever becoming indulgent, 4 is intoxicating. [Nov 2008, p.94]

The seemingly simple yet thoroughly conceptualised material here, all held within specific harmonic language, is beautifully realised. [Oct 2022, p.26]

He pulls it off in style. [Apr 2009, p.91]

Though disparate, it's some legacy. [May 2016, p.90]

What these titles lack in detail, the songs themselves quickly fill with lashings of lurid prose. [Jul 2017, p.18]

This is a strong debut throughout. [Aug 2020, p.27]

This follow-up is even better [than 2015's Music In Exile], their skittery rhythms making fuller use of R&B grooves, brass and funky licks. [Jul 2017, p.39]

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

This is the rare jazz record that feels equipped to venture outside the genre's familiar borders and engage with the wider world. [Jul 2018, p.29]

As they've refined their technique, they've almost erased the need for lyrics, while their twin obsessions--romance and the celestial--remain constants. [Jul 2016, p.89]

Snipe Hunter is Childers' familiar reconciliation of the raucous and thoughtful, and possible his most accomplished to date. [Oct 2025, p.24]

While Like Clockwork sometimes felt a little leaden, Villains flies by. [Sep 2017, p.31]

[A] stunningly assured fifth studio album. [Aug 2014, p.80]

The venom and rage of the Jim Jones live experience is captured more effectively on this third album than its predecessors, but there;s also greater depth to the playing and writing. [Nov 2012, p.76]

Stuffed full of prospective hits, Wretch's desire to rank beside Kanye and Jay-Z may not be that far fetched. [Sep 2011]

Their first LP is an imaginative amalgam of electronic pop, avant noise, psych-folk, freeform jazz and kosmische on a panoramic scale, which both delights and surprises. [Oct 2024, p.37]

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]

Spektor's biggest-hearted, clearest-minded effort yet--achieved, thankfully, without sacrificing any of her wonderful weirdness. [Aug 2006, p.111]

For those willing to take a chance, it's an impeccably realised, verbose treat. [Apr 2007, p.99]

Thankfully, Williams' effort to emulate that bygone sound is too sophisticated and idiosyncratic to be mere pastiche. [Mar 2018, p.35]

The idiosyncratic chamber-pop o these 14 songs evokes The Kinks, XTC and the more melancholy side of Hot Chip; like much of their past work, it's musically intricate, too. [Mar 2016, p.73]

It's all invigorating, wonderful stuff.

Depth Of Field, Blasko's sixth studio album, substantially persists with the gloomy synthesiser motif of its superb predecessor, 2015's Eternal Return, but locates an even more poised balance between the chilly melancholy of glam-electronica backdrops and the capacious warmth of Blasko's vocals. [Apr 2018, p.24]

United Crushers establishes a more muscular sensibility for the American quartet. [Apr 2016, p.78]

The LP's seven originals are solid, but the five country covers hit with sweaty immediacy. [Feb 2014, p.95]

When The Roses Come Again feels like something impossibly ancient, sent back to us from some distant future. [Dec 2023, p.32]

Guthrie's work endures because if its essential big-hearted hospitality--and Farrar, Johnson, Parker and Yames have mad themselves right at home. [Mar 2012, p.93]

DAMN. is a showcase for a rapper at his peak, blessed with a flow, nuance and unostentatious authority that currently feels unparalleled. [Jul 2017, p.32]

The Vienna-based Londoner who lurks behind the Sohn alias coins a wintry brand of high-tech electro-soul on this striking debut. [May 2014, p.80]

An engagingly simple and yet sophisticated third album, full of elegant melodies, shuffling percussion and bewitching Marling-esque vocals. [May 2013, p.67]

It's like John Bonham playing with Can, or Floyd-meet-Spiritualized with a barely repressed pop consciousness. [Jul 2004, p.95]

This is good-time instrumental party music that mixes Turkish Psych, South American cumbia, surf-rock and reggae, sometimes with the poise of Khruangbin but more often with the tequila swagger of a Tarantino caper. [Mar 2022, p.31]

This linear, orderly chronicle i s a faithful overview of the studio career nevertheless. [Sep 2011, p.100]

By turns oblique, soulful, scornful yet rarely dissonant. Rather, it's one of their lovelier, more formal offerings. [Mar 2005, p.108]

Deeply hermetic then, but catchy as hell, too. [Jul 2023, p.34]

His home-recorded approach reaches imaginatively beyond glossy pastiche. [Mar 2006, p.90]

Nobody else writes songs like Treacy. [Mar 2006, p.103]

His songwriting style is pitched somewhere between Elvis Costello, Burt Bacharach and early Roddy Frame, displaying a knack for heart-tugging chord changes and delicately deployed Brazilian rhythms. [Nov 2011, p.91]

Prekop's lyrical ruminations on distance and direction never lag. [Dec 2012, p.76]

Mostly, though, it reasserts Bishop's status as wide-ranging guitar master, gently amused by any such assumptions of grandeur. [Mar 2015, p.71]

Contains some of their most objectively beautiful songs. [Jun 2025, p.41]

This lolls with a neat mix of languor and subtle urgency through the kind of smart/funk The Beloved mastered 20 years ago. [Jun 2009, p.90]

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]

Their full engagement in the creative task was never in doubt, and more than 40 years later the result compels close listening. [Apr 2014, p.88]

Lovely, languid melodies disguise bleak sentiments on Erin Rae's solo debut. [Jul 2018, p.34]

Mehldau brings the influence front and centre, with bittersweet, often lovely arrangements of even the darkest moments in the Smith songbook. [Sep 2025, p.33]

May be the most consistent of the four albums to date. [Jan 2003, p.122]

Themes of mind control are sprinkled throughout the record, whose highlights include storm opener "Paradise," the semi-rapped title track, the funky "The Planet Of Straw Man" and closing song "Maria 63." [Oct 2019, p.39]

A deep-breathing, ecstatic joy. [Sep 2019, p.34]

It's best appreciated not as a legend's lap of honour, but for itself. [Sep 2015, p.75]

He's best on matters of the heart: "Father" is a spectral journey to a lost 1970s of family intimacy and may be the most affecting song yet in a catalog stuffed with heartbreakers. [Jul 2024, p.32]

He's a great country singer, armed with the sardonic humour of Todd Snider and the loping grace of Waylon Jennings. [Sep 2014, p.70]

Will massage the shoulders of fans of Mercury Rev, The Flaming Lips, Neil Young and Kevin Shields.

Orton remains a luminous presence among often monotone peers. [Dec 2012, p.75]

From austere, absurd materials, the cumulative effect is remarkable. [Dec 2011, p.76]

The band hits an altogether richer seam on the Fleet Foxes-like “Mine Forever” and the vast sweep of the string-laden title track, rooted in the lost highway myth but sounding more akin to classic Walker Brothers. [Jul 2021, p.30]

The performances are entirely unmediated, taped in the open air like an old-style field recording with the cicadas and birds chirping gloriously in the background. [May 2025, p.31]

Since rising to attention with 2009's Me Oh My, Cate Le Bon has turned out four albums of arch, otherworldly guitar pop, of which Crab Day is surely the best yet. [May 2016, p.75]

Darkly entertaining, thoughtful and a little threatening, St. Vincent fizzes with enthusiasm and the uncontrollable strangeness of life. [Mar 2014, p.74]

There are clearly mad skills at work, but silent Earthling is rarely anything other than a simple pleasure. [May 2016, p.81]

Her own songs are more intriguing, however; poetic mediations on love and its destructive powers, sung in a tremulous but intense voice. [Feb 2009, p.76]

Placid moments abound. ... But "Spoot Ebb's" syncopated, Penguin Cafe rhythms indicate choppier waters, and "Flattie," introduce by poet Will Burns, hints at dark, incoming clouds. [Jun 2019, p.27]

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

Richard Hawley hasn't strayed too far from a successful formula. What he does introduce is a deliberate sens e of brevity, keeping songs tight and focused. [Jul 2019, p.29]

It's among his best. [Apr. 2012, p.79]

It's too early to pass judgement, but in pursuit of Burdon's stated ambition to "finish my career with my head held high," 'Til Your River Runs Dry finds his mission fully on course, a hero returned. [May 2013, p.64]

They still sound epic and unusually angry. [Oct 2025, p.31]

Strange Friends marks a measured step towards accessibility for one of Britain's most inventive bands. [Jun 2014, p.82]