Admittedly they hit a few soaring peaks, but none that haven't already been conquered. [Nov 2017, p.39]

Open Here is another prog-pop masterclass from a band reflecting our times while remaining stubbornly out of step with them. [Feb 2018, p.23]

Damned Devotion is her fifth album, and feels like a kind of reckoning, a taking stock, and a work of renewed focus. If 2014's The Classic was a high-concept exercise in soul pastiche, here she returns to her core territory, forensically charting the human heart, tracking the course of midlife love, lust and loss. [Mar 2018, p.20]

The album's best tracks are those where Carlile strides beyond the confines of orthodox pop-country. [Apr 2018, p.24]

It's a cinematic experience that reaches a peak on the immense finale of "Ugly And Vengeful." [Apr 2018, p.37]

The choices on Dock Of The Bay Sessions suggest an artist who was refining his songwriting, someone concentrating more on character development. [Jul 2018, p.38]

Few artists combine concepts of arcane and contemporary quite as atmospherically as New York's Odetta Hartman, who uses the banjo to provide melody and age but then embeds songs with dance beats and sound effects, before adding timeless jazz-folk vocals. [Sep 2018, p.30]

Pete Bernahrd's songs speak of humanity facing insanity in many forms. [Oct 2018, p.27]

The lowering, incantatory "Circles," suggesting Peggy Lee fronting a minimalist Warpaint, and the doomy rebetika of "Loving Loving" stand out, but there's much to admire. [Dec 2018, p.33]

The result is lush, beautifully busy-bodied ambient music with a roomy, lo-fi hiss running underneath, as though they're creating these sounds in a basement somewhere. [May 2019, p.30]

Sparse and otherworldly, yet powerful and dynamic. [Mar 2020, p.24]

Some tracks lean too far towards tastefully decaffeinated worldbeat. But there are soulful depths and deliciously supple rhythms too. [Aug 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]

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]

A notably confident-sounding record. [Aug 2021, p.23]

His verse is relentlessly positivistic and hippy-ish (“I go forward in the courage of my love”), delivered in a conspiratorial whisper, but the highlight is the backing, which drifts between spiritual jazz, skeletal dub and folksy minimalism, all the time featuring Fairbairn’s quiet, quavering tenor sax improvisations. [May 2022, p.26]

Consistently startling and affecting. [Jan 2023, p.21]

Low-key arrangements are anchored by Henry's agreeably lived-in voice. [Mar 2023, p.28]

An ample demonstration of their powers. [Apr 2023, p.25]

An elegantly spare showcase for her radiant voice, a tremulous yodel tinged with gospel and country inflections. [May 2023, p.31]

A vibrant record that is a self-deprecating yet poignant reflection on a complicated and chaotic upbringing. [Jul 2023, p.27]

These 10 sheeting, luminous soundscapes lean into the band's considerable pop smarts as well as their soundtrack and post-rock mastery. [Jan 2025, p.39]

Boldly treads a more adventurous path. [Sep 2025, p.32]

At 15 tracks, The BPM is rather too much of a sensory overload, but this is enthusiasm in context. [Dec 2025, p.37]

Cumulatively Morning Phase can feel too consistent in mood and pace. [Mar 2014, p.65]

Redd Kross' comeback is a stunner, taut, hyper-melodic songwriting and heavenly harmonies wed to a veritable barrage of fierce hooks and riffs. [Aug 2012, p.78]

Ambiguity and intensity is there from the start. [Jul 2017, p.38]

The Inheritors is a fiercely original feast of experimental sound. [Jul 2013, p.76]

There's artifice in Booker's make-up but the troubled, strutting loner, serving sizzling sides of electrified psyched-swamp blues, is a role he inhabits with conviction and aplomb. [Sep 2014, p.69]

There's depth, vulnerability even humour to the lyrics. [Nov 2019, p.27]

Cuts deeper and sharper than previous Decemberists efforts. [Sep 2005, p.116]

Diviner retains much of what Wild Beasts did best. [Jul 2019, p.37]

McKenna merges glam, pop, indie and a touch of electronica to make a contemporary sonic exploration of a tumultuous world. [Oct 2020, p.34]

The Ruby Cord won't fail to impress. You leave it mind reeling, happily baffled, dazzled by the scope of its achievement. [Dec 2022, p.22]

From A Room, Volume One manages to pull off that rare trick of sounding both fresh and familiar, as dauntless as it is consoling. [Jul 2017, p.28]

Everything shines out brighter and louder than ever before as they return from a three-year break. [Sep 2014, p.64]

Strands is one of Hauschildt's finest efforts, unfolding through a dense fog of ambience and gently bubbling electronics, always staying weird and disobedient enough to offset its new-age tinge. [Dec 2016, p.30]

The results will probably not prove a tremendous cash cow, but theirs is a commendably original aesthetic, and theirs is an enigma you resolve to crack. [Oct 2010, p.114]

So Runs The World Away is vivid, artful, expressive and more besides. [Sep 2010, p.100]

Commendable ambitions, uneven results. [Sep 2017, p.26]

It's often mournful in tone, dwelling on loss and abandonment. But Bevan infuses his music with a glowing warmth, these tunes framed like prayers for happier times ahead. [Apr 2022, p.25]

Nakedly intimate narrative of self-discovery. [May 2023, p.35]

Distinguished by the forceful, deeply personal flows of Roots' MC Black thought, their fourth takes on hip-hop jazz tone, leavening their somewhat overly tasteful retroism without ditching its widescreen pleasure. [May 2023, p.28]

Kempner's lyrics are visceral and specific. [Aug 2023, p.36]

All the hustle, serendipity and moments of beautiful clarity that characterise urban life are here in nuanced, very modern song. [Jul 2013, p.78]

A sort of gothy folktronica dominates songs like "Yes Men" and "Out The Way," with shades of PJ Harvey on the acerbic title track about refugees, while the crawling jutter of "2016" captures the dislocating agony of experiencing personal anxiety while "there's a fascist in the White House." [Sep 2017, p.37]

Entirely irresistible. [Aug 2023, p.33]

Beautiful, meditative music. .... Although it does its job cinematically speaking, this is much more than just background music. [Review of the Year, p.24]

It's a beautiful collection of genre-hopping songs. [Apr 2026, p.37]

The Mods return with fury unabated. [Apr 2023, p.36]

It's the sound of two people deeply interlocked. [Feb 2022, p.25]

May be Lucero's finest album yet. [Apr 2023, p.32]

What Acoustic Recordings best illustrates, though, is a consistency to White's songwriting that has endured through his myriad projects, even as his music has swung unpredictably between playfulness and intensity. [Oct 2016, p.48]

Konoyo draws inspiration from Tokyo Gaksu, players of gagaku, a Japaneses classical music. You can discern this in the gentle drones and fluting of the opening "This Life," but it's soon all transformed by the producer--as it is on the fizzing "Keyed Out" or the lovely "Mother Earth Phase"--to the subordinate role in Hecker's rather more epic sonic drama. [Nov 2018, p.30]

Elliott is better at world-weariness than he is at sass, but has enough guile to mould the songs in his own image.

Northern Passages is just that [promises both new delights and reassuring old comforts], their banked harmonies as warm and familiar as the blissful psych-country of "Riverview Fog" or the Clarence White-era Byrds stylings of "God Bless The Infidels." [Mar 2017, p.39]

A knottily intricate yet oddly inviting album. [Jan 2024, p.30]

The singer-guitarist somehow manages to deliver passages of remarkable intimacy within this sonic immensity, as if the sounds were an externalisation of the ravaged psyche he first exposed on the 2014 modern-day landmark Lost In The Dream. [Dec 2024, p.39]

Unironically majestic set pieces that offer a ray of hope as this wild ride ends. [Oct 2020, p.28]

Gira's Angels side... loses its way in bluster and dirge. The Akron tracks, however, are a revelation. [Dec 2005, p.109]

Baltimore multi-instrumental duo Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack have raised their game with this third LP. [Apr 2011, p.103]

Anderson's admiration and affection for this feminist icon is such that you come away from Amelia with a greater respect for those who keep on taking risks. [Sep 2024, p.28]

Packed with big, epic pop. [Jun 2003, p.102]

Entertainingly eccentric pop, even if at times it seems to pull in too many directions. [Jun 2006, p.103]

They raise a lively ruckus, but never venture far from the sounds pioneered by groups like Steeleye Span and The Albion Band. [Aug 2017, p.35]

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

This pleasing mix of exploratory guitar tones and ever-shifting rhythms that switch between the kinetic and flowing makes for an arresting debut. [Jun 2022, p.25]

The expanded palette, majoring on warm, Dylanesque waltzes and rolling country-rock, brings out the colours of the songs even if, at 17 tracks, it trades in the focused intensity of Ruminations for something looser. [Apr 2017, p.35]

The Antlers, fronted by the sepulcral warble of Peter Silberman, manage to distinguish themselves slightly from these shuffling, mournful legions by bringing to bear a gently epic sensibility that verges on the orchestral. [Jul 2011, p.77]

There’s acreaky Sunset Boulevard synth-pop air of nostalgia to much of Nonetheless, but just when you’re ready to dismiss it, they pull out “Love Is The Law”, adream collaboration between WH Auden and John Barry, which shoots straight into the Top 10 of their indisputably greatest songs. [Jun 2024, p.37]

Avatar... feels like the work of a band bursting with ideas, and with the confidence to realise them. [Sep 2006, p.96]

"The Look You Gave (Jerry)" feels plucked from an '80s synth-pop record. The album manages to avoid nostalgia however, instead offering the pair's own doomy electronic voyage into the uncertainties of the future. [Mar 2019, p.24]

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

This is the most approachable and therefore unexpected Osees album for some years. [Sep 2023, p.32]

Niño’s adventurous, meditative spirit is a worthwhile companion for Ntuli’s masterful piano and expressive voice, resulting in an album that is vivid and subdued in equal measure, the vitality of a battle cry rendered as a warm embrace. [Jan 2024, p.29]

Platform is not a manifesto, but it feels like a galvanising challenge to Herndon's peers to embolden their ideas, broaden their horizons and push on into an undiscovered continent of sound. [Jun 2015, p.70]

Oddball, but articulate, brimming over with a delight in language, "Bury" is a wonderful example of Mark Smith's transformative science fiction, and pretty much what one would hope to find on The Fall's first album for Domino records.

It takes some skill to make these sentimental songs sound this effortless. [Apr 2015, p.77]

Dan Lopatin champions sounds that fall between futurological cool and nostalgic resurrection, and here takes them to a new level of melamine gloss. [Nov 2013, p.76]

There's something deeply satisfying about the way the songs fit together as an album, their sequence strengthened both by the homogenous tone of the music with its air of wistful melancholy, and by the way each song seems to push the next one forward. [Mar 2013, p.61]

A superb new Fall album.

The band must from time to time stray from their stomping ground of doomed sailors and pining maidens, but one hopes the band will not steer too close to plain old indie rock. [May 2011, p.96]

The album's centerpiece is the autobiographical 10-minute "Colfax/Step In Time," a richly detailed remembrance of a run-in between his high school marching band and the KKK. [Mar 2012, p.84]

His is a personal, emotive take, and it proves very effective. [Dec 2012, p.72]

The Shabazz sound is sprawling and promiscuous, but also deep, which might make for uneasy listening. [Aug 2014, p.79]

Sea Island feels comfortable, perhaps a little overly so, though there are plenty of lovely moments. [Jan 2015, p.74]

The Last Days Of Oakland is a polished--but not too polished--set of soulful blues. [Aug 2016, p.75]

Feels like the work of a man who's finally found his calling. [Apr 2017, p.28]

The trio deliver devotional, soulful, throat-reddening gospel on Move Upstairs, where the odd rough note only adds to the one-take authenticity. [Jul 2017, p.26]

As you would expect from a Daptone act--musicianship is uniformly excellent. [Oct 2017, p.24]

There are enough familiar motifs to keep long-time fans happy. Lyrically, it's an endlessly pleasing melting pot. [Nov 2017, p.36]

[She] breathes new life into past glories. [Mar 2018, p.32]

Sensual beauty abounds. [Apr 2018, p.24]

On paper this should be a mess; on record it's a thrillingly chaotic sonic voyage. [Jun 2018, p.27]

The sound remains satisfyingly Stax/Volt-centric yet also full of left-field touches. [May 2019, p.35]

At its best it feels emblematic of California: merging a sunny disposition with the hard, ragged terrain of the desert. [Aug 2019, p.29]

A collaborative project that's all over the map--delightfully so. [Sep 2019, p.29]

Doesn't reveal itself in haste but rather unfolds over time and through multitudinous layers. [Nov 2019, p.23]