Weber masks the scale of the enterprise with typical grace. [Feb 2013, p.77]

[The album] follows a familiar trajectory: martial climaxes and blackened ambient passages, bombast and afterburn. Rarely, though, has that trajectory been charted so effectively. [May 2015, p.82]

At its best, The Magic Whip thrums with ideas and possibilities. [May 2015, p.65]

An instantly engaging, 11-track set with zip, heart, sly humour and real staying power, which shucks off the often dry terseness of the genre without trashing its template. [Feb 2024, p.34]

Still short on humanity, true, but possessed with an alien sort of beauty. [Oct 2009, p.98]

A far more ambitious affair as producers Black Dog and Custom Blue underpin her crystalline vocals with subtly pattering lite beats, clever jazz inflections and humming electronic textures. [Dec 2001, p.102]

She builds on that promise [from her last album, Lights Out Zoltar!] with a skittish yet evocative album that draws on surf-rock. [May 2012, p.72]

Often recalls 1992's Automatic For The People in its sobriety of purpose. [Nov 2004, p.100]

A candidate for country album of the year. [Nov 2002, p.130]

A great idea, brilliantly executed. [Sep 2019, p.37]

Wake Up The Nation, an album that goes a long way to differentiate itself from its predecessor in sound, texture and atmosphere.

An all-instrumental set of improvised studio performances as lyrical and soulful as they are virtuosic and energised. [Nov 2021, p.25]

For what keeps Field Songs on the right side of unyielding darkness, what keeps it ringing with an affirming note of beauty, is the certain knowledge that however black it gets, "the sun's about to rise."

If the first half of the album doesn't quite fire up with the dame ferocity as its predecessor, fans of Tin Star will be pleased to hear it gathers pace soon after. [Sep 2015, p.72]

Occasionally, they lapse into their own shuffling comfort zone, but there's always a pixel-level attention to detail here. [Nov 2005, p.102]

Highlights include the distinctly Davis-ish "Apples And Oranges", the spectral soul of "Giddy Up", and the country trundle of "A Puppy & A truck". [Jul 2023, p.30]

His songs' unruffled, hushed intimacy is an effective tonic. [Aug 2023, p.26]

It's their best since 1995's "LP5." [Apr 2008, p.83]

The sumptuous Sea Lion sees him exploring similar territory to the Elephant 6 collective, adding notes of African highlife, Polynesian folk, Disney soundtracks and (briefly) '80s synth pop, to joyous and naively charming effect. [Apr 2008, p.99]

Dying is at once a queasy and exhilarating listen, made more unnerving still by the lyrical fragments about addiction, insomnia and depression that emerge from their clamour. [Mar 2015, p.

Uplifting and upbeat; it's the sharp-suit Saturday night to Buena Vista Social Club's Sunday Morning. [May 2018, p.33]

A resounding power chord marks the confident introduction to this fine debut album. [Nov 2010, p.113]

All this makes the album sound like an arid conservatoire experiment, but it's more than that. Many of its tracks, like Morricone-feeling "Written, Forgotten," are designed to drift into the background--upmarket mood music, if you will--but others demand your attention. [Dec 2010, p.89]

The lyrics are still all Rennie's, of course, teeming with mysterious metaphors and fantastical flights of fancy. [May 2009, p.90]

The best album McCulloch's had a hand in since 1984's Ocean Rain. [May 2003, p.96]

The Way is a terrific, club-attuned set that renders them barely recognizable. [Jun 2014, p.83]

Undercurrent is an enthralling journey from source to mouth. [Aug 2016, p.72]

Zauner adds peppier number like "Machinist" and "Road Head" without ever sounding like she's spread too thin. [Aug 2017, p.32]

This engrossing hour-and-three-quarter work pursues long-form drones at the pipe organ in a way that is both hypnotic and uplifting. [Oct 2019, p.30]

Here, the 35-year -old is once again joined by co-producer/multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily, who provides settings that ate mostly empty, the better to allow Holland's mystical persona to fully inhabit them, as she sings in an elongated East Texas Drawl that curls like smoke rings. [Aug 2011, p.90]

This remastered version certainly sounds clearer than the muddy original. ... As far as the songs, go, there are a few surprises, just some frenzied romps through the band's greatest hits at this point. [Oct 2016, p.47]

A self-titled collection that ranks among their very best. [Aug 2024, p.39]

It comes across, surprisingly, as a wildstyle update of the bricolage fusions Weatherall started out exploring in the early '90s. [Nov 2017, p.39]

The end result is a rich, luxurious take on bass music that could probably have only been made by outsiders. [Dec 2011, p.96]

"To Shave The Leaves. In Red. In Black" is a frankly terrifying piece of spartan, gothic metal, where Gustafsson sounds like he's mutilating a hymn on the tenor sax. Best of all is the fidgety, one-chord funk of "Washing Your Heart In Filth," where Andreas Werliin sounds like three drummers playing at once. [Mar 2018, p.25]

Hyperactively wordy and exquisitely tuneful. [Apr 2017, p.39]

Often, however, it's the catchy, heads-down belters that win you over. [Mar 2016, p.81]

That band’s ambition is intact is remarkable--that they’ve made an album that captures the zeitgeist is maybe even more so.

Arguably Pond's slickest effort so far--a gorgeously nuanced set of damaged synth-funk and curdled power ballads that should finally see off any Grateful Dead comparisons. [Apr 2019, p.20]

Cool and clever without being contrived, this is sharp, commercially astute pop music that ebbs and flows to the rhythm of a very human pulse. [Jan 2011, p.84]

In Spades is a thrillingly impassioned addition to their catalogue. [Jun 2017, p.21]

Lofgren's voice is crackly, but plays perfectly. [May 2019, p.30]

It's exasperating at first, but the rewards are there for the dedicate dreamer. [Apr 2015, p.77]

Lost In The Dream is calmer and more confident than previous efforts, songs stretching out beyond the six-minute mark if the feeling is right. [Apr 2014, p.83]

The record is as intimate and low-key as an evening home with friends. [May 2015, p.84]

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

Amelia Rivas and Christian Pinchbeck were "on" before they recorded their debut album, but are now very much "off," a situation which adds a fraught edge to the woozy Sky Swimming. [Jun 2014, p.76]

The choice arrangements are alive with conviction. [Jul 2015, p.73]

It sounds more like a busk than a serious recording session, and that briskness is its strength. [Feb 2011, p.83]

The Monsanto Years is occasionally rambling, frequently sentimental and sometimes moving. [Aug 2015, p.68]

Banhart's free-flowing oddness makes most musical eccentrics seem self-conscious and predictable. [Jun 2004, p.90]

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]

It's a strong, seductive set, with the soul-blues burn of "Prophet" and tender "If You Think It's Love" standouts. [Dec 2019, p.29]

Surprises are few on the pair's excellent fourth album Par Avion. [Sep 2014, p.81]

Small, but near-perfectly formed. [Nov 2011, p.90]

These stark, largely unadorned folk-country songs are given added edge by Irwin's faintly metallic voice, with delicate shadings from the like of producer and multi-instrumental wizz Tara Jane O'Neil and pedal steeler Marc Orleans. [Dec 2012, p.72]

Seldom can nostalgia have sounded so fresh on songs such as "Downhearted," "Try" and the exquisite slow burn of the title track. [Mar 2017, p.25]

This fully formed debut is incontestable evidence of an important new act. [Sep 2022, p.30]

If these 13 tracks recorded between 1996 and the early 2000s can't match the perfect cohesion of the parent album, the collection's calling card is its diversity. [May 2015, p.93]

The trio's captivating blend of archive voiceovers, yearning harmonies and melodic lushness proves as compelling as Hannah Peel's vocal daring. [Apr 2016, p.76]

An hour-long piece of generative music in Discreet Music's mould. [Jul 2025, p.27]

Motion files nicely alongside Fripp & Eno, or Klaus Schulze, a set of rippling, drowsy circuitry, laminated with silvery guitar drones. [Apr 2014, p.76]

With its innocently poignant synth melodies and fragile guitar arpeggios, You Win Again Gravity is redolent of the flashes of true beauty that the style's original practitioners sought back in the glory days. [Dec 2002, p.151]

They have the grit and immediacy of demos, but Whole New Mess sounds just as powerful and just as finished as its more polished predecessor, like we're hearing Olsen work through her ache and confusion in real time. [Oct 2020, p.34]

Slowly, these immensely crafted songs bed in, emerging as some of the best and most accessible that Oldham has ever written. [May 2010, p.84]

Dreamy of atmosphere, and often screwed of tempo. [Aug 2015, p.71]

Warm Leatherette is often considered a rehearsal for Nightclubbing but in some ways it’s the most radical of the pair, because it unveiled to a shocked audience the new-look Jones, presented on the sleeve in stark black and white as a kind of sinister Pierrot by her partner Jean-Paul Goude.

It's a departure from previous Lanegan solo LPs... This time, Lanegan is looser, open to both experimentation and, once more, full-on rock. [Sep 2004, p.96]

This equally fine sophomore effort sees Burch take a few steps into the present. [Nov 2018, p.25]

The music is tight and telepathic. [Nov 2011, p.90]

Spencer Gets It Lit is the strongest recorded offering from the rocker since the Blues Explosion’s 2012 album, Meat + Bone.

Remarkably alluring. [Apr 2007, p.93]

This terrific sequel feels bigger and better. [Dec 2011, p.81]

Luxury Problems is distinguished by the piercing vocals of Stott's former piano teacher, Alison Skidmore; looped, layered and heavily reverbed, they coil elegantly around Stott's brutalist constructions. [Jan 2013, p.83]

An album you can get lost in. [Mar 2018, p.24]

It's transfixing and entirely dangerous. [May 2019, p.27]

As irresistibly loopy and buoyantly Beefheartian as anything in Deerhoof's formidable back catalogue. [Jul 2020, p.29]

The septuagenarian reintroduces himself as a lively and supremely compelling singer. [Jun 2017, p.24]

The charm here is in hearing a veteran band who still really enjoy the process of getting in a studio and playing music together. And it’s great, still.

Moisturizer is a bold, confident blast fuelled by the security and invincibility of a deep love. [Aug 2025, p.23]

It's an accomplished, evilly wrought set piece, but the acid-etched disco blues of "Poison Apple" is a standout. [May 2013, p.79]

The music is accordingly spectral, with sparse piano teasing its way into break-out crescendos of strings, French horns and a children's choir. [Dec 2009, p. 87]

There's little identifiable guitar until track five, by which time anxiety and menace have taken hold thanks to the lumbering mien of "Bye Bye" and "I'm A Man"'s monstrous grind. "Shelf Warmer" lets in some air but it too is fabulously foul. [Mar 2024, p.26]

There are a few dated misfires here, but overall, All The Young Droids is a warm-hearted, playful and sporadically dazzling tribute to the futurist dreams of yesteryear. [Jul 2025, p48]

Glasper's keen-eared stewardship throws up some astonishing alchemy. [Aug 2016, p.75]

Carnegie Hall has its own distinctive vibe, with the songwriter coming to terms in real time with his burgeoning, sometimes over-enthusiastic fanbase. [Nov 2021, p.49]

On paper it may sound like brittle Grand Royal retro-cool, but on record it simply belts along with a primal melodic simplicity and sexy nu-wave freshness. [January 2002, p.146]

It's indeed a thrilling blast. [Aug 2015, p.72]

There are occasional moments of poppy levity, like the energetic "Feel Like I Wanna Stay," but otherwise this has an impressive heft. [Sep 2017, p.26]

What's most frightening is that, mighty as Desperate Youth... is, their real stone killer is probably yet to come. [Jul 2004, p.100]

Songs still betray their freestyle origins in what is Wand’s most exploratory album to date, from the disquieting “JJ” to the seven-minute churn of “High Time”. [Aug 2024, p.40]

The skinned-back arrangements on the self-produced Madman isolate his voice's primal expressiveness and the plainspoken emotion of his songs. [Nov 2014, p.81]

Following the pattern of 2020's Ultimate Success Today, this is more expansive and less claustrophobic than previous Protomartyr releases, but no less intense. [Jul 2023, p.33]

Peyroux's enviable ability to sing just behind the beat conveys effortless sophistication. [Nov 2006, p.124]

Overall there's a warmth lacking on last year's lo-fi Swim Inside The Moon. ... Elsewhere, echoes of Bon Iver and label boss Sufjan Stevens suffuse "All Your Life," his rejection of suicide, while "Time's" whistled melody confirms his latent optimism. [Feb 2019, p.26]

A high-flying triumph. [Mar 2017, p.26]

Listeners seeking more of those exquisite harmonies are well served by glorious opening track "Silver," among others. [Apr 2020, p.35]

It’s a wonderfully tactile set, pared back to just fingerpicked guitar and voices, their verité approach welcoming informal chatter and ambient sounds of the surrounding high desert. [Aug 2021, p.28]