Despite its many-handedness, Rainbow Ends is an intensely personal vision. Indeed, it feels more like a companion piece to his great ’70s work than it does a postscript.

He's at his best on the more downbeat moments. [Apr 2017, p.35]

Deep-pocket blues covers alternate with scintillating originals. [Oct 2018, p.32]

[B.E.D.'s] conversational neo-electroclash ditties are slight but hugely charming. [Jan 2019, p.20]

On this debut album they already sound fully formed, despite only having come together in 2016. [May 2019, p.37]

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

Airy melodies and Rachael's breathy vocals combine to create music that gets under the skin. [Jul 2023, p.24]

Confirming the band's Merseyside-'67 LA space-time portal, retracing familiar if melodically firm ground. [Oct 2023, p.26]

Sherwood's production is typically stylish - clear when needed, dubbed-out and spiraling when the music demands; heavy and uplifting. [Nov 2023, p.26]

The decades since Fogerty first recorded these tracks have perhaps cost him some of the high top and low bottom ends of that distinctive half-drawl-half-snarl with which a California kid reinvented himself as some Southern swamp monster, but across “Legacy” he sounds generally in vigorous form, verging in parts on the downright feral, and he is surely entitled to what is as much a vindication as a celebration. [Sep 2025, p.30]

The whirl of ideas is intoxicating. .... But there's space for moments of straightforward beauty too. [Sep 2025, p.29]

A Bridge To Far finds Midlake refining what they do best. [Dec 2025, p.30]

While [Tom Joad] was often more like reading a book than listening to a record, this time Springsteen has struck a more natural balance between words and music. [Jun 2005, p.100]

Anyone who ever felt that David Rawlings hid his light under Gillian Welch's bushel-never getting the full credit he merited as her partner and accomplice--will greet his first solo album with a lusty cheer. [Dec 2009, p. 101]

As so often, Chris Abrahams' piano provides an anchor. [May 2020, p.31]

More suited to contemplation and drift than dance, perhaps, and with Gavin Bryars-like strings and low-level electronics making the 11 pieces more voluptuous than ever. [Oct 2014, p.67]

Kannon will leave other neophytes feeling awed by the complexity and physicality achieved here. [Jan 2016, p.70]

Their elastic moods are endlessly absorbing, typified by the almost weightless "Cernubicua" and the grinding, Malevolent buzz of "Inkstain." [May 2018, p.27]

This is a fretful and ferocious record, lyrically much preoccupied with things having ended or appearing about to end, but musically much more blaze of glory than any kind of funeral pyre. [May 2024, p.40]

It understandably struggles with a weightiness, an emotional claustrophobia. [Jun 2006, p.100]

It is, like LA itself, heavy on style. [Sep 2008, p.88]

Waiting For You echoes something of The Bug's brooding, echo-drenched pressure, but where London Zoo felt dense, the likes of "Meltdown" have a beautifully spectral, washed-out quality, Robinson's sweet, soulful vocals weaving through the night in search of salvation. [Jan 2010, p. 118]

Sprawling, impassioned and mostly terrific. [Oct 2011, p.98]

This, to paraphrase Burnett, just tore 2012 a new one. [Jun 2012, p.71]

The Streets' Original Pirate Material crossbred with The Fall's Grotesque, it's nasty and brutish, but mercifully short. [Jun 2014, p.83]

An album of fierce ambition and undeniable charm. [Mar 2015, p.80]

Self-imposed limitations allow Lawrie to create unusual textures and sounds and force him to be more resourceful in how he deploys them. [Mar 2023, p.36]

Deliberately daft, but also bold and adventurous, Late Of The Pier are a hyperactive British answer to MGMT. [Sep 2008, p.90]

While nothing here quite matches the last album's majestically weary "Elevator Love Letter", Set Yourself On Fire is still quite sublime. [Sep 2005, p.104]

Allas Sak marks another gentle shift in direction for Gustav Ejstes, and though Dungen are not saying anything new, they're at least articulating timeless emotion in a classy fashion. [Nov 2015, p.75]

The lyrics are shorn of detail. Hearts are dented, if not entirely smashed, but the emotional core of the songs are harder to locate, because the tropes of country songwriting ave been traded for something less defined. There's a restless energy. ... There's a refreshing purity, too. [Aug 2020, p.31]

A brave, beautiful record. [Sep 2006, p.76]

MoB have... not lost a cent of their turbulent, controlled-chaos energy. [Jul 2006, p.101]

Andrews' deft touch with an insidious melody and candid phrase extends whatever solace she finds to her audience as well. [Jul 2020, p.27]

She presents another batch of intimately detailed songs – from the anxious ballad “Dreaming Of Falling” to the exultant rocker “Driver” – in sturdy, string-accented settings that seem wholly unified with her intentions. [Nov 2024, p.43]

Klara and Johanna Soderberg have crafted a remarkably mature work. [Feb 2012, p.84]

AmERICa finds Wreckless Eric reborn in the USA, his home since 2011. Curmudgeonly, maybe, but a sly joy pervades. [Dec 2015, p.81]

Ward's sweet, carefree voice is at odds with the urgency of the music. [Oct 2006, p.133]

Elemental and menacing. [Feb 2024, p.35]

Sadly the album’s latter stages revert to type, as Jónsi Birgisson’s quavering choirboy falsetto illuminates glacially paced piano and strings. All achingly lovely in a Coldplay-meets-Clannad way, of course, but Sigur Ros play too safe when they clearly have much more to offer than misty-eyed Celtic abstraction.

This is raw, inventive stuff. [May 2007, p.88]

Shepherd's most eclectic album to date, a richly pleasurable balancing act between brain and body, academic seminar and night club, cerebral experiment and sensory feast. [Nov 2019, p.32]

Amplifying the convivial otherworldliness of his music by grabbing hold of mythic melodies like "Outer Spaceways Incorporated" and "We Travel The Spaceways" and filling them with their analogue fantasia, alien chants going intergalactic in gently fried circuit boards. [Dec 2021, p.25]

[Aug 2024, p.40]

A haunting collection which points towards renewal. [Jun 2025 p.35]

The Maels' spectrum of tried-and-true on Sparks Album No 25 is wide and rich enough to provide no end of delights. [Oct 2017, p.39]

A highly evolved exercise in absorption and restraint. [Dec 2018, p.28]

Several tracks here resemble conceptual art installations. .... But others movie in a poppier direction. .... Best of all might be "The Men Who Dance In Stags Heads". .... With help from harmonised backing vocals, woodwind countermelodies and some dreamy electronic flourishes, it somehow manages to turn this dark tale of the rural poor's response to the Industrial Revolution into something sunny, joyous and beatific. [Jun 2025, p.38]

A record that is dreamy and introspective yet teeming with ambition. [Apr 2021, p.37]

While never musically abrasive, [it] is riddled with enough trademark lyrical barbs and sung with sufficient Eartha Kitt-ish snarl that the listening is never too easy. [Nov 2006, p.134]

Open-hearted vulnerability is what sets them apart--the desire to be cool dissipates with age, leaving them to restore funk, the album's major underpinning, to its maximalist glory following years of sublimation from bedroom musicians. [Jun 2015, p.76]

The most prismatic Hiss Golden Messenger record to date, one that ranges confidently from the folk shuffle of "Say It Like You Mean It" to the taut rural funk off "Like A Mirror Loves A Hammer." [Nov 2016, p.22]

His poignant, classically arranged pieces sit surprisingly well alongside more electronic compositions. [Apr 2017, p.37]

Kelly's craftsmanship ensures Untouchable is a deeply satisfying 32 minutes. [Jun 2017, p.24]

Lage switches to electric on Modern Lore, playing in a style that's acrobatic but never ostentatious as he mixes rangy jazz with early rock'n'roll. [Mar 2018, p.28]

Its distinctive musicianship leads to some powerful moments. [Jun 2018, p.35]

The 12 songs on his eighth ares till gloriously strange, though: lyrically as kaleidoscopic as mid-'60s Dylan, and packed with fascinating, contradictory references. [Sep 2016, p.76]

Strange To Explain might be about dreaming and escape but it's also about their limitations, our need for hoke and the importance of other people. [Jun 2020, p.31]

The band achieve an impressive impact with a wide dynamic range. [Jun 2003, p.109]

And though his long-running solo project has hitherto been a private sketchbook of laptop doodles, for this latest release Atlas Sound engages with the widerworld to great effect: the best two tracks are collaborations: the ambient bubblegum of "Walkabout" with Animal Collective's Panda Bear and the ectoplasmic Krautrock of "Quick Canal" with Laetitia from Stereolab. [Nov 2009, p. 81]

If is deeply lovely music, born of a tenderly weighted sensibility. [Dec 2011, p.88]

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

Deceiver sees them return in a better mental state but with much the same spirit as when they left, delivering wafting waves of shimmering guitar over lyrics that hint at drama and turmoil. [Nov 2019, p.24]

This is a broad, swaggering definition of jazz that touches on Nigerian afrobeat, Ghanaian high-life, grungy post-rock and vocal-led astral soul. Non-jazz fans might be drawn to Nerija's astonishing guitarist Shirley Tetteh. [Sep 2019, p.30]

Finely honed reflections that add a new perspective to the conversation of politics. ... The songs here are simple, but they contain multitudes. [Oct 2019, p.25]

She's angry, but she's trying to offer some answers too: more power to her for such positivity. [Feb 2023, p.32]

At a time when a generation of US roots guitarists are reaching creative maturity, Modern Country reasserts Tyler's place at their forefront. [Jul 2016, p.81]

By turns poppy, cerebral and conceptually cute. [Jun 2006, p.106]

The Animal spirits is earthy and tactile. [Dec 2017, p.23]

It may surprise some, and disappoint others, but this is a record that ultimately finds Sparhawk turning pain into a kind of spiritual beauty. In that, it continues his work of over three decades, from the spectral I Could Live In Hope right up to the imploded noise of Hey What. [Sep 2024, p.22]

It's familiar territory but there's plenty to enjoy being pummelled by here. [Mar 2022, p.23]

Kirby's second is more cosmopolitan than 2021 Cool Dry Place, with bandmates Alberto Sewald's and Logan Chung's muted soft rock production shifting her halfway toward Weyes Blood's polished indie folk. [Jan 2024, p.31]

Bleed is more about wayward drift than some of The Necks’s most-loved albums, like 1999’s Hanging Gardens, but there’s tenderness in its seeming austerity, and beauty in its chill. [Nov 2024, p.40]

Dan Wriggins brings some of Lambchop's pained soul-baring to his vocals, and the band give him plenty of space while keeping songs interesting and dynamic. [Aug 2025, p.31]

Barbara Barbara... makes explicit the band's influence, as well as their core strengths. [Apr 2016, p.81]

These songs are full and rich, with longtime foil The Strangers creating honky-tonk, country shuffles and even Tin Pan Alley backdrops that often explode with life. [May 2010, p.98]

This collection does him justice by featuring cuts from all seven albums in the Smith catalogue. [Dec 2010, p.105]

Even with Rubin dialling things back, the material grabs the listener by the collar and holds on tight. [Album of the Month, Feb 2006, p.66]

Glimmers of Blonde Redhead's future can be divined throughout Masculin Feminin, whether in Kazu Makin's girlish vocals, or Simone Pace's snaking, restrained drum parts; even in their juvenilia, Blonde Redhead were looking through their own sophisticated, idiosyncratic filter. [Oct 2016, p.49]

"Relay Runner" and "Jornada" boast more muscular sensibilities, with pulsing rhythms that bust through the layers of eerie drones and noises that make Loma as unsettling as it is compelling. [Mar 2018, p.28]

As with Singing Saw and City Music, a lot of time an thought has gone into ensuring Oh My God holds together. Lyrical themes are repeated, explored and teased out. [May 2019, p.22]

A Distant Call is full of songs that are pretty good, but it rarely stops you in your tracks. [Oct 2019, p.36]

Like a rolling stone made of avant-garde music and sadness. [Sep 2020, p.27]

Carvings is a more considered affair [than 2020's All Ears], stepping back from first-person confessional into a wider canvas of community, place and time. [Mar 2023, p.26]

The London trio chart out some fresh trajectories for the mesmeric brand of avant-pop they established with 2019's eerily prophetic The Age Of Immunology and 2021's superb Ookii Gekkou. [Nov 2023, p.33]

It’s an incredible, accomplished confection, kept on track by Greep’s way with a tune and the grotesquery of his ear-catching lyrics. [Nov 2024, p.36]

A stunningly audacious second album, inspired equally by prime Prince and film soundtracks, and reminiscent of Jane Siberry's prog-pop ambition circa "The Walking." [Jun 2009, p.103]

The Trackless Woods is one of those wonderful records that reveals more if itself with each successive play. [Sep 2015, p.74]

Keith provides Out Of Range with its sense of momentum, moving things forward where Sharp will circle his themes like a vulture. ... Gun Outfit can sing from the heart as well as from the brain. [Dec 2017, p.31]

Wonderfully eclectic and strangely uplifting. [Aug 2021, p.31]

The fourth album by childhood friends Carlotta Cosials and Ana Perrote is a masterclass in simple but devastatingly effective melodies. [Oct 2024, p.36]

There's a greater diversity of moods, tempos and instruments, supporting a more experimental mindset. [Jul 2020, p.27]

Exhausting but rewarding. [Oct 2018, p.26]

Dawes have never sounded more musically sophisticated. [Sep 2022, p.23]

Lyrically and vocally, Houck is as witty and insightful as the come, with that cacked voice making everything sound sacred or profound. [Mar 2024, p.33]

“Stock Horror” offering aghostly absence, its additional sepulchral weight midway through welcoming what could be ameteor shower, while the amorphous “Dim Hopes” ultimately brings brighter skies too. Similarly, “We Were Vaporised” effects alanguid transubstantiation. [Jun 2024, p.39]

Screen Violence is a punchy and determined effort, full of big hooks ands awash with glittering synth textures. [Sep 2021, p.27]

Their debut burns through 11 tracks in 27 minutes like acetylene torch burns through butter, as spin-on-a-dime tight as it is exhilaration unsubtle. But there's more to Amyl than visceral wallop--namely Amy Taylor. [Jun 2019, p.23]