There’s a tenderness to the way he puts the instruments in conversation with one another, drawing out Younger’s harp and Macie Stewart’s melancholy violin solo. That’s ultimately what makes this record so powerful, even if you’re not familiar with its touchstones: by colliding the past with the present, McCraven makes a point of making progress. [Oct 2022, p.24]

Both adventurous and accessible, a record in love with the obliterating power of sound. [Apr 2003, p.120]

Without question, Schmilco is Wilco's quietest, most disquieting album. [Oct 2016, p.24]

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

As a representative trawl through Lanegan's solo albums, Has God Seen My Shadow? gets it very right indeed. [Feb 2014, p.94]

[A] hugely satisfying album. [Jul 2016, p.66]

Her ambitious third record marks anther giant progression in an already distinguished career, and offers provocative thoughts on sacrifice and identity that should outlast its 48-minute runtime. [Oct 2016, p.22]

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

They immediately settle back into a familiar dynamic on the aptly titled opener “Let’s Do It Again”, with the band providing a lively and sympathetic soundtrack to Cartwright’s tale of loneliness and longing. They’ve learned more than a few new tricks over the years, as evidenced on the lovely psychedelic chamber-pop saga “Just Say When”, a duet with Coco Hames. [Jun 2021, p.31]

A flood of captivating images are buoyed along by the rich musical tapestry and a song that's illustrative of the broader mood: uplifting and open-hearted, looking backwards and forwards without blame or trepidation. [Sep 2025, p.22]

Another stunning album. [Mar 2022, p.29]

In isolation, it’s a dozen of Young’s best songs, powerful no matter how many times they’ve been reshuffled since. But in reality, it risks getting lost in the shotgun spray of Young’s self-curation. [Oct 2023, p.49]

The clarity and effervescence of much of V can seem revelatory. [Apr 2023, p.34]

While Songs Of A Lost World is not as angry as Pornography or as claustrophobic as Disintegration, it instead possesses an immersive, graceful beauty and more energy than you might expect. [Dec 2024, p.113]

This sprawling, beguiling collection strives to reveal all, but every answer brings more questions. [Jul 2019, p.18]

Supremely inviting, warm and ruefully radiant. .... A crown on a career still going strong. [May 2024, p.31]

Some of the rather quizzical couplets here, all of them set to heart-wrenching chord sequences that hark back to the band's favorite 1970s guilty pleasures. It set SFA apart from the world of Britpop in the mid-'90s. [Dec 2016, p.51]

This seamless synthesis of sinew and silicon is crucial to the album's slippery feel: there's a pleasing fluidity and crooked funkiness to the arrangements that Yorke sometimes struggled to achieve on The Eraser. [Mar 2013, p.66]

if Shannon Lay's solo expression has been a steady blooming across three albums, Geist represents its full-blown folkish splendour. [Nov 2021, p.29]

Though Cleveland's delivery is generally far more subdued, Manzanita shares a similarly transportative, anciently psychedelic feel with The Incredible String Band's magical '60s work. [Apr 2023, p.24]

This is adventurous modern music which uses old rock and singer-songwriter traditions as the raw material to be manipulated. [Album Of The Month, Feb 2002, p.110]

Due to Joe Dilworth's propulsive drumming and Holger Zaf's synth work, these 12 tracks never stray into stuffiness. [Mar 2016, p.71]

The Stand-In has everything that made its predecessor special--big voice, expertly crafted tunes, clever backings, a deft mix of stridency and restraint--but is definitely a step up.

Revelatory. .... The set offers great insight into Springsteen's creative process. [Aug 2025, p.50]

There's a purity to them that's as much a product of her spirit and artistic choices as a demo's function. ... The Demos in particular still overwhelms with its conviction and visceral wallop, almost 30 years on. [Sep 2020, p.47]

Remarkably, the world they create together never curdles into sentimentality. ... Wednesday turn that stabbing pain into triumphant rock'n'roll. [May 2023, p.39]

It is raw, but also synthetic. There are a number of very long songs,m verbal rambles, but the music fills in, disturbing the melancholy of Cave's piano with static interruptions that owe as much to cave and Warren's film soundtracks as they do to the Bad Seeds' more conventional songcraft. [Dec 2019, p.18]

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

A more polished and focused affair that demonstrates the breadth of Duncan's sparkling ability, not to mention his pop chops, while conveying a gorgeous otherworldiness that effortlessly channels peak Cocteau Twins and Radiohead. [Nov 2016, p.26]

Small Town Heroes is the band's fifth and best album. [May 2014, p.68]

The Power & The Glory never sounds morose. ... Mantione invests the sentiment with immense compassion and concern. [Feb 2023, p.25]

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]

The result is a record that confirms … Phenomenal Nature was no fluke. This is the sound of Jenkins hitting her stride – less disembodied than its predecessor, more grounded, its tone ranging from the easy warmth of Tom Petty to the steady discernment of Aimee Mann, via a little Laurie Anderson. [Jul 2024, p.28]

Its expansive ambition abetted by fellow travellers including Wayne Kramer and Peter Perrett. [Oct 2018, p.27]

It's a mind-boggling assemblage of swingin' 50s "space-bop" like "Soft Talk" and "Super Blonde," processional chants such as "Rocket #9" and "Journey To Saturn." and electronic keyboard voyages like "The Perfect Man" and "Disco 2021," an edited taster of the monumental "Disco 3000." [Jan 2017, p.46]

Consistently stirring and heartbreakingly lovely. [Feb 2018, p.18]

A Weird Exit has an immediacy and coherence that was missing on previous outing, 2015's Mutilator Defeated At Last--a fine album, but not as hooky as this one. [Sep 2016, p.80]

With all the percolating energy the album delivers, its three most memorable songs are ballads.

Timeless, tender and sparse. [Dec 2019, p.35]

Overwhelming and beautiful. [May 2017, p.35]

Superb third album. ... The album is beautifully structured like this, with narrative threads and recurring thoughts picked up and passed from song to song. It's also self-referential but, crucially, never arch. [May 2016, p.68]

An entirely ravishing aesthetic experience. [Jun 2014, p.76]

We can surely welcome more bittersweet beauties like the steely "Elderberry Wine" and, in particular, "The Way Love Goes", Hartzman's very own "Silver Springs." [Oct 2025, p.35]

The three-disc set brings the artist's life and times into sharp focus. [Dec 2012, p.87]

There are rowdy barn-raisers, but also melodic, meditative grooves and strange, insidious songs. It’s an album of almost fragile beauty, intense loneliness and raging storms. Not for the last time, Crazy Horse took Neil Young somewhere he wasn’t expecting. It’s just a shame it’s taken us so long to get there too.

It's a tough, late-night, soul-searching kind of process that Kurt Vile signed up for here. It's a testament to his talent that he takes it so seriously, but makes it all sound effortless. [May 2013, p.61]

Frantic is packed with potential singles, as if he's decided it's not crime to enjoy himself, to embrace foolish things earthier than Avalon. This is classic Ferry, but full of surprises. [May 2002, p.92]

Purple Rain sounds incrementally more alive. [Sep 2017, p.51]

Lankum have found a convincing way to keep the damn hulk going, stoking the engines of folk tradition and setting course to who knows when. [May 2023, p.24]

Every song contains a clever new idea. [Mar 2024, p.35]

It's an impressively strong set of songs, diverse in both lyrical themes and musical styles, and delivered with a confident range of drama and empathy by a "heritage" act resolutely refusing to rest on his laurels. [Oct 2013, p.66]

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

The results are exquisite. [Sep 2019, p.34]

Mostly brilliant. [Aug 2005, p.88]

The album works in isolation but maybe watch the film on Netflix first. ... Tonally, we're in the territory of Nebraska, Tom Joad and Devils & Dust, but there's also the deep romantic melancholic tones of Darkness and The Rising. [Feb 2018, p.18]

From funk struts to tender touches, Thundercat's ascension continues rapidly here. [May 2020, p.35]

A celebration of the inherent power of community and music’s ability to connect and resonate through the ages, created by someone fast becoming one of the most important young voices in modern American folk music. [Oct 2022, p.18]

An album that feels joyously cathartic as well as musically stunning. [May 2014, p.76]

Mercy is the most out-there work Cale has made in some time. ... The presence of Cale's voice - familiar, rich and avuncular - almost disguises just how radical much of the music is. [Feb 2023, p.18]

It's become a cliche to treat every latter-day Cohen album like a potential swansong but it's hard to imagine a richer, finer or more satisfying finale than this. [Nov 2016, p.18]

The album is a magnificently heavy double of downtuned, epic riffing. [Apr 2026, p.36]

Insanely beautiful, with the strength and delicacy of spider silk. [Mar 2018, p.25]

Cacti is relentless, laser-focused and irresistible. [Feb 2023, p.32]

Just gorgeous. [Jan 2025, p.40]

The Delines' sixth and finest album to date. .... You'd have to reach for the likes of Bobbie Gentry's Patchwork or Rickie Lee Jones' Pirates, or indeed a film like Robert Altman's Raymond Carver amalgam, Short Cuts, to find a world so rich and intimately strange. [Feb 2025, p.40]

Segarra is skilled at identifying the shifting goalposts that immigrants have to live by, and staring past them. [Apr 2017, p.18]

The bonus material proves just as revelatory as the remastered albums, as Against The Odds doubles as a shadow history of the city’s creative heyday. [Sep 2022, p.39]

The dilapidated English fairground has served as a metaphor for the vicissitudes of the music business for everyone from Ray Davies to Kevin Ayers, but it's rarely been so vividly, furiously and poignantly realised. [Jun 2025, p.35]

The two CDs from SIR Rehearsals in New York find Dylan in what might be described as his element. Which is to say, at the centre of a certain amount of chaos. His Approach to rehearsal is at best relaxed, if not entirely whimsical. [Jul 2019, p.44]

It's human where Radiohead are impenetrable, but complex where Coldplay are banal.... Elbow remain unquantifiably great. [Sep 2003, p.100]

[A] flat-out sensational album. [May 2015, p.77]

It's wonderful to have them back, and on such imperious form. [Nov 2022, p.30]

M.I.A.'s vivid debut already sounds like a booty-shaking milestone to rank alongside The Streets and Dizzee Rascal. [May 2005, p.98]

So full of imagination and life-enhancing radiance that you could wallow in their fragrance all day. [Nov 2024, p.43]

Containing only nine lithe and varied songs, Multi-Love is anything but a whimsical indulgence. [Jun 2015, p.79]

Worth waiting for, waiting for. [Dec 2021, p.23]

From Every Sphere is the ultimate grower, which moves, in your mind, from quite nice to utterly compelling and addictive over a matter of days, or better, nights. [Album of the Month, March 2003, p.94]

An album that's both sad and angry, thoughtful and impassioned, and desperate for America to escape its chequered past. [Nov 2016, p.18]

With This Is A Photograph, he offers the wisest and most assured rendering of the Middle American vision he’s been honing of late, one where Dylan-esque anti-singing narrates impassioned, earnest and earthen tales of family, place, love and heroes, and a crack band shakes the rafters. [Jun 2022, p.32]

Emma Jean is mellower, mournful and unimpeachably authentic.... A magnificent piece of work. [Jun 2014, p.76]

American Dream is a triumph, then, and possibly LCD Soundsystem's finest album so far. [Oct 2017, p.18]

This fine reissue includes remarkably fully formed demos of the entire LP. [Dec 2014, p.89]

It's an embarrassment of riches. [Nov 2023, p.40]

Lewis conducts what navel-gazing there is on The Voyager with her characteristic mordant wit, and she has shed none of her way with an irresistible, deadpan pop melody. [Aug 2014, p.75]

Reunited with his band, orchestrated and multiplied, Cave surfs a swelling tide of preposterous proportions. He is the wild god, a wearied charismatic presence, flitting between the songs. Nobody else sounds like this. [Oct 2024, p.26]

Fading Frontier strikes the most satisfying balance between menacing mantric grooves of 2006's Cryptograms and the pop melodicism that emerged on 2010's Halcyon Digest. [Nov 2015, p.82]

The more one listens to Ever-Roving Eye, the more details emerge to elevate it from a mid-60s tribute to something wholly rooted in the present, and far stranger. ... An outstanding record. [May 2020, p.18]

A spectacular return to the tower of song and the game he plays best. Brimming with memorable melodies, swooning arrangements and smart lyrics dreamily sung. [Aug 2020, p.39]

Natural Brown Prom Queen revels in ear-catching beats and hooks while still maintaining Parks’ mile-a-minute rate of musical ideas. [Oct 2022, p.34]

Evocative, but with plenty of open spaces. [Mar 2015, p.75]

Snaith has perfected his recipe for bite-sized psychedelia. [Nov 2014, p.71]

This is acoustic roots music at its most glorious, and Giddens is fast becoming the genre's brightest star in the firmament. [Jun 2019, p.33]

There's not a weak moment to be found. [Jul 2020, p.34]

It's a pity that the immaculate construction that is Ghosts now has an extension tacked on to it. [Apr 2006, p.119]

What an incredible head-spinning trip this album is. [Aug 2025, p.26]

Extra disc Kid Amnesiae mostly puts a fresh spin on pre-existing material, with just a handful of previously unheard compositions. Hearing them again two decade later, the shock of the new has faded, but the sonic richness and meticulous attention to detail endures. Behind the fizz and crunch and crackle lies a surprisingly lush, soulful beauty. [Dec 2021, p.40]

Not for the faint-hearted, Damien Jurado is a habit which won't necessarily bring joy to the listener. But once acquired, you will find it hard to kick. [Apr 2003, p.106]

Strikingly immediate, yet also rewarding repeated immersion, the 10 tracks here are, just as Forster intended, amusing, infectious and relaxed. [Oct 2015, p.65]