Out Of Times sounds slight, so pop-driven that it feels weightless; in '91, it sounded like a triumph, but really it was a herald of triumphs to come. There is, however, something extremely reassuring about the volatility of this album, its out-of-time-ness, which suggests that the music isn't simply confined to the past but thrives in the present. [Dec 2016, p.46]

Unfussy poeticism abounds. [Oct 2020, p.27]

A beautiful record. [Mar 2003, p.100]

Each track comes shrouded in glitchy systems noise and Eno-esque ambient drones. The best moments maintain Howard's way with a melody. [Aug 2018, p.28]

The melodies and brittle guitars burrow into your cerebrum. [Jul 2005, p.106]

It's the sound of a man confronting his own inevitable end with humour and dignity. Let's hope he doesn't move on any time soon. As band OF Joy proves, this particular wellspring is far from dry. [Oct 2010, p.82]

Hard not to admire his audacity as much as his ear for a great drivetime radio riff.

This is music that looks death square in the face and screams back at it, announcing its life. [May 2014, p.69]

Very much a Van Morrison album, and a pretty decent Van Morrison album at that, tapping into that apparently inextinguishable reservoir of muscular yet crotchety blues. [Dec 2019, p.30]

Electric guitars crackle at the edge of the mix like Caribbean lightning, Jay Gonzalez's "Oliver's Army" piano glittering in the gathering storm. "Tough To Go" is from the Memphis sessions. Doom-laden drumbeats, gloomy organ and blasts of wracked guitars punctuate a song about disenchantment, lost opportunities, stacked odds. [Dec 2020, p.32]

Daniel's sumptuous offering provides some brightness in days of darkness. [Feb 2026, p.39]

Distracted may be his most coherent album to date. Less prone to abrupt zigzags than its predecessors, it's his smoothest, too. [May 2026, p.35]

One True Vine is a seamless sequel. [Aug 2013, p.70]

The whole of American Head finds Wayne Coyne and Steven Drozd examining the nature of family, love, death and nostalgia with a sincerity and tenderness that's been missed. [Sep 2020, p.29]

They're not quite as cerebral as Vampire Weekend, but Camera Talk and Cards & Quarters are studded with synapse-snapping shifts in tempo and tone, making this record the place to be as the year ends. [Dec 2009, p.119]

The author's humanistic, heart-first approach, coupled with his songs' compellingly opaque expression and egoless playing makes reliability more rewarding. [Feb 2019, p.22]

She produces a cumulative effect that's both shattering and exhilarating. [Jan 2017, p.31]

There are shades of The Smiths and The Sundays in the likes of "Strange Warnings" and "Take Yourself With You," while opener "Colour Of Water" is a near-perfect piece of electro-pop, at once wistful and joyful. [Feb 2017, p.24]

Tragedy and Geometry is exquisite and detailed to an almost obsessive-compulsive degree. [Jan 2012, p.89]

Gamble is a dab hand at sound design and creating textures that convey anxiety and paranoia--some tracks are smothered in hiss--but because of its sprawling length, parts of KOCH feel rather one-dimensional. [Nov 2014, p.75]

The sound is brighter and bolder. [Nov 2016, p.26]

Few chronicle heartbreak with such methodical, forensic attention. [May 2008, p.111]

His blend of house and Eurodisco soon settles into a bland formula of bittersweet Balearic fare. [Mar 2011, p.98]

Bad Magic is gloriously genre-defying. [Sep 2015, p.78]

Like 2008's Slime & Reason, Bleeds can come on a bit like an episode of "Grumpy Old MCs." But there's always room for salvation in Smith's world. [Dec 2015, p.92]

A former architect, his second album pursues a funky, abstracted techno that, much like the music of his former label boss Actress, has a distinctly London grit. [Mar 2017, p.35]

Fun for all the family. [May 2020, p.28]

On Hardware and elsewhere in his solo career, there remains little doubt about what he does best. [Jul 2021, p.32]

Aşk feels like a liberation, bursting out exuberantly in all directions as they boldly rework a set of ancient Turkish folk tunes with characteristic invention. [Apr 2023, p.23]

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]

The abundance of dreamy, placid wonders like "Between The Past" and the instrumental "White Wonder Melody" doesn't entirely negate one's longing for more of the ferocious, Ira Kaplan-worthy shredding that fills the final moments of "Another Dream" or other touches that add a wobblier, woozier feel to the proceedings. [Oct 2023, p.37]

Another fine encapsulation of what has become Price's signature mix of bracing honesty leavened with droll self-mockery. [Dec 2023, p.34]

Here they have shuffled back a few years from the disco and jazz-funk infusions of 2021's Private Space to a more sun-dappled classic soul sound. It suits them perfectly too. [Aug 2025, p.32]

Very much a reflective affair, rendered in warm acoustic folk tones and coloured by Mellotron strings and piano. [Dec 2025, p.33]

There's very little quite like it, and it's much wilder than it first seems. [Mar 2014, p.77]

If Matt Pike's current group High On Fire are a little less singular than Om, in thrall to the dark trash of Slayer and Celtic Frost, five albums have semn them chisel out their own grizzled, imposing image. [May 2010, p.90]

This set of sentimental cappuccino funk is as intimate and provocative as anything Murphy's put her name to, the eight songs a fussy fusion of Balearic soul and bohemian synthpop. [Jun 2015, p.80]

Its 10 songs sing with warmth, love, gratitude and lessons learned. [Sep 2020, p.37]

A dazzling return. [Apr 2020, p.30]

The intensity builds so subtly that it's hard to pinpoint when the easygoing chord changes give way to droning menace, but by the time they hit the nine-minute-plus closing reprise of "In Between," the pastoral vibe has been transformed into squalling white noise. [Mar 2017, p.30]

A gig of the year, no question. You should have been there. Now you can be. [Dec 2004, p.150]

Some of Feist's most affecting and exhilarating music to date. [Jun 2017, p.16]

There's a lot to take in, but the standard is remarkably consistent and occasionally dazzling. [Nov 2016, p.31]

American Slang delivers spectacularly on all expected fronts. Everything that was great about The '59 Sound is here, but the sound is even bigger, epic without getting blustery.

What is startling is the abundance of new ideas and feeling of renewed vitality on Music For The Age Of Miracles, qualities that make the songs as compelling as any the band have recorded. [Oct 2017, p.34]

It's hard to think of a UK R&B album that sounds as formidably ready for the world as A Little Deeper. [Jul 2002, p.114]

Under Cold Blue Stars is a towering achievement. [Apr 2002, p.108]

Solid song structure replaces ambient abstraction... ranges across Latino jazz, stadium rock, soul and pastoral glitch. [Jun 2004, p.86]

It's less a Kelis venture than it is a showcase for the various producers Virgin could afford. [Feb 2004, p.72]

The vast majority of it still sounds like what it was: cerebral, bloodless 'dance' music for junkies, the kind of posturing Gotham tripe we used to describe as "atonal" and "angular." [Aug 2003, p.120]

Trees might be the best '70s antecedent; the Japanese Ghost a more modern analogue for these seething reveries, tantalisingly poised on the edge of freak-out. [Apr 2016, p.74]

Rich and strange. [Nov 2017, p.30]

This subtle score to Italo Calvino's 1972 experimental novel still boasts quietly echoing melodies on "The Divided City" and on "Desires Are already Memories," hazy Stars Of The Lids atmospherics, but an underlying tension threatens "Every Solstice And Equinox's" tranquil air and "Total Perspective Vortex's" climax is terrifying. [Apr 2021, p.37]

This is perhaps her most conventional release. [Jul 2024, p.39]

It's fastidiously realised, taking in gorgeously orchestrated jazz, hi-octane funk and a pristine slow jam featuring Lauren Faith. [Aug 2020, p.39]

The furious cumbia/rock fusion of "Graveyard Love" and the gentler cosmic pop of "Tourmaline" may comprise a new creative apex for these inveterate overachievers. [Dec 2022, p.29]

Halo is occasionally guilty of tasteful conservatory restraint, but overall this is a richly, immersive headphones experience, a haunted sonic mansion of many chambers. [Nov 2023, p.29]

Perhaps his knottiest - though once unravelled, its charms are hard to resist. [Review of the Year 2025, p.29]

His sax-heavy third solo album blows its own horn. [Aug 2015, p.75]

You can't help but be charmed by the sincerity of these beautifully crafted homages. [May 2015, p.81]

It's more of a subtle restyling than a full-on reincarnation, the soft-edged weightlessness, sumptuous tones and gauzy vocals still instantly recognisable. [Jun 2018, p.24]

The true spiritual kin to Neal's spectral fragility is Mazzy Star's. [Mar 2021, p.35]

By "Carousel", the feedback feels cleansing, as authentic anti-heroes and alter-egos merge with the purging heaviness. [Apr 2025, p.35]

The lurching tempo shifts of opener "She Makes Me Real" set Masquerade's brooding, anxious mood. [Mar 2026, p.26]

For all this sonic broad-mindedness, the Twins' ideas are piled on a lightweight core, and good luck making sense of the lyrics. [Jul 2005, p.104]

The songs tap '80s electronic pop, art-house soundtracks of the same era, psych-prog ad house and constitute a compelling set-piece. [Jun 2023, p.32]

Technology's presence just goes to show how untamable Amidon's unself-conscious, creaky-rope voice is. [Nov 2014, p.71]

Can feel somewhat alienating, but worth sticking with. [Dec 2015, p.76]

Saved! is powered by a sense of joyful rebirth. [Review of the Year 2023, p.29]

Elsewhere the good time roll with tuneful consistency as singer Cameron Omori arranges his affairs of the heart into three-minute teen-dreams called "Dance Away" and "Fallen In Love." [Jun 2011, p.96]

A bell-bottomed soft-rock glaze courtesy of Greg Kurstin that gives their new songs real heft - "Bloom Baby Bloom" splits the difference between Spinal Tap and the Carpenters - but leaves some tumbling along like Elton John offcuts. [Oct 2025, p.35]

Hallelujah Anyhow may have been recorded swiftly, but the abandonment is still exquisitely detailed, as every listen to "Domino" reveal further nuance beneath the swagger. [Oct 2017, p.22]

The implausible but winning transformation is complete: Arab Strap have made a genuinely uplifting record. [Dec 2005, p.109]

The soundtrack works beautifully without reference to the [1975] movie. [Sep 2012, p.96]

He pulls a few originals out of the bag. But it is the sideways eviscerations of "Ol' Man River" and "Over The Rainbow" that resonate the longest. [Sep 2017, p.35]

A surprisingly lively and assured comeback. [Apr 2024, p.29]

In this lunar setting, Oldham's visionary, spooked words are lit up with renewed clarity. [Feb 2005, p.78]

2007's Burnt Toast & offerings established her as the natural successor to Lucinda Williams--this does not contradict the notion. [Mar 2012, p.97]

Hoodoo is spellbinding stuff, a new high mark in a delightful late-career renaissance. [Oct 2013, p.64]

The Alvins' follow-up [to Common Ground] is highly expansive in a focused way. [Oct 2015, p.69]

A bit of a triumph. [Dec 2017, p.27]

Wildly ambitious in its melding of industrial bombast, free-jazz skronk, horror-film atmospherics and psych freakouts. [Mar 2019, p.34]

There's a more pronounced sense of drive and velocity. [Aug 2020, p.36]

Though the more sweeping likes of “Black Heart” evoke the menace and grandeur of Angelo Badalamenti’s scores for David Lynch, there’s an appealing degree of rattle, clatter and noodling elsewhere as Wallumrød and Silvola commune with the spirits of Harry Partch and Charles Mingus. [Oct 2024, p.41]

The guitar sounds engineered here by Young and Lanois are astonishing, almost terrifying at times in their elemental beauty. [Nov 2010, p.78]

The only danger of such an exercise being the risk of tarnishing the legend. But there's no problem here. [dec 2008, p.100]

Year Of Meteors is no flat-out masterpiece.... Still, Veirs is clearly moving in the right direction. [Sep 2005, p.102]

Having phased out the shoegaze from their sound, Blondes at times struggle to address the dancefloor head-on. [Oct 2013, p.63]

They're now a glorious band. [Feb 2007, p.76]

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

He writes evocatively about his home state of Texas, which lends these songs a vivid backdrop. [Nov 2024, p.31]

The result is a collection that sounds like nothing so much as a modern-day Dock Boggs signed to the Lost Highway label.

Sketchy beginnings, but lots of promise. [Nov 2010, p.100]

The result is a bold but difficult record, dogged but a little hard to love. [Sep 2018, p.25]

An album that can initially feel scatty but is held together by its creator's passion and poise. [Dec 2018, p.28]

There was much more to Stapleton than the Music Row standards he'd been cranking out for others, and Vol. 2 further confirms this suspicion. Under his own name, and own steam, Stapleton cleaves closer to the outlaw ethos of Waylon Jennings, Hank Williams Jr and Johnny Paycheck. [Feb 2018, p.32]

The duo take their movie-fuelled visions in directions that are continually surprising. [Nov 2021, p.35]