Colors may be less anarchic than his most famous albums from the 1990s, but he emerges as a studio tinkerer who has grown more disciplined but no less eccentric. [Nov 2017, p.24]

Wasteland retains a wilful catchiness. [Dec 2018, p.33]

Lanois, along with other western guests, fits organically into Tinariwen's desert blues. The collaborations help even the most furious lyrics slip down nicely. [Jun 2023, p.30]

This is a record that has both groove and bite. [Feb 2026, p.37]

Slugger is low-key but, true to form, leaves a mark. [Dec 2016, p.37]

It's a fine country record refracted through a DIY folk-rock lens. [Feb 2021, p.30]

Weathervanes is another imperious demonstration of Isbell's signature ability to simultaneously project confidence and vulnerability, both musically and lyrically. [Jul 2023, p.32]

[The union] is clearly well-judged. [Feb 2019, p.37]

Despite his melancholy rep, Lekman's rarely sounded sunnier. [Mar 2017, p.32]

It's electro adventurism aligns him with John Maus and White Rainbow,m but Nick Cave and Berlin-era Bowie hover nearby. [Dec 2011, p.79]

Out Of My Province retains the earthen quality of her previous works, but with an added confidence, her words enunciated with a newfound assurance. [Apr 2020, p.22]

A richly inventive trip made off the usual musical map. [Feb 2025, p.43]

These dusky vignettes are embellished with delicate shades of cello and synth, making them most suitable, like his debut, The Houseboat And The Moon, for a quiet night in. [Feb 2016, p.71]

On Un Dia with her insistent, looped and latered frooves to the fore, her seductively dreamy voice is used as both rhythmic counter and complement. [Nov 2008, p.109]

There’s a sense throughout that Bird’s head is engaged in a battle with his heart, as if aware that there’s a pop masterpiece squatting on the far horizons of his intuition.

The vocals are muddied, but there are diamond-bright tunes here. [Oct 2009, p.95]

An album that frequently feels to be about growing pains, Sprinter may, like its predecessor, not quite be Mackenzie Scott's defining moment. All the same, it shows enough promise that we should take that as a profound positive. [May 2015, p.68]

She summons the spirits very effectively here. ... John Parish's production of Hoop's delicate finger-picking adds to the sense of beautiful, bewitching isolation. [Aug 2019, p.31]

Harvey's intimate understanding of Serge's rich catalogue allows him to smother markedly different compositions such as "Ce Mortel Enniu" (1958) and perverted mid-70s gear "SS Si Bon" and "L'Homme a Tete De Chou" with a menacing Bad Seeds swagger that unifies Delirium Tremens. [Aug 2016, p.76]

Lights feels like the product of a distinctive personality, following a peculiar vision rather than ticking genre boxes. [Apr 2010, p.90]

Those who enjoyed "Noise Won't Stop" smoochier moments will relish Liquid Love. [Mar 2010, p.95]

The intimate, minimal work done by his accomplices serves to channel Pop at his bleakest and most rueful. [Oct 2019, p.34]

A cult classic in waiting. [Jul 2014, p.69]

Price's maximalist approach is largely successful, producing vivid, neon-lit dancefloor monsters like "Axis" and "Fluorescent." [Aug 2013, p.74]

This first solo release in 10 years finds him in majestic form. [Nov 2016, p.40]

Recalls both Erykah Badu and Arlo Parks, but there's no heavy shadowing here. [Apr 2023, p.32]

As a mature statement by someone who's done it all, but still retains a desire to create something new and fresh, Mighty Rearranger is a record of considerable depth, admirable adventure and surprising passion. [May 2005, p.110]

The template remains classic American pop-rock served with a glaze of summer-fried weirdness, redolent of The Shins, Flaming Lips and Neil Young, but now there's real heart beneath the often twee facade. [Oct 2014, p.67]

More organic and less electronic... but... still thrillingly left-field. [Jun 2006, p.106]

Psychedelically strange and outrageously entertaining. [Oct 2006, p.99]

This self-titled debut is a joy. [Dec 2012, p.64]

Overall, Sirens… may be a bit of a stylistic scattershot, but the Muscle Shoals foundation and Isbell’s razor-sharp songwriting mark it as an auspicious debut.

They recreate the mood and spirit of seriously wiggy space-prog excavations. [Apr 2017, p.35]

It's excellent, with enchanting melodies, emotional depth and a few unexpected evolutions. [May 2021, p.26]

Without Reznor's shouting, they're more hypnotic, even, at times, soothing. [June 2008, p.98]

The most emotionally mature and fully realised work Gillespie has delivered in years, laying grainy, soulful, impassioned vocals over sumptuously old-school chansons clothed in vintage orchestral country-rock arrangements. [Aug 2021, p.27]

It's sensitively poised and technically perfect. [Mar 2014, p.80]

[A] low-key, often gorgeous new project. [Jun 2016, p.79]

Yo La Tengo's 12th album finds them operating well within their comfort zone but it's no less delightful for the absence of envelopes being pushed. [Oct 2009, p.123]

The songwriting basks in his love of music, freedom, friendship, dogs and tractors. [Jun 2013, p.78]

A free and forward-thinking kind of record, but also one that taps into forgotten, mythic resonances of American music without ever sounding ersatz, hokey or remotely contrived. [Mar 2004, p.92]

Another group who make a virtue of the physical and cultural space America has to offer, drawing on the disparateness of their origins. [Ju l 2010, p.108]

Evolving from fairly skronky beginnings, and passing through a great set of ostensibly Greek folk-psych, Redshift at once honours and transcends those influences, chucking in some Dead-style ambulation. [Aug 2016, p.81]

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

Dave Brock's outfit are still hot-wiring the same motorik grooves and primitive electronics that helped jump-start the counterculture in the first place. [Nov 2019, p.27]

Confirms System Of A Down as one of the most innovative bands in modern rock. [Jun 2005, p.110]

The addition of bassist Bi;ll Herzog lends Earth a gnarliness absent in recent folk-inflected outings. [Oct 2014, p.71]

Their excellent debut album is a neat mix of somnambulant balladry and ragged high drama. [Oct 2011, p.105]

A lively, impassioned record that proudly eschews convention and celebrates its outsider roots. [Apr 2022, p.31]

Here “When I Paint My Masterpiece” has a lovely jug-band lurch, “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” loses its country lilt but sounds as if was always destined to be mated with the taut riff from Roy Head’s “Treat Her Right”, and “Queen Jane Approximately”, hung against a latticework of accordion and finger-picked guitars, is almost unbearably tender. [Aug 2023, p.46]

Ultimately dissolves into a beautifully arranged and slightly sickly morass of curdled pop tropes, out of which spurt a bodacious riff or glossy rave arpeggio. Oddly no-one does this better. [Dec 2015, p.76]

Wincing isn't so much a departure as it is an all-out augmentation, taking the best things about The Shins and amplifying them. [Feb 2007, p.72]

Tuttle takes the krautrock flavours even further, with hypnotic Tangerine Dream-ish accents cohering around Michael’s manic melodies. It ends up sounding like nothing else in either Chapman or Tuttle’s respective oeuvres – and there’s where the magic lies. [Sep 2024, p.34]

Layered with cryptic clues, poetic quotes and fragmentary vocal loops, this lush electronic jazz odyssey is an unorthodox curio but consistently rewarding. [May 2021, p.33]

The Jayhawks provide a diverse, autumnal foundation that amps up when needed. Stace's deceptively winsome voice, meanwhile, delves deep into memories, dreams, relationships and life's absurdities. [Mar 2017, p.40]

Arrangingtime functions as both a means of closure and a creative reboot. [Apr 2016, p.82]

Dreamy, trippy and filled with elegant hooks, it's his best yet. [Apr 2016, p.75]

There are very few other albums this year with as much force, verve, and sheer musical imagination as That Lucky Old Sun. [Sep 2008, p.84]

Phosphorescent has followed 2010's country-rock homage Here's To Taking It easy with an equally magnificent beast, mixing country jams with claustrophobic electronica and mournful Mariachi horns to create a beautiful but discomforting album. [Apr 2013, p.74]

The band's sophomore effort feels like more than a photocopy of past indie-pop glories thanks to the surprisingly punchy contributions by bassist Nick Oka and drummer Keith Frerichs and the degree of craft and care evident even in songs as breezy as "When You Find Out". [Jan 2024, p.36]

From the Ground Up takes a heartland rock template and imbues it with tougher, weather-beaten elements asking big questions. [Apr 2013, p.72]

Humility and sobriety suits a band who have never sounded more fresh and alive. [May 2013, p.73]

This seventh studio album doesn't find them doing anything much different but still doing it with grit and conviction. [Dec 2009, p. 113]

Performance is expertly weighted between great hooks and loose, Southern-styled jams that dare you to shake a leg. [Sep 2018, p.39]

[An] edifying fourth solo album.[Aug 2015, p.78]

Spans Essiebons' output between 1973-84 and gives some indication of its profile as both a prime mover of modern highlife and promoter of Afrobeat and funk. [Jan 2022, p.44]

The new ‘Ultimate’ mixes are an excellent reimagining of the original’s tinny sound, giving a clearer route to Lennon’s voice while ensuring each instrument gets due prominence. Songs like “Aisumasen (I’m Sorry)”, “You Are Here” and “Out The Blue” can now take their place among Lennon’s finest. [Aug 2024, p.49]

Think swoonsome pop at its most non-cynical but with a left-field twist. [Aug 2004, p.98]

September November is undeniably a vital, relevant 21st-century artefact. [Apr 2023, p.22]

The band's deepest and most accomplished effort yet. [Oct 2024, p.40]

Simpson and Ferguson keep the country stylings fresh, and Childers delivers the songs with the melodic urgent of early Steve Earle. [Feb 2018, p.34]

Most impressive is Peel's ability to take the source material and make it her own. [May 2021, p.31]

In sentiment and execution, Feeling Mortal is more Hank than Dylan, yet there's a subtle poetry in the way the lyric flits between life and death, dreams and wakefulness.

TNP have slimmed down, morphing into a thoughtful electronic pop group with shades of Depeche Mode or late Talk Talk. [May 2019, p.37]

Preposterous on first listen, more utterly beguiling with each repeat. [Mar 2015, p.71]

The results are instantly rewarding. [Review of the Year 2023, p.21]

Weird-but-wonderful free-folk explorations. [Jul 2017, p.25]

The extent of [Caleb Scofield's] bandmates' shock and grief is palpable throughout the eight songs they built up from the demos recorded with Scofield. All that sadness and fury adds further turbulence both to the more melodic likes of "Winter Window" as well as "Led To The Wolves." [Jul 2019, p.26]

One small quibble, though: while it’s great to have documentation of the band’s early live sound (and in many ways the versions of the songs from Bleach are superior thanks to the sprightly energy), you don’t really get a sense of the sheer ferocity and electricity Nirvana generated in a tiny, cramped college bar.

An album of flashing wit and giddy ambition. [Oct 2002, p.110]

Tusk this isn't, but Tusk it doesn't need to be. In an age of off-the-shelf LInda Perry pop, the Mac keep the mainstream interesting. [May 2003, p.98]

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

Moving On Skiffle is richer and more sophisticated [than 1998's The Skiffle Sessions] but has a lightness of touch that recalls Bruce Springsteen's delightful 2006 album of Pete Seeger reinterpretations, We Shall Overcome. [Apr 2023, p.27]

It holds together remarkably well, and has an atmosphere at least as distinctive and beguiling as that of, say, Punch The Clock or The Juliet Letters. It isn't typical Elvis Costello album, but then they never are. [Dec 2020, p.24]

All Mirrors is her boldest reinvention yet. [Nov 2019, p.30]

A set of well-crafted songs that resemble PJ Harvey's collaborations with John Parish, but which mainly recall various stages of David Bowie's career. [Oct 2020, p.29]

Lights may be bleak, but that only makes the moments of catharsis all the more illuminating. [Dec 2017, p.22]

Minimum Maximum is the sound of Kraftwerk shedding all previous skins and staking their claim on the now. [Jul 2005, p.106]

As ever, it all coalesces around that voice, and its still potent conjuring of beauty and darkness. Timeless music, for heavy times. [Dec 2016, p.34]

The Colourist & Emiliana Torrini draws on the singer's back catalogue, infusing it with added warmth, texture and elegance. [Jan 2017, p.31]

The album never becomes a dry documentary, though, because the music adopts the station’s spirit of dissent and subversion. [Jun 2022, p.31]

"Forever & A Day" sounds suspiciously like a love song, "Sleep On The Wing" has one of those gorgeous Colin Newman vocal performances. Otherwise, it's ominous thrum, insistent rumble and circular tunes that hide menace beneath their logic. [May 2017, p.40]

One of the most coherent and surprising big-ticket pop albums in years. [Apr 2016, p.79]

EarthEE feels both comfortingly familiar and thrillingly alien, without striving too hard to be either. [Mar 2015, p.83]

'Little Ones' is insanely jaunty, like somthing out of "Sesame Street" and one of the most enjoyable songs of the year. The rest of Receivers is equally buoyant. [Dec 20008, p.108]

The band's newfound eagerness for moodier tempos and treatments allows frontman Elias Bender Ronnenfelt to dig deeper into his Gun Club fetish on "under The sun" and make like he's stumbling out of a Kurt Weill musical on "Showtime," a stunning piece of punked-up cabaret. [Jun 2018, p.28]

The combination of vaulting pop glory and damaged, fractured insecurity has seldom been done better since the early days of Sinead O'Connor. [Apr 2009, p.87]

Teeth Dreams is The Hold Steady's least fussy, least mannered, least arch album. Not coincidentally, it's possibility their best. [Apr 2014, p.63]